1. Though Lino Miccichè is right to point out that to like The Messiah but not Anno uno is a contradiction because the "nonideological" method of both films is the same. ( Il cinema italiano degli anni '70 [Venice: Marsilio Editore, 1980], p. 246.)

2. Unfortunately, the first screening of the film for the Italian press, on October 25, 1975, was an audiovisual disaster, and most of the subsequent criticism of the film seems to have stemmed from this original screening. According to reports, the film appeared to be completely colorless, much too dark, and poorly photographed in general. The film must have been reprinted subsequently, for the copy I have seen (owned by the Rossellini family) is none of these things and is, in fact, visually superb.

3. Interview with the author.

4. "Save 'The Messiah,'" Take One , 6, no. 7 (1978), 2.

5. Interview, Filmcritica , nos. 264-65 (May—June 1976). Reprinted in R.R.: Roberto Rossellini , ed. Edoardo Bruno, p. 126.

6. Interview, Écran 77 , no. 60 (July 15, 1977), 47.

7. Quoted in a short review of the film by Françoise Maupin in La Revue du cinéma , no. 305 (April 1976), 96.

8. Claudio Sorgi, "Il Messia," Rivista del cinematografo (December 1975), 543. Sorgi's article is invaluable as well because it carefully sorts out Rossellini's sources and his modifications of them. His conclusion is that "it is certain no film on the Gospels has ever reflected such up-to-date lines of biblical research," especially since, according to Sorgi, The Messiah follows the theory known as "Formgeschichtliche Methode," which holds that the Gospels were born as oral tradition between the time of Christ's death and their actual writing.

Sorgi believes that the principal source for the film is the Gospel of Mark, mainly because of its popularism and its accent on the mystery of messianism, but "the fundamental theory of the film derives from Matthew: Jesus seen as the realization of promises and the continuous correlation between what Jesus does and says and what was predicted of him" (p. 543). Among the many small shifts that Sorgi catalogs are the words instituting the Eucharist, which John does not report, and which Rossellini borrows from Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 11. The colloquy between John the Baptist and Herod concerning power, freedom, and poverty is invented; Sorgi suggests that it may have come from Acts of the Martyrs , a book written during the early Christian period. Other critics have thought it comes from a suggestion in Mark 6:20. Rossellini has also put Psalm 86 in Judas' mouth (as he remarked in an interview), and, as mentioned, redistributed some of Christ's speeches among other characters.

9. I am indebted to Gridley McKim-Smith for this suggestion.

10. Though Rossellini did maintain, unconvincingly, in one interview that he was only later told that Michelangelo's Mary was younger (interview in Amis du film et de la télévision [Brussels], no. 239 [April 1976], 14).

11. The art historian Charles DeTolnay, in The Youth of Michelangelo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943), p. 92, tells us:

This youthfulness [of the Madonna] is said to have been criticized by Michelangelo's contemporaries. Michelangelo is supposed to have defended himself with the argument that a pure woman preserves her youth longer and he wished to symbolize the chastity of the Madonna. Indeed, according to Neo-Platonism, the body is the image of the soul and participates in its inner qualities. The youthfulness of the Virgin in Michelangelo's Pietà thus expresses a moral as well as a physical beauty.

Frederick Hartt, in Michelangelo's Three Pietàs (New York: Abrams, 1976), points out that most Pietàs of the period showed Mary as middle-aged. Perugino had painted her as about the same age as Christ, but Michelangelo went even further.

12. Jacques Grant, Cinema 76 , no. 208 (April 1976), 117.

13. Mireille Latil Le Dantec, "Le Messie," Cinématographe , no. 18 (April-May 1976), 38. I think Latil Le Dantec is also right to see in Mary an embodiment of Rossellini's aesthetic, for she is often seen to be looking at Christ from a hidden place.

14. Jacques Grant, Cinema 76 , no. 206 (February 1976), 68.

15. "Rossellini in '76," 90.

16. Interview in Avvenire (October 26, 1975); quoted in Sorgi, "Il Messia," 541.

17. Miccichè, Cinema italiano degli anni '70 , p. 248.