نوع مقاله : مقاله پژوهشی
نویسندگان
1 گروه فلسفه هنر، دانشکده هنر و معماری، واحد همدان، دانشگاه آزاد اسلامی، همدان ، ایران.
2 گروه پژوهش هنر، دانشکده هنر، واحد تهران مرکزی، دانشگاه آزاد اسلامی، تهران، ایران.
چکیده
کلیدواژه‌ها
عنوان مقاله [English]
نویسندگان [English]
The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), stands as a monumental work in avant-garde cinema, offering a radical departure from the sanctified depictions of religious narratives typical of mainstream cinema, such as Hollywood epics like Ben-Hur (1959) and The Ten Commandments (1956). Directed by an atheist Marxist, the film eschews conventional idealization, employing a documentary-like realism to present a stark, unadorned, and politically charged interpretation of Christ's life. While extensive scholarship has explored the film’s neorealist elements and ideological implications, no prior study has systematically analyzed it through the specific theoretical lens of Hal Foster's concept of the anti-aesthetic. This research addresses this critical gap, posing the central question: How does the concept of the anti-aesthetic manifest in it and what is its relationship to Hal Foster's critical framework? This study aims to analyze the film's anti-aesthetic manifestations by applying Foster's theories as a methodological framework. The research is qualitative in nature, utilizing a descriptive-analytical method. The anti-aesthetic, as articulated by Foster, emerged from postmodern discourse to describe practices that resist traditional notions of beauty, harmony, and aesthetic pleasure, often incorporating a critique of cultural commodification. It signifies not an absence of aesthetics but a critical stance against formalism and a re-engagement with "the real”the materiality of bodies, social trauma, and the abject. This paper adopts Foster’s analytical components, examining the film’s representational, structural, and political dimensions, including the crisis of modern aesthetics, the break from the autonomy of art, and the production of anti-aesthetic cultural meaning. The findings reveal that Pasolini’s film is a profound embodiment of Foster's anti-aesthetic strategy. A central technique identified is the deliberate clash between form and content. Pasolini frequently employs compositions that reference classical religious paintings but subverts them by populating the frame with heterogeneous materials: non-professional actors with weary, "worker-like" faces, harsh and impoverished landscapes, and an unadorned, raw depiction of reality. This juxtaposition creates a critical distance, preventing the viewer from consuming the image as pure aesthetic beauty and instead forcing an engagement with its underlying social and political context. Furthermore, the film's cinematic language systematically dismantles aesthetic idealization. The use of high-contrast, direct lighting strips the subjects of any beautifying aura, emphasizing the ruggedness of faces and locations. The editing rhythm is intentionally inconsistent, shifting between long, meditative takes and fragmented cuts that reflect a modern, fractured sensibility. Miracles are depicted with a deliberate artificiality, which undermines their spectacular nature and foregrounds their narrative function over visual illusion. The analysis concludes that The Gospel According to St. Matthew rejects the autonomy of art, refusing to exist as a self-contained aesthetic object. Pasolini thrusts the sacred text into the arena of class struggle, poverty, and political oppression, aligning with Foster’s thesis that anti-aesthetic art returns art to the social sphere. By depicting Christ as a revolutionary figure with a harsh, demanding tone, the film thus aligns with Foster's framework, using anti-aesthetic strategies to deconstruct traditional iconography.
کلیدواژه‌ها [English]
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