«The Christ in the throat», new Gospel in the places of Pasolini- Corriere.it

The Gospel according to Antonio Rezza, that is The Christ in the throat, started shooting in 2014, the film that on November 25 will open the Torino Film festival directed by Steve della Casa. The first Gospel is not only apocryphal but atheist without reticence, of which the author underlines the philological adherence at least in the first part: For me – says Rezza, Golden Lion at the Biennale in 2018 – it was a performative experience. The protagonist, the divine one, is always a colleague who makes me tenderness, but I didn’t want to do hidden advertising for the state religion, just like Pasolini I shot almost everything in Matera.

A Christ who does not say a word but screams his despair, often poured out on Mary’s lap, as already dead, but he works miracles: he heals a deformed man without touching him, he crosses himself with nails and hammer, while the multiplication of loaves and fish allows a maxi sandwich, the he last supper takes place in the water and the innocents of Herod go round on a merry-go-round. Eight years of work, opening titles written on the crosses (because everyone prepares his own). Rezza makes independent films and often without official release. Without earning a euro: If I would ever give to charity, I am a victim of dull morality. But she is nevertheless promoted by Jesus to God, after being crucified by the Madonna. There are two crucifixions but no thief: I made the second on Giordano, my son and Stefania Saltarelli’s, he was six months old at the time.

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‘fake agreement, but there is noise and the baby cries, scared. After three cries, Mom took it away from me. Today he says he won’t give me the release because he hasn’t been paid. But we agree that when I die he will carry me in his arms and shoot the scene, he will be the only actor who prepared the scene alive when he was dead. Here are various moments of the evangelical story, the massacre of innocent dolls (with a black one), Pontius Pilate, water that becomes wine. But all casual and unintentional, like the scene of the Shroud or the archangel Gabriel soldier because the boy was then a telegraphist; the Devil a wise woman who keeps asking me to make it rain, she says pearls of popular wisdom about maternal love but she wants to know if I am enrolled in SIAE. Why so many screams and zero words? In the film I scream because despair cannot be verbalized, it must be screamed: I had magnificent aphorisms that have remained unpublished. After all, God is pure sound and man’s greatest invention: he inhibits, a lifesaver that confronts that miserable amusement that man. For me an outburst of protest for a corrupt cultural system, certain that God would be with us.

In black and white, Rezza’s own soundtrack (cast of some aboriginal music), pierced like San Sebastiano by grotesque humor, the film adds Argentine voices in the sound: Those of Peron, Evita and Videla, the pathos of the worst capitalism, Evil: God disappeared because man born and died right and willing to trample everything.

In the film we see the progressive physical mutation of Rezza, the growth of the child, everything follows the course of time. After the Golden Lion for the theater, did you not propose the film at the Venice Film Festival? I showed it to Barbera but he didn’t take it. Too bad, I would have liked another Lion, even a question of furniture.