Great Lights, Seen in Darkness
The Passion of Milo Rau and Yvan Sagnet
Joseph Cermatori
But my subject is hope, the theological virtue, which I would
distinguish very sharply from what I have called optimism.
Hope implies a felt lack, an absence, a yearning.
—Marilynne Robinson, “Considering the Theological Virtues”
“Questa è l’ora della fine / Romperemo tutte le vetrine”
[This is the final hour / We’ll smash all the windows]
—“Ciao Ciao” (Italian pop song, 2022), La Rappresentante di Lista
Milo Rau’s 2020 film The New Gospel, based on the Passion of Christ, is a tri-
umph of twenty-first-century religious and political art, one whose release
heralds new directions in the landscape of contemporary global perfor-
mance. The work defies any clear genre, drawing together elements of documentary
cinema and theatre, metacinema and metatheatre, neorealist film, modern agit-
prop art, Brechtian Lehrstück, Beuys’s social sculpture, and the medieval mysterium.
It debuted as part of the 2020 International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam
under the German title Das Neue Evangelium only two years into Rau’s new artistic
directorship of Belgium’s NTGent. (The premiere streamed online due to Covid-19
restrictions.) The film is now widely available in DVD format, introducing audienc-
es worldwide to an artist already being hailed as “the world’s most controversial
director,” and helping extend that artist’s influence to a global scale.1
The film sprang from an invitation Rau received to create a project in Matera, an an-
cient city in Southern Italy built on a network of Paleolithic caves, whose untouched
surroundings have suggested to many filmmakers a vision of ancient Jerusalem.
Both Pier Paolo Pasolini and Mel Gibson used the site for filming their depictions
of the Passion, and a score of other films have been shot there too, including the
latest James Bond release, No Time to Die, dans 2021. Early in The New Gospel, Rau
16 ■ PAJ 134 (2023), pp. 16–26.
16 ■ https://doi.org/10.1162/pajj_a_00657
© 2023 Joseph Cermatori
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explains that he was moved (like Pasolini before him) to cast non-professionals
from the nearby area as actors in the narrative of Christ’s final days. Unlike Pasolini,
cependant, he also wished to include the area’s current sociopolitical problems as
well.2 A humanitarian crisis has engulfed the larger province, causing “an extreme
situation,” as Rau puts it, “thousands of migrants just living under the sky”: entire
communities of African refugees—and, in some instances, persons who have been
smuggled or trafficked into Italy—living unhoused and undocumented in fields
outside neighboring villages like Metaponto di Bernalda.
Some of the film’s opening images show the poverty of the shantytowns where
these migrants are forced to dwell, their makeshift huts and tin-roof encampments
set against Mozart’s Maurerische Trauermusik in C minor. As the viewer quickly
learns, the inhabitants of these ghetti are exploited as agricultural workers in an
illegal labor market dominated by agro-mafia gang-masters known as the capo-
ralati. The laborers can scarcely earn subsistence wages in this system, sometimes
as little as €3.50 per hour ($3.74 dans 2019 U.S. dollars). They lack long-term con-
tracts, healthcare, and any worker protections whatsoever, with some enduring
sixteen-hour workdays in the blazing summer heat.3 Many work as tomato pickers,
harvesting a staple produce commodity for what is arguably the world’s most cele-
brated gastronomic culture.
To all appearances, the system amounts to a modern form of slavery encouraged by
labor deregulations, both hidden inside and integral to Italy’s agro-culinary econ-
omy. The situation brings to mind George Orwell’s 1937 observation that “under
the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hun-
dred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation—an evil state of affairs,
but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries
and cream.”4 One need only substitute “Africans” for “Indians” in this sentence,
and a similar observation could be made about Europeans and Americans, digging
into slices of pizza.
The son of an Italian mother, Rau describes himself as having been “raised with
Catholicism, but then also in a Marxist way.”5 Perhaps unsurprising, alors, that his
approach to Christ’s life would be framed by the current facts of poverty and racism
in the region. For his staging of the Passion, he cast as Jesus the Black Cameroonian
activist Yvan Sagnet (b. 1985), a former engineering student from the Polytechnic
University of Turin, now a community organizer—and incidentally, also raised
Catholic. As Jesus’s disciples, Rau cast some of Sagnet’s closest comrades in the
fight against the gang-master system, almost all of them African migrant activists
aussi. Together with Rau, Sagnet, and many other African and Italian compatri-
ots, they are seen in The New Gospel fomenting a “revolt of dignity.” The mostly
Black cast of non-professional actors appears throughout the film in biblical garb
against Matera’s stony backdrop, both rehearsing and enacting the Passion. Biblical
CeRMAToRI / Great Lights, Seen in Darkness ■ 17
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reenactments amount to only a part of the finished film, cependant. They are juxta-
posed with documentary sequences following Sagnet as he mobilizes the migrant
communities to demand better protections from the local authorities.
The New Gospel continues Rau’s commitment to examining harsh contemporary re-
alities through performance, a mission that extends at least as far back as 2007, quand
he co-founded the company that produces much of his work, the International
Institute for Political Murder.6 The IIPM cites a range of artists and philosophers
as its influences, but Rau’s debts to Brecht are among the most apparent, complexe,
and significant. The manifesto he composed for his Ghent directorship includes
a set of ten demands for what he calls the Stadstheater (German: Stadttheater, ou
city-theatres) of the future, modeled after the Dogme 95 movement’s filmmaking
manifesto, and opening with two notably Brechtian positions.
un: It’s not just about portraying the world anymore. It’s about changing
it. The aim is not to depict the real, but to make the representation itself
réel.
deux: Theater is not a product, it is a production process. Research, castings,
rehearsals, and related debates must be publicly accessible.7
Other demands stipulate that “at least two different languages must be spoken
onstage in each production,” and “at least one production per season must be re-
hearsed or performed in a conflict or war zone, without any cultural infrastructure.”
They are ambitious proposals for any arts administrator, to say the least. (For some
Europeans, these provocations have already invited comparisons with the work
of the late German director and provocateur Christoph Schlingensief, who died
dans 2010.) They put NTGent’s theatre on the move, conjoining a traveling stage or
Wanderbühne with the functions of a mutual aid society’s mobile unit. The manifes-
to thus hurls down a gauntlet to Northern Europe’s urban theatre infrastructures,
demanding entirely new dramaturgies and new global methods of production.
And while southern Italy may not count as a conflict zone by the standards of
international law, The New Gospel furthers Rau’s dedication to collaborating with
those affected by the violence of globalization across multiple languages: in this
case, Italian, French, German, and English.
As Rau himself has argued, in describing his own work: “there is, paradoxically,
only a global economy, a global climate, global flow of information, and refugees;
a global civil society or even global legislation does not exist. They have to be cre-
ated by our generation, as a utopian, unfinished project. … It is only when one
understands seemingly foreign, distant conflicts as one’s conflicts, that one enters
the level of global flows of capital and consciousness.”8 The New Gospel illuminates
this political and aesthetic project with exceptional clarity. Equal parts theatre, film,
18 ■ PAJ 134
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and protest action, it aims less at depicting the world than helping intervene at a
point of global political crisis, pushing representation into a new reality. The proj-
ect demands its viewers and participants imagine not just new futures for the arts,
but new social relations, new administrations of justice, and new codes of morality.
As the film follows Sagnet’s uprising, it helps give visibility to a collective struggle
and to some of global neoliberalism’s most destructive contradictions. For today,
modern forms of slave labor are both, apparently, integral to and illegal within the
capitalist system, simultaneously the rule and the exception.9 And today, while cer-
tain Italian foods and tourist sectors remain popular across the globe, it seems they
may be fast becoming unsustainable without businesses having recourse to human
rights violations, an especially disturbing prospect after the ascendance of the far
right in Italy’s 2022 elections.
The film’s power stems from the simplicity of its concept, its depth of spiritual and
moral seriousness, and the directness of the questions Rau poses to the viewer:
“What would Jesus preach in the 21st century? Who would his disciples be? Et
how would today’s bearers of secular and spiritual power respond to the return
and provocations of the most influential prophet and social revolutionary in hu-
man history?” Rau’s answers to these questions are clear and forceful, even as the
film eschews any easy didacticism. In one sequence, Sagnet (as himself) speaks to
a crowd of workers in front of a mural depicting the Pan-Africanist revolutionary
Thomas Sankara, aiming to conscript his listeners to the broader fight: “We want
access to real homes, no matter whether we’re Italians or not. We want all the pa-
pers because it’s impossible to live in this illegality. … We have to get started in a
new direction, in the direction of change, a change that puts dignity in the center,
the dignity of all of us, against the dominant powers, against the powers of capi-
talism. You are the apostles for that. You are the disciples.” These moments shine a
more radical light on the cliché still popular among American Evangelicals, "Quoi
would Jesus do?»
This scene cuts to the image of a grove at night where the assembled workers are
seen at a screening of Pasolini’s Gospel, watching the scene of Christ’s baptism,
underscored by the second movement of Bach’s Concerto for Oboe and Violin
in C Minor. In an inspired move, Rau has included Pasolini’s Jesus—the Spanish
actor, leftist, and professor Enrique Irazoqui, a septuagenarian in the last year of
his life in 2019—as John the Baptist for The New Gospel. Members of the assembled
migrant community watch as images of the younger Irazoqui from Pasolini’s 1964
film play in black and white on a small outdoor movie screen. Suddenly, Rau’s film
changes locations to an image of the sun-drenched Mediterranean. Yvan Sagnet
is shown in a distant long shot against an azure sky. He seems to have taken up a
torch that Irazoqui has passed him, embodying a new generation of leftist activ-
ism. In costume and character as “Jesus,” he walks on water toward a boatful of his
CeRMAToRI / Great Lights, Seen in Darkness ■ 19
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comrades, also in biblical dress. They meet in the middle of the ocean for a word-
less confrontation whose silence dims Bach’s solemn measures. Then this image
cuts to a conversation between two of Sagnet’s comrades in the struggle, sitting in
their modern clothing on a beach jetty, talking about the terror of their recent flight
from Africa to Italy. One of the two men reports:
When I remember how we were at sea when darkness came, nothing but
darkness. … I longed for our salvation in this darkness. I’m looking for
atterrir, but I only see the sea around me. Nothing else. … That was some-
thing I cannot explain. I can’t find words for that. Where’s the land?…
Where are we? I don’t know what to believe any more. In the sea, in total
darkness. The only ones who see me are the stars above me. There’s no
land for me anymore. I don’t want to remember all the drowned people
here in the sea either. I don’t want to be reminded of the sea at all. Because
people live on in my memory, forever. I can’t let go of them.
Against this agonized description of a twenty-first-century middle passage, dont
only witnesses are constellations in a darkened heaven, Rau then juxtaposes a
placid image of the Mediterranean horizon under steely clouds. A narrator intones
in voice-over: “Blessed are you when they insult and persecute you and falsely say
all kinds of evil against you because of me.” Then the scene shifts back to the near-
by shantytowns and to depictions of organizers stirring up a protest under eviction
threats from the Italian police. The threat of winter homelessness looms.
Through sequences of this kind, the film produces an interrupted spectacle in
which the ancient past, the political present, and a messianic future converge
repeatedly—collisions of historical and theological time that are equally majestic
and unsettling. The effect is of a Brechtian distancing of narrative registers: le
tensions of Jesus’s confrontation with Satan in the desert, par exemple, are broken
by Rau’s voice calling “cut” from off-screen, giving Sagnet a moment to relax, et
reminding viewers that they are watching a film-in-the-making. Peu de temps après,
Rau depicts the scene of Sagnet (as Christ) saving a woman accused of adultery
from being stoned to death. The performer playing the accused woman then takes
the camera crew on a nighttime drive to a nearby train station: a former sex work-
er, she points out spots on and under the train platforms where local migrant
women wait as prostitutes for their johns. Rau’s collaborators bring blankets and
other provisions to the girls. After helping them to a nighttime coffee, the actress
playing the accused adulteress tells the documentarians: “It was not a nice thing
to be on the street. Believe me. … I experienced a lot of things at my tender age.
Sometimes it still reflects in my memory. … I’ve been hoping. I want to be some-
chose, something really interesting. I want to be somebody that people use as an
example, to say: wow, a prostitute can be saved.” In a breathtaking moment, le
biblical past and the neoliberal present overlay each other in the “now.” The scene
20 ■ PAJ 134
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The disciples meet Jesus on the open sea in Milo Rau’s The New Gospel (2020). Photo: Thomas
eirich-Schneider. © Fruitmarket/Langfilm/IIPM/Thomas eirich-Schneider.
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Cast members on the Via Dolorosa in Milo Rau’s The New Gospel (2020). Photo: Armin Smailovic. © Fruitmarket/
Langfilm/IIPM/Armin Smailovic.
CeRMAToRI / Great Lights, Seen in Darkness ■ 21
makes clear that, if “Christian” names an ethical ideal even more than a demo-
graphic, as authors like Marilynne Robinson have proposed, then in the second
decade of the twenty-first century, Europe is still not yet Christian. Ours is still the
age of Empire.
Sometimes Rau’s epic interruptions occur through sequential juxtapositions of in-
congruous imagery, while at other times the counterpoise of timeframes is more
simultaneous. In an instance of the former, he shows Sagnet’s comrade Samuel
Jacobs speaking at a street protest in Matera, appealing to European principles of
universal human rights for a redress to the suffering of his fellow workers. (“By the
law of dignity and equality of human persons, they deserve a better life than this,»
Jacobs tells the assembled European listeners.) Then later in the film, Jacobs takes
on the role of Judas Iscariot. In a more simultaneous directorial juxtaposition,
when Judas offers to betray Jesus to the chief Jewish priests in exchange for thirty
silver pieces, the scene is shot—in full biblical costume—in the dimmed chancel of
a Catholic church. No further comment is needed for Rau’s critique of the institu-
tional church to be fully clear. En effet, Sagnet is seen several times throughout the
film, advocating for the importance of bringing church leadership more actively
into the fight on the side of the migrants’ rights.
One scene in The New Gospel, two thirds of the way through the film, is especially
effective in both political and aesthetic terms, and deserves some extra commen-
tary. Just moments after depicting Christ’s betrayal in Gethsemane, Rau includes a
sequence of local community members auditioning for the Passion reenactment.
Several young, mostly white Italians are shown trying out in a local church. UN
handsome, bespectacled young man expresses interest in being cast as one of the
Roman soldiers tasked with beating and abusing the imprisoned Jesus, drawn to
the contradiction of being a Catholic actor charged with “killing, massacring God
Himself.” Rau gives the young thespian a stage whip and invites him to improvise
flogging and harassing a Black Jesus. A black plastic chair stands in the place of the
victim for the purposes of the audition.
The young performer removes his shirt and glasses, revealing an athletic torso. Il
does some push-ups at the foot of the altar, alors, for four, nearly unbearable min-
utes, brutally whips the black object and showers it with racist jokes and invective,
having been permitted to theatricalize any taboo instinct—whether internalized or
imagined—by the special circumstance of the audition scenario. At the end of the
scène, the actor treats the black chair as having been beaten into unconsciousness,
perhaps beaten to death, and spits on it. A cross-shaped necklace dangles from his
neck. This almost pornographic moment of theatrical sadism plays out accompa-
nied by Pergolesi’s haunting Stabat Mater Dolorosa, with a soprano and counterten-
or locked in a chilling duet. For an American viewer watching the film after George
Floyd, after Breonna Taylor, after Tyre Nichols, the scene is especially hideous and
22 ■ PAJ 134
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revealing. Suddenly, the film shifts to images of the same young actor later, having
been cast and costumed as the Roman soldier role of his desire, receiving a friendly
embrace from Sagnet on filming day, the two men exchanging air kisses on both
cheeks, as Italian men do. The actor seems proud to be part of the project and the
larger anti-racist, anti-caporalato movement.
It is a sequence that might have amazed Pasolini, I believe, one that flashes up in the
film as crystallization of the project’s overall political insights. Rau needs no elaborate
means to make his point, he need only expose something already present, if implicit.
His Brechtian Gestus in The New Gospel is that he doesn’t force things; he allows and
shows them. For him, the theatre becomes that mask which does not hide but reveals
a latent set of realities, forces, conditions. His decision to include this excruciating
moment both makes viewable and defamiliarizes an image, one that is almost un-
watchable, but which simultaneously must be witnessed, the horror of racist brutality
at the hands of the law. This unmitigated human cruelty, while it may seem astonish-
ing, remains the governing rule that structures everyday white supremacy, the same
force that consigns migrant workers to a lack of public consciousness, exploitation,
violence, and death. An anti-racist student of Arendt, Rau reminds his viewer that evil
is not something aberrant and extraordinary, but something banal, known deep in
the souls of white people, awaiting a moment to be granted its entrance. Ici, le
filmmaker acts something like the bad conscience of his age, reminding us that vio-
lence and barbarism still lurk unexpunged near the heart of European “civilization,»
behind such seemingly innocent objects as jars of tomato sauce.
The final fifteen minutes of the film are given over to showing the scenes of Christ’s
execution, from Pilate’s judgment to the descent from the cross. After the film’s
first eighty minutes, the familiar images (Peter’s denials, Judas’s suicide, Veronica’s
veil) reacquire something of the ancient gravity they have lost after so many kitsch
renditions and blockbuster retellings. Mozart’s Maurerische Trauermusik once again
plays, giving an operatic richness to the reenactment of the via dolorosa, as the spec-
tator enters into this live-action staging. Never having attended the Oberammergau
Passion Play in Germany, I imagine this sequence captures something of its splen-
dor, but in italiano. Smartly, Rau’s depiction of Christ’s death denies the sort of cin-
ematic realism one sees in Mel Gibson’s treatment: blood-soaked rags and thorns
are clearly fake, clearly stage blood, another visual defamiliarization, reminding
the viewer not to watch “too romantically” (as Brecht might say). Encore une fois, un
feels times past and times present interfolding one another, as in a royal robe richly
bedecked with emblems. The mayor of Matera appears briefly as Simon of Cyrene,
Sagnet helping carry the cross toward Golgotha. As the crucifix rises, modern cam-
era crews and spectators wielding iPhones record the murder of an innocent Black
man. The sounds of the hammer driving the nails, Christ wailing in pain, et
Mary’s cries of grief are left to reverberate over silence. As the sun goes dark, Sagnet
CeRMAToRI / Great Lights, Seen in Darkness ■ 23
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is taken down from the cross and given a warm blanket, ushered away from the
cameras. Encore une fois, a narrator’s voice: “il popolo che camminava nelle tenebre
ha visto una gran luce.” The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light.
And then, a coda. Clips running during The New Gospel’s closing credits show
Sagnet—apparently months after the Passion play’s filming, now wearing a Covid-
era facemask—visiting a local Italian supermarket and proudly holding up a jar
of passata, tomato purée. This jar, cependant, was produced under the brand name
IAMME-No Cap, a new line of tomato products manufactured in ethical compli-
ance with the goals of Sagnet’s movement. His efforts, combined with the publicity
brought to the region by Rau’s New Gospel project, generated sufficient pressure on
local authorities to begin enforcing the area’s labor laws against the mafia, helping
secure better contracts and housing for migrant Africans. This sequence mirrors a
scene shot earlier in the film, in which several Black activists appeared in biblical
dress inside an Italian supermarket, overturning pallets of tomato sauce that were
produced under the gang-master system. A cynical critic of this protest tactic might
call it a “riot” or “looting,” but in Rau’s film, this gesture appears almost a reen-
actment of Christ expelling the moneylenders from the temple, overthrowing their
tables of ill-gotten goods.
This hopeful note closes out Rau’s film: some progress has been made in the “No
Cap” struggle. Given the continued political catastrophes of our world, it is far
from a fully redemptive ending, but it is a step in a good direction toward what
some might call a more “ethical capitalism.” Above all, cependant, the film’s finale
serves as an example for other artists and activists—a call to the future, for how
spiritually engaged artworks may effect political change in the world. Beyond the
film’s powerful cinematography, beyond its nods to Pasolini, its incorporation of
the histories of Christian art, musique, and scripture, its true grandeur lies in the ur-
gency of this call, which enacts a prefigurative politics and aesthetics.
It bears emphasizing here that the successes of both the Dignity movement and
Rau’s New Gospel project were not secured separately, but as part of a conjoined
effort of solidarity. The gains made in the fight against the agro-mafia were not
the result of any single savior personality, Black or white, but of an entire net-
work of collaborators acting in concert, across national, linguistic, racial, and even
religious lines. (Many of Sagnet’s “apostles” are revealed in the film’s closing to
be faithful Muslims.) In coming together to compose this larger social sculpture
called a more just society, each participant in The New Gospel had to summon up
that capacity which Walter Benjamin famously named “a weak messianic power, un
power on which the past has a claim.”10 And for even the most committed secular-
ists in Rau’s audience, the film offers an image for how one might imagine what
24 ■ PAJ 134
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I have elsewhere called “liberation theologies … without theism.” Of course, ce
anti-caporalato fight is just one local arena in a larger ongoing struggle, a global
struggle that will require a total renovation of political and spiritual consciousness.
The theatre of Milo Rau reminds us that there are many paths forward, même quand
it has long seemed like the time for contestation was a thing of the past.
NoTeS
1. For Robinson’s epigraph, see Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here?: Essays
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), 225. For the description of Rau’s controver-
sial status, see Briony Cartmell, “The World’s Most Controversial Director,” Huck Maga-
zine, Juin 26, 2018, https://www.huckmag.com/art-and-culture/theatre-art-and-culture/
milo-rau-interview/.
2. Another of Pasolini’s films undertakes a similar project, offering precedent for Rau’s
work in The New Gospel. In La Ricotta (1963), released one year before his Gospel According
to Matthew, Pasolini depicted from behind the scenes a fictional production crew making a
film based on the Passion, making a meta-filmic political commentary on the plight of the
Italian working classes.
3. At The New Gospel’s outset, Sagnet describes to an interviewer the defining moment
that led him to an activist’s life: Dans 2011, while working as a tomato picker in Puglia after
leaving his university studies, he witnessed a fellow laborer succumb in the fields to extreme
summer heat, with temperatures soaring well above 100ºF. In response, Sagnet organized a
two-week farmworkers’ strike, eventually leading to new labor protections in the area, et
catapulting him to a wider public’s awareness.
4. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (Londres: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1958),
159.
5. Eleanor Stanford, “A Director Turns an Immigrant into a Modern-Day Jesus,” New
York Times, Septembre 10, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/10/movies/milo-rau-
the-new-gospel.html.
6. A comprehensive introduction to the IIPM’s past projects and aesthetic theories can
be found in the special issue of Yale’s Theater magazine dedicated to Rau, published in May
2021 and guest edited by Lily Climenhaga and Piet Defraeye.
7. Milo Rau, “Ghent Manifesto,” Theater 51, Non. 2 (2021): 21–23.
8. Milo Rau, “Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better.,” The Theatre Times, Avril 30, 2020, https://
www.thetheatretimes.com/try-again-fail-again-fail-better.
9. These contradictions have their corollaries in U.S. politique, as well. Voir, for exam-
ple, Aaron Morrison, “Slavery, Involuntary Servitude Rejected by 4 States’ Voters,” AP
News, Novembre 9, 2022, https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-slavery-on-
ballot-561268e344f17d8562939cde301d2cbf.
10. This translation is Harry Zohn’s, with emphasis in the original. Walter Benjamin,
Selected Writings, éd. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, vol. 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge,
MA: Presse universitaire de Harvard, 2006), 390.
CeRMAToRI / Great Lights, Seen in Darkness ■ 25
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JoSePH CeRMAToRI is a contributing editor to PAJ and an associate pro-
fessor of English at Skidmore College. Son 2021 livre, Baroque Modernity:
An Aesthetics of Theatre, recently won the American Comparative Literature
Association’s Helen Tartar First Book Award and received honorable men-
tion for the International Comparative Literature Association’s Anna
Balakian First Book Prize.
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26 ■ PAJ 134
