Milo Rau’s newest film, Das Neue Evangelium,or The New Gospel, premiered on September 6, 2020 at the Venice Film Festival as part of Giornate degli Autori.
Milo Rau’s newest film, The New Gospel,brings together political agitation and action employing the narrative framework of a Biblical reenactment of the Passion story. Filmed in the Southern Italian city of Matera – a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the 2019 European Capital of Culture – between August and October 2019. Matera also (somewhat famously) resembles ancient Jerusalem and has housed some of the cinema’s most significant Biblical films: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004).
The film is a carefully choreographed exploration of the complex interrelationship between Europe’s neocolonial economic system (a system that demands lower prices and greater access to goods) and (economically) poor nations that bear the brunt of this system. It is an exploration of what Rau calls the winners and losers of the current economic system. It combines the provocative power of its (both real and staged) images with the palpable energy and frustration of its participants: Yvan Sagnet (who plays Jesus in the film), his apostles, and the numerous participants.
The film (and to a less extent the reactment) uses the Biblical narrative (the New Testament’s theological moralism) coupled with the brutal economic realities of a system that feeds off modern racism and the continuation of colonial economic policies in a neocolonial present. Using this critical lens, Rau and his team of dramaturgs and activists ask:
Who would Jesus be today?
What would he look like?
Who would he stand with today?
What would he fight for?
What would this story look like today?
The Biblical epic is transposed into the context of Europe in 2019. Jesus is played by none other than the Cameroonian activist, Yvan Sagnet, and his apostles are the oppressed: refugees, poor farmers, strike leaders, sex workers, etc. Together they take on the uneven and unjust reality of the globalized present in symbolic (i.e., the Passion of Christ) and concrete (i.e., the revolt of dignity) terms.
It is – as one expects from Rau – a human examination of a complex and pressing issue, which constructs its internal vocabulary on the lived experiences of its participants. It flits between reenactment and reactment (a performative, protest-based reaction) as a way of staging a response to the exploitation of Italy’s massive seasonal migrant labour.
Biblical Films in Front of Ghettos:
Just a few kilometres outside of Matera are a series of ghetto shantytowns constructed by the massive migrant seasonal workforce (between 405,000 and 500,000 people, largely made up of migrants from North and Central Africa) that is vital to Italy’s agricultural sector. This workforce is made up of people who travelled from their homes to Italy – at great personal risk – in the hopes of a better life, only to find themselves living in worse conditions than those they left behind. Migrants provide plantations with cheap, easily manipulated, and exploitable labour (the great advantage of using marginalized people). The system is rife with human rights violations: labourers work 10- to 12-hour days, seven days a week, all while only earning only 3 to 4 Euros per 300kg of tomatoes picked. Additionally, they must often pay for the ride to the and from the fields and for any food they might eat during the day. These workers (often asylum seekers or other desperate people) are forced into the ghetto system. With no other housing options available and provided with no assistance from the government, migrants are forced to live in dangerous and unsanitary conditions. They are given no choice but to occupy abandoned buildings and construct makeshift shanties from garbage. They live without access to clean water, electricity, or heating and are at constant risk of eviction by the police and army with little or no warning.[i]
The entire system – known as the caporalato system – is overseen by gangsters from the mafia, which holds considerable power in Southern Italy. This third-party system was only recently made illegal and the legislation is seldom enforced. Therefore, the workforce is carefully controlled through the use of violence, threats, and intimidation, thereby creating an atmosphere of paranoia and fear within the ghettos. Gang masters hold onto the work contracts and residency permits for those few who have them, making it near impossible to escape or resist the system. Migrant labourers live under constant threat of deportation, and resistance could result in withholding work and money, threats, or straightforward acts of violence. This is a workforce that has been paradoxically made illegal by Italy’s right-wing government, a government marked by populist figures like Matteo Salvini. For The New Gospel, Rau and his team, in contrast to the Italian government, is hyperaware of the paradox of the system: the Italian economy (particularly in the South) is completely dependent on its migrant labour force and yet its government is dedicated to pushing these people to the margins and making it as difficult as possible for them to arrive and to stay.
The system feeds off the very desperation it fosters, creating a vicious cycle. It exploits the hope that inspires people to cross the Mediterranean – the hope of a better future – and instead uses it to trap them in systemic exploitation. It takes advantage of vulnerable people and an unregulated system – the result of what can only be described as the utter distain[ii] of a government that makes little effort to control or change the situation. These are the conditions in which modern slavery thrives: vulnerable people, discrimination, and lack of rule of law.[iii]
A Gospel for 2020:
The New Gospel is the filmic translation the political action, La Rivolta della Dignità, or The Revolt of Dignity, staged between August and October 2019 by Rau, the IIPM (notably dramaturg Eva-Maria Bertschy), Cameroonian activist Yvan Sagnet, and other activists. For me, it is extremely difficult to talk about The New Gospel (the film) without looking at Rivolta della Dignità, which I followed over the 50 days of filming from afar through live-streams, Facebook posts, the director’s diary (available on Taz), and articles written during this period. I was also present in Matera during the final week of filming and the assembly in Rome.[iv]
Rivolta della Dignità and New Gospel seek to expose a very real and very pressing issue that extends across Europe and is rooted in a colonial (even neocolonial) system. Both are interested in the performative and aesthetic dimensions of protest, creating an organized, action-based, politics of hope through real political action. And this is an important distinction, La Rivolta della Dignità is real political action. It extends beyond the confines of the performance and event and into the real-world. The film, on the other hand, transposes the real, present-day struggle of Yvan Sagnet[v] (a force to be reckoned with) and other activists with Jesus’s Biblical struggle against Roman colonial forces and his mission of love.
Part of what the religious narrative of The New Gospel does, is expose an existing religious hypocrisy in Italy (and by extension Europe):
How can this extremely religious Western European nation tolerate (and, at least within parts of the government, encourage) such an extreme system of human exploitation?
(And Italy certainly isn’t the only guilty party in this issue, these plantations are responsible for the production of the cheap tomatoes shipped from Italy across Europe as the 39 cent cans of tomatoes available at most European supermarkets).
The project reveals the incompatibility of the Capitalist economic system: where the activist’s demand that the basic human rights of the workers be upheld (the very reasonable demand for housing, running water, a fair income for their work, and papers) runs absolutely counter to Europe’s ruthless neocolonial economic policy marked by the demand for cheap products which means there is also a demand for cheap labour.
The film employs a making-of performance style (which we also see in theatre, repertoire productions like Orestes in Mosul and Five Easy Pieces). We are shown not a straight Jesus film, but a film that shows us the staging of the Passion reenactment as well as the organization of a political action. The film intermittently steps out its reenactment to show what goes into creating both the reenactment and the political movement of the reactment. The film shows us – in a limited frame – some of the difficulties met by Rau and his team: the frustration of white activists like trade unionist Gianni Fabris at the centrality of Sagnet in the press, the paranoia and fear within the ghetto, the real, palpable anger of the young black men trapped in the ghetto. We see Sagnet receive direction from Rau as well from Enrique Irazoqui (who played Jesus in Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Matthew).
I struggle with the onscreen presence of Rau in this film just as I do for The Congo Tribunal (2017), because it holds inklings of the white saviour complex (an element that certainly must be acknowledged). Yet, I also acknowledge that by including himself in the picture, Rau is also directly confronting this issue of white saviourism (which, as a white director making theatre and film about a primarily [North and Central] African migrant workforce inevitably arises whether Rau is onscreen or not) by acknowledging the film will inescapably fall short of its lofty goals.
Rau doesn’t pretend that he isn’t an active part of constructing both the images and the narrative. Rather he says, “Here I am. And, yes, I am curating what you see on the screen and what you are seeing here is (no matter how much I collaborate and work with Sagnet, workers, and activists) still shot from an inevitably European (and Swiss) perspective. It is flawed but it is also a starting line for something better.”
This self-awareness doesn’t absolve some of the more troubling images that appear in The New Gospel, but it means that the impulse to create something better is present and that Rau and his team are also aware that what they are putting forward is potentially problematic.
As Rau explains in a recent interview with Filmmaker Magazine:
As a director I want to show my own failure, my own intrusion in the films I make. For me a film, an artpiece [sic], is not the end product but the entire process, before and after the premiere.[vi]
But returning to the film itself: Outside the Biblical reenactments, we are shown first-person testimonials from fieldworkers, sex workers, and activists. Some of the most powerful moments of the entire film come from these testimonies. It is through these that we really come to understand the dynamics at play in the ghettos, the fields, and Italy itself.
The testimonial technique provides a human face and voice to a global tragedy. Rather than a vague gesture, it visually asserts: THIS, this here, this person in this place at this moment is what this system does, and it is impossible to ignore. The New Gospel drags obfuscated and easily ignored brutal daily realities behind the multi-billion Euro agricultural industry out of the shadows and into plain view (there is certainly something of Arendt’s banality of evil present here). The film provides a snapshot of the workforce’s lived experiences, giving us a tour of the ghettos (shantytowns constructed of sheets of discarded metal and pieces of used cardboard) and even – by pure coincidence – witnessing the forced shutdown and eviction of the Felandina ghetto by the Italian police and military. We visit the activists (many of whom, like Sagnet, are former labourers or still working on the plantations) who have occupied the abandoned containers and buildings that litter much of Italy but are locked to the migrant workforce the sector depends upon.
In this human aspect – the body politic of the performer – The New Gospel is acts as an ode to Pier Paolo Pasolini (a figure who looms large over Rau’s oeuvre) and his Gospel According to Saint Matthew, almost becoming a reenactment of Pasolini’s film. Rau, like Pasolini, has his Jesus crucified looking out onto the city – and thereby looking out onto the people he was dying for – rather than with his back to it.[vii] Like Pasolini did in his Jesus film, Rau focuses on the faces of his performers. The New Gospel’s actors are also locals from Matera (as were Pasolini’s). The film creates a time capsule of sort for the population of Matera: Matera in 2019, inclusive of those living in ghettos on the city’s outskirts. Rau presents Matera in terms of what its population actually looks like: white bodies, black bodies, able bodies, disabled bodies, old bodies, and young bodies.[viii] The New Gospel visually integrates those systemically excluded from Italian society into the population. They are no longer on the margins of a story, but right at its heart.
A Somewhat Scattered Critique:
For me, the most important part of the entire Matera project is Rivolta della Dignità… particularly when we look at it within the context of the unique historical moment that we find ourselves within. I.e., Within the context of the Black Lives Matter Movement and a global anti-racism movement that forces us to acknowledge and work through the continuing legacy of colonialism, the fact that we are living in racist and colonial states, and the justifiable rage that comes from hundreds of years a state-sanctioned, systemic gaslighting a massive population’s experiences of oppression, exclusion, and violence.
Rivolta della Dignità marks a real movement, not an aestheticized presentation of an issue and it has resulted in real and quantifiable change: producing national and international attention of the issue. And even more importantly, it has helped raise money for “Houses of Dignity,” an organization run by Sagnet and his team that has provided housing, papers, and real income to the migrant workers who played Jesus’s apostles in the film and numerous others.[ix] It is almost a shame that the film ends where it does (with the crucifixion and removal of Jesus from the cross) and only provides snapshots of the campaign’s real results in the closing credit sequence.
And it is here, when I consider the quantifiable results and real-world power (and continued significance) of the reactment, that I find my internal struggle with the film.
There is no doubt that it is an aesthetically beautiful film, but it doesn’t quite translate the power and effectiveness of the action into the film.
In the same vein, nor will the film’s aesthetic beauty necessarily translate into direct action on the part of the spectator.
I feel very connected to the project, because I followed the entire process so closely for so many weeks and, on the one hand, it is a strange experience to re-witness an event you first saw through a drastically different lens. To watch a political march through a low-definition and halting live-stream is very different from a high definition camera with a privileged angle.
In the same vein, it is interesting to see the directorial choices that I admittedly had some doubts about translated (and at times removed) from the final product.
For example, during filming, Rau decided at the condemnation of Christ and the carrying of the cross that he wanted the spectators to make ape noises at Jesus (Sagnet) to illustrate the role of racism in The New Gospel’s re-interpretation of Jesus story. Rau explained this act served as a metaphor for racism[x], but the problem was it wasn’t and isn’t really a metaphor (this still happens at soccer/football games in Italy to black players like Mario Balotelli), it was (and is) just racist. That said, after finally seeing the final product a year after the scene was filmed, I’m happy to admit that it came off better on camera than it did live.
Live it was, at times, extremely troubling, not just because of its implications, but because of how people responded to Rau’s direction.
The live result was troubling because of a certain giddy violence that accompanied it for some people, which we also see in the film at certain moments. It was Cedrick Tamasala (a Congolese artist from the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantations Congolaises) who initially pointed this issue out in Matera: When some of the actors and spectators heard the direction asking for monkey noises and slurs, it was as if some had been waiting their entire lives to be given permission to be this venomously racist.
There was such a strange line between those people somewhat half-heartedly implementing the direction in their performance and those – to use a colloquialism – going full ham.
We again see this in the film, in the audition of one actor playing a Roman soldier: The actor initially explains he wants this role because, as a Christian, he wants to see how evil he can be. He then – in a scene that feels like it extends for hours rather than minutes – proceeds to viciously beat the empty chair that stands in for Sagnet, all while hurling violent racial slurs between blows, even spitting on it eventually.
It extends to a point that isn’t just performance…
It reflects a language and a violence that already seems to be there. It’s had to say because we don’t see everything that happened in the audience (in fairness to the actor, we don’t know if there were other directions given or what happened in the room before or between), but it is so incredibly uncomfortable to watch. It doesn’t look or feel like someone just doing what the director asked for, but like someone given free range to choose their performance who made some very specific choices.
It’s an interesting question, at what point do we distinguish between performance and a real, underlying racism?
And at what point is that line crossed?
We see this again in the torturing of Christ – carried out by the same actor who so viciously assaulted the chair and two others. However, here – in the midst of the beating that takes on a striking historical significance when you consider images of slavery and the 1863 image of “Whipped Peter” (or Gordon) whose scars are copied in the makeup applied to Sagnet’s back for this scene – we get to see the reaction of the spectators in the room. Other actors directly responding to the brutality: some cry quietly and others, like Enrique Irazoqui, cover their faces.
All that being said:
The most important contribution of The New Gospel and Rivolta della Dignità is the concept of dignity they both develop, and which, if anything, the film doesn’t have the time to really dive into. The idea of dignity is based in negation, or, as sociologist John Holloway explains, the No, which leads to a space of creation and potentiality. Holloway explains:
Dignity is the immediate affirmation of negated subjectivity, the assertion, against a world that treats us as objects and denies our capacity to determine our own lives, that we are subjects capable and worthy of deciding for ourselves. Dignity in this sense means not only the assertion of our own dignity but also implies the recognition of the dignity of others. Central to the crack is the idea that mutual recognition does not have to wait till the end of history, but that we can already start on it now, by combating constantly the negation of our mutual recognition as persons.[xi]
The dignity developed in the IIPM’s collaboration with strike leaders and activists rejects the equating of a person’s worth with economic worth. Dignity asserts that a person is not an object of Capital, but a subject with intrinsic, unique human worth. Sagnet communicates a similar idea in a story from his time working on a plantation: when a friend collapsed in the field and no one helped (the overseers didn’t care, and the workers were too afraid to help). It was then that he realized he and the other migrant workers were not looked at as human beings, but as tools in the system only kept until they are used up.
Dignity is about taking control, about negating-and-creating, about creating a “crack” in the existing system and using this crack as a way to the reclaim self and subjectivity. The concept of dignity seen in the Revolt of Dignity is wrapped up in the politics of empowerment and hope and is the most significant contribution of the entire project as well as what ties the real-world struggle and the struggle of real people (and we must never lose sight of the fact these are real people) to a Biblical one.
It is entangled in a radical, ever-developing politics of hope.
And until this hope, this dignity, is fully realized, we cannot (once again) turn away from what The New Gospel reveals to us.
In the end, all I know is I haven’t bought a can of tomatoes since I started looking more closely at the system in June 2019.
[i] Giorgia Ceccarelli and Fabio Ciconte, “Human Suffering in Italy’s Agricultural Value Chain,” Oxfam.org, June 2018, pp. 2, 5.
[ii] “Under the hard-right government elected last summer, deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini’s immigration-security decree will accelerate the illegalisation of asylum seekers and push people further into irregular work without any labour protection. ‘Humanitarian protection’, granted to African asylum seekers in previous years, will end. Francesco Caruso, an activist from USB (Unione Sindalcale di Base) in Calabria, another southern region, says: ‘The Salvini decree increases exploitation, caporalato (the gangmaster system) and social degradation … The asylum centres are emptied and rural ghettos are filled up, like the rural slum of Rosarno in Calbaria, which has grown fast in recent weeks. Hundreds of migrants are abandoned in the street and have no alternative but to find refuge in these ghettos, in terrible conditions, without water [and] electricity.” Hsiao-Hung Pai, “‘You’re lucky to get paid at all’: how African migrants are exploited in Italy,” The Guardian, February 9, 2019.
[iii] Tobias Jones and Ayo Awokoya, “Are your tinned tomatoes picked by slave labour?,” The Guardian, June 20, 2019.
[iv] Rau quite wisely chose not to include any footage from the assembly in Rome, which allowed more time for the film to explore the living conditions of those people living in the ghetto and the forced eviction of the Felandina ghetto that occurred while the IIPM was filming.
[v] Yvan Sagnet was and continues to be an important figure in the movement against migrant exploitation in Italy and is actually personally responsible for the first anti-gang master law in Italy. Here are some articles about Sagnet that better explain his significance in Southern Italy since 2011:
- https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qv9xwm/how-a-young-cameroonian-sparked-a-revolt-against-migrant-exploitation-in-italy-v25n3
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/20/tomatoes-italy-mafia-migrant-labour-modern-slavery
[vi]Lauren Wissot, “‘As a Director I Want to Show My Own Failure, My Own Intrusion in the Films I Make’: Milo Rau on His Venice Premiering The New Gospel,” int. with Milo Rau, Filmmaker Magazine, September 10, 2020: https://filmmakermagazine.com/110251-as-a-director-i-want-to-show-my-own-failure-my-own-intrusion-in-the-films-i-make-milo-rau-on-his-venice-premiering-the-new-gospel/?fbclid=IwAR3S8Rdumm8lDKEuByAVQ4EOH4v28PLHPbkqWkzqJKMjCBymSH8qUANQKd4#.X1si0tMzZ_l.
[vii] Mel Gibson made the more scenic choice in The Passion of the Christ to have Jesus crucified with his back to the city.
[viii] Rau also chooses to situate his Jesus film within the larger tradition of Matera’s Biblical films. Alongside the amateur cast, the film also features a number of famous actors: Irazoqui from Pasolini’s film plays both a directorial figure as well as John the Baptist who, in the Baptism, passes the torch to Sagnet; Maia Morgenstern from Gibson’s film plays the Mother Mary in both films; and the beloved Italian actor Marcello Fonte of Dogman fame plays Pontius Pilate as well as serving as a guide at the assembly in Rome.
[ix] If you are interested in donating: https://www.gofundme.com/f/2gjex-houses-of-dignity?fbclid=IwAR2hZfH7a9Zf5wh0G96T5ThpFZFXgfhqgYPvWNRC-hUlrfvSJbY0t2FJf5c
[x] I found this extremely funny and lord knows I have gotten A LOT of mileage out of this story.
[xi] John Holloway, Crack Capitalism (Pluto Press, 2010), 39.
Lost Dramaturgin International 