Page - 100 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/01

consisting of a fez and a large black band across the chest. Given the parallels drawn in Alexander Nevsky between the Teutonic knights and the Nazis, it is not so very unlikely that Herod’s soldiers represent a Fascist squad.23 This kind of syntax, used by Pasolini throughout the film, renders the scenes consonant with each other; in other words, it creates chains of meanings that obey internal compositional rules. This is not a question of a simple, absolute and functional arrangement of the elements, as in the work of some Russian Formalists (Alexander Veselovsky, Viktor Shklovsky, Alexander Afanasyev), but of their reciprocal relationship within wider schemes, which relates to the les- sons of structural linguistics. Ties to external and to some extent objective references are not necessary because the director composes his own code to communicate with the view- er: the narrative structures within the film provide an architecture of reality, making the representation self-sufficient by relying on audio-visual leitmotifs. This architecture is developed not in a casual or indifferent manner, but along valorizing semantic axes, which distribute a whole series of significances and values (including moral ones) to characters and situations. In other words, the director’s message, encoded around recurrent and organized combinations of sounds and images, permits the implicit attribution of “positive” and “nega- tive” values (for example) to a given character. So, for instance, Herod and his retinue are perceived as antagonists of Jesus by associating the theme “The 13th Century” with them. In this way, in an almost spontaneous and implicit manner, the spectator ab- sorbs and learns the director’s code and is able to interpret the film and receive the communicative content. Only through a process of deconstruction a pos- teriori can we break down the audio-visual continuum into individual semiotic markers, going beyond the “reality effect” of the film. Obviously this analysis of Il Vangelo secondo Matteo is incomplete and does not consider, for example, all the references to the extra-cinematographic context, such as the historical context in which the director lived. In this article I have favoured an internal per- spective focusing on audio semiotic markers, elements able to generate struc- tures of sense through auditory contact and agreement with other markers of a visual kind. The director’s objective – and ultimately the purpose of any film – is not just to tell a story, but to communicate with the viewer through an architecture of reality, which has two aspects, one morphological and the other teleological. The former involves the generation of semantic axes, logical sequences corre- lated principally with an audio-visual syntax; the latter is the presence of one or more metanarrative levels, introduced by the director to transmit precise ideo- 23 Subini 2006, 163. 100 | Nicola Martellozzo www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/1