Different reasons have prompted numerous directors to shoot their films in the Sassi of Matera. In ’49 for example, Carlo Lizzani made a documentary film trying to investigate that peasant world described by Carlo Levi and capturing its contradictions.
It is the only time that the Sassi of Matera do not pretend to be something else or a mere setting and tell their own story. In fact, from here on, the Sassi will be adapted to various needs. Lattuada chose them to shoot The She-Wolf there, and the Sassi became a miserable Sicilian village.
By the 1960s, the Sassi had become completely uninhabited, and the strong sense of decay as a result of the abandonment was used speciously to show southern backwardness, as in “The Roaring Years,” “The Devil,” “The Basilisks,” “Here the Adventure Begins,” “Christ Stopped at Eboli,” and “Scorched Earth.”
The lifeless Sassi are now a setting without a precise historical time. Pasolini in his 1964 “Gospel according to Matthew” consecrates this role: the Sassi are given meaning only if they are divorced from the present historical period, and projected into a motionless, metaphysical, timeless world.
It is the only way to bring them to life, otherwise their separation from the present is very clear, Pasolini seems to tell us. Interestingly, a second time the Sassi in ’85 became Jerusalem, with King David, (Richard Gere was the lead actor), and a third time in 2002 with Mel Gibson’s film“The Passion of the Christ.”
The weather that does not change in the displaced Sassi favors the most diverse scenarios: an eighteenth-century southern village (the sun even at night), early nineteenth-century (Allonsanfan with Mastroianni), a twentieth-century Basque village (The Tree of Guernica), a 1950s Sicilian village (Tornatore’s L’uomo delle stelle).
A surreal place, also suitable for the fairy-tale “Once Upon a Time” with Sofia Loren or the extravagant “The Time of the Beginning.”
Never, however, are the Sassi again. Thanks to the splendid setting they offer, together with the surrounding area, and thanks to the absence of population and thus of transformation, they have been an excellent set for dozens of filmmakers over the past fifty years.
We hope that the Sassi, restored and lived in, will provide an opportunity for Matera to tell the History, and the stories, of this splendid city.
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