However, the deeper I’ve gotten into his work, the clearer it’s been that this is not the full answer. He does set several of his adaptations pointedly within a reinterpreted context closer to his own background and interests. There is St. Matthew’s ostentatiously Italian cast and countryside, for example, which makes it a Jesus movie like no other. Filmed without embellishment on location in the rocky landscapes of southern Italy, in the semi-vérité style known as Italian neorealism, the movie is unmistakably the product of the national cinema of mid-century Italy, a movement that stressed the desperation of the working class in a land ravaged first by fascism and then by the loss of a world war. As is the case in many neorealist films, most of the actors are nonprofessional and intentionally unglamorized. It is a film of dust and empty space and craggy faces; Enrique Irazoqui, who plays Jesus, sports a gloriously heavy unibrow without apology or comment. But classifying it as a work of neorealism is simplifying; the miracles of Jesus, hardly “realist,” are kept intact. The score is also sprinkled with a diverse and anachronistic spread of worship music from locations as far flung as the Congo and Russia, in styles ranging from grand orchestral arrangements to African American spirituals to blues.

That’s far from the only transmutation in Pasolini’s career: Oedipus Rex has been refracted through a panoply of cultures, filmed in Morocco, costumed in a fusion of African, feudal European, and indigenous Central American clothing, and bookended by scenes set in 1920s Italy; Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, changes the late-18th-century French setting of its source novel and moves it to 1944 within the Nazi puppet state of Salò that presided over Italy during the latter years of the war. But the films rarely do a simple find–replace swap of settings; what Pasolini is doing is something more transformative, as he brings these stories closer to himself.

A common temptation by teachers is to recontextualize the canon in an attempt at hollow “relevance” to the younger generation—“Shakespeare was the first rapper” remains a classic piece of English teacher cringe, and I myself have screened Baz Luhrmann’s wacked-out maximum–Gen-X Romeo + Juliet to a confused classroom of Zoomers. But doing so still assumes the basic supremacy of that story’s elevation, reinforcing the idea that this story in particular is important to know, even in a different setting and era.

No such self-flattery exists in Pasolini’s canon films. When Pasolini takes these otherwise faithful adaptations and bewilders them with anachronisms, it feels not deferential to traditions so much as it is flagrantly aggressive toward them. The most obvious case is his Oedipus Rex, whose pan-national flourishes delocalize the film’s geography so Pasolini can land the film nimbly within the framework of the Italian fascism in which he grew up. Pasolini’s father was a lieutenant within the Italian army with deep allegiances to the fascist regime, and Pasolini was fairly open about the fact that his appropriation of Sophocles’ tragedy was “the story of my complex of Oedipus”—i.e., his antipathy toward what his father represented. Before assuming the traditional ancient Greek setting, the film opens with Oedipus’s birth in 1920s Italy, the decade of both the ascendency of fascism and Pasolini’s birth, and the film’s ending sees the blinded Oedipus suddenly transposed into 1960s Italy. With these impositions of 20th century history into the canonical tale, Pasolini embattles tradition against itself, drawing continuity between the Great Stories, the birth of fascism, and the blind, foolish serenity of a postwar Italian bourgeoisie indifferent to its inheritance of Mussolini’s violence. By colliding history with the myth, Pasolini attacks the ruling class with its own story.

Throughout his work, the past and present continually impose upon one another in ways that destroy the credibility of the present. His adaptation of The Canterbury Tales, for example, an otherwise faithful adaptation of Chaucer, includes a scene in which a man convicted of sodomy is burned alive, a scene nowhere to be found in Chaucer’s poem but placed in the film to emphasize the durability of centuries of violent European homophobia. A few years later, Pasolini’s transporting of Salò’s unflinching depiction of sadistic violence from the source novel’s French aristocracy to the fascist state of a crumbling Nazi satellite at World War II’s end makes the horror of fascism not a horrible historical anomaly but a product of an uninterrupted tradition of Western Europe.

Then, of course, there is Pasolini’s most “reverent” film, St. Matthew. It’s worth pointing out that “La ricotta,” the short film for which Pasolini received jail time just one year prior to his Gospel film’s release, is about the production of a Jesus film in which an impoverished extra starves to death during the production—a vicious critique of what Pasolini considered to be Catholicism’s insufficient care for the poor. Surely when making Matthew merely one year later, Pasolini had not experienced a change of heart regarding the Church’s treatment of the poor. In that light, the impositions of contemporary southern Italian poverty and international music onto the gospel’s setting and score feels like a further critique of the Church, insisting that an oppressive religious establishment neglecting a desperate proletariat was not a phenomenon confined to the regional and historical specifics of the Bible but rather an ongoing struggle within all societies. Again, a work of tradition that takes aim at tradition.

This ethos represents a kind of revolutionary praxis, a struggle for power over the battlefield of familiar stories. It’s not an idea unique to Pasolini. Stories have long been recognized for their utility within the power struggles that constitute what we know of as history, from Genesis 1’s sly profanation of ancient near-east creation narratives to Margaret Mitchell’s enshrinement of the fallacious “Lost Cause of the Confederacy” with Gone with the Wind. The history of storytelling is the history of who gets to control social myths and, by proxy, reaffirm their own legitimacy. Why else would people still instigate knock-down, drag-out fights in school board meetings and parent-teacher conferences about which stories get canonized in K-12 curricula and libraries? Why would the Tennessee legislature pass a law demanding that teachers not diverge from texts that they have approved? These reactionaries share a simple assumption with Pasolini: that it matters who controls the canon. Yet what makes Pasolini’s particular use of the canon so fascinating is the way in which he wields it as a resistance against that which it represents.