Matera on Film: How the Screen Turned the City into a Universal Landscape

Visual Cultures · Biographies of Place

Matera has played Jerusalem, mythical worlds and itself. Cinema expanded its fame by selecting a different city, each time, within the same material fabric.

Matera entered cinema long before it became an international destination. On screen it has been a town in the Italian South, Jerusalem, an ancient city, the village of the Amazons and the setting for a James Bond chase. Each production recognised an unusual quality in its material fabric: the ability to assume another name without losing the force of its own form.

The paradox is clear. To become universally recognisable, Matera has often had to disappear as Matera. The camera isolated calcarenite, stairways, voids, the ravine and the tightly layered profiles; editing removed signs, cars, modern districts and ordinary life. The real city was reduced to a visual core able to move across periods and geographies.

This history is more than a list of films shot in the Sassi. It is the history of a gaze whose function changed over time: first reading Matera as evidence of an archaic South, then as the Holy Land, later as a mythical setting and finally as a fast, global city, recognisable even when it plays itself. Cinema recorded the transformation of the place and, through the same act, taught audiences how to look at it.

A city able to become somewhere else

Matera’s cinematic power comes from a meeting between matter and subtraction. Pale façades, cavities, the continuity between roof and street, the depth of the ravine and the relative absence of immediately datable signs allow the camera to construct an open time. Change the costumes, props and direction of light, and the same space can evoke Palestine, the ancient Mediterranean, the Middle Ages or a mythical future.

The filmed city is never the whole city. A shot selects a portion and makes it coherent; editing joins places that are separate in reality. Cinematic Matera is often a composite geography, assembled with Barile, Lagopesole, Gravina in Puglia, Maratea, Sapri and other territories. Topographical accuracy gives way to narrative necessity, while the viewer receives a continuous landscape that exists fully only on screen.

This ability to become somewhere else explains Matera’s success as a location. It also explains the risk of perceiving the city as a ready-made set, available to every story and stripped of a present of its own.

The 1950s: observing the South at close range

In 1953 Alberto Lattuada shot part of La lupa in Matera. Federico Patellani’s photographs connected with the production, brought back to public attention in recent years by the Municipality of Matera, show a city still inhabited and crossed by bodies, animals, tools and work. Stone does not appear as a restored surface: it contains a material density that the frame can scarcely separate from life.

At that time Italian cinema viewed the South first as a social condition and only later as heritage. Matera offered an image of poverty, archaism and distance from the modern nation; the camera made visible what national debate would soon turn into a political and housing problem. The gaze could be sympathetic, curious or severe, yet it tended to read the city through the category of backwardness.

Cinema therefore contributed to an early form of fame. It brought Matera out of invisibility and, at the same time, fixed it within a repertoire of figures: the peasant world, bare walls, overcrowding and life governed by necessity. The future heritage city began to be constructed through these images produced before recovery.

Pasolini: Jerusalem emerges from the material

With The Gospel According to St Matthew in 1964, Pier Paolo Pasolini made the decisive move. Matera became Jerusalem for the Passion, Crucifixion and Resurrection, while other parts of the film were distributed across several locations in southern Italy. The Gospel landscape was therefore born through territorial editing: the Holy Land was reconstructed from a constellation of towns, castles, countryside and rupestrian architecture.

Pasolini had visited Palestine, Jordan and Syria while scouting. The Italian solution did not seek an archaeological copy of the original places. It pursued a visual and human truth: stone, harsh light, popular faces and slopes crossed by bodies. Matera offered a landscape able to bring the sacred story close to the present of the poor and excluded, without turning it into a museum illustration.

From that moment the Sassi entered the international imagination as a possible Jerusalem. The local city acquired a universal dimension while its own name receded behind that of the biblical city. The gain in visual power was immense, accompanied by a simplification that would endure: Matera as a place outside time, pure enough to receive the origins.

The biblical city becomes a global image

Forty years later, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ returned the Gospel narrative to the Civita, Via Muro, the Sasso Caveoso and the Murgia landscape. Masseria Radogna held the memories of Jesus’ childhood; Matera’s streets carried the Way of the Cross. The film amplified, on a global scale, the established correspondence between the Sassi and Jerusalem.

Digital cinema and worldwide distribution made that version of Matera more recognisable than any previous one. The colour of the stone, alleys and carved walls became an immediate code for antiquity and the sacred. Productions including Ben-Hur, The Omen and, more recently, the sixth season of The Chosen have reactivated the same visual archive through different narratives and production systems.

Repetition is not neutral. Each new film inherits earlier images and strengthens the idea that the city possesses a single natural period. Biblical Matera works because many contemporary signs can be excluded from the frame; what disappears, however, belongs to the biography of the place as fully as the stone that remains visible.

From the sacred to the mythical

The shift from the Bible to myth shows that Matera is more than a substitute for Jerusalem. In Wonder Woman, the stone settlement inhabited by the Amazons uses the city to construct a world detached from ordinary history. The place appears ancient, protected and almost originary; the material of the Sassi enters a fantastic geography with no claim to documentary precision.

Other films have used Matera for civil narratives, dramas, comedies and stories of speed. Night Sun, The Star Maker and Italian Race belong to very different registers, yet they confirm the same availability of the landscape: the city supports the narrative without becoming ornamental scenery. Steps, edges, squares and cuts in the rock direct movement and give scenes a precise scale.

Matera thus becomes a visual grammar. It is recognisable even when unnamed, and can appear credible within incompatible universes. This flexibility is one reason for its success and one of the foundations on which tourism has built the idea of a vast open-air film set.

James Bond: stone enters the language of speed

No Time to Die marks another turning point. The Italian shoot in 2019 brought James Bond to Matera, presented under its own name and placed in the film’s opening sequence. The city does not replace a remote elsewhere: it is a contemporary destination, reached by car, experienced through a hotel room with a view and crossed by the protagonist’s personal memory.

The film turns the urban structure into an action machine. Steps, bends, squares and changes of level become choreography for cars, motorcycles, pursuits and jumps. A tunnel was reconstructed near Sant’Agostino; the hotel room was built near Piazzetta Pascoli; editing stitched together real sections and recreated spaces. Matera’s geography is compressed into a spectacular continuity faster than the city that can actually be walked.

The archaic image does not disappear. Technology, noise and speed cross it. Stone, which sustained suspended time in biblical films, becomes friction, obstacle and trajectory. Matera enters the global language of action without losing recognisability, while film tourism gains a new repertoire of locations to seek out and retrace.

When Matera plays itself

The most revealing change occurs when the city stops lending its body to another place. In the television series Imma Tataranni – Deputy Prosecutor, Matera contains offices, homes, investigations, family relationships and contemporary conflicts. Palazzo dell’Annunziata becomes the courthouse, Via San Biagio provides the exterior of the protagonist’s home, and the Sassi converse with squares, streets and landscapes across Basilicata.

Here recognisability does not depend on removing the present. The present is the very substance of the narrative: clothes, cars, bureaucracy, domestic life, work and humour. After decades spent playing Jerusalem or imaginary cities, Matera can appear as a living urban environment, crossed by people who are not extras from a remote age.

This change does not erase earlier representations. It places them in countershot. It shows that the universal city can become specific, local and even ordinary again without losing visual force.

Editing removes what interrupts the image

Cinema made Matera legible through a discipline of selection. Modernity is often left outside the frame; the Piano, urban expansion, services and the lives of residents give way to the mineral continuity of the Sassi. Even the sound of tourism can disappear during a shoot, replaced by a costumed crowd or by silence prepared for the production.

The universal landscape emerges through this subtraction. The more the city is stripped of contingent signs, the more it can belong to every period. The same operation that produces extraordinary images can turn urban complexity into texture: the home becomes a volume, evacuation becomes purity, and the alley becomes a scenic route.

Precision is also necessary when reconstructing the filmography. Many lists attribute to Matera works shot across several places in Basilicata or southern Italy; even the best-known sequences combine distant locations. Recognising the edit does not diminish cinema’s magic. It reveals how that magic is built and which territories participate in its image.

From location to cultural ecosystem

Productions have brought employment, skills, temporary infrastructure, international relationships and new forms of tourism. Matera’s recognition as a film location has supported film commissions, festivals, location trails and training initiatives. The 2020 agreement for a branch of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia signalled a clear direction: moving from a city used as a set towards a city capable of producing audiovisual culture.

Duration is the decisive issue. A major film occupies the city for weeks or months; its image can circulate for decades. Local value depends on what remains after the crew: professional skills, archives, training, businesses, opportunities for local authors and a more informed understanding of place.

Film tourism needs the same depth. Visiting the place where Bond makes his motorcycle jump or recognising Via Muro in the Way of the Cross can offer an entrance into the city. It becomes knowledge only when the shot leads towards material history, evacuation, recovery and present life, rather than replacing them.

Looking at the countershot

Cinema did not simply promote Matera. Film by film, it wrote a parallel biography of the city. The peasant Matera of the 1950s, Pasolini’s Jerusalem, Gibson’s mystical city, Wonder Woman’s mythical world, James Bond’s action machine and the everyday city of Imma Tataranni belong to the same place, yet they do not reveal the same truth.

Matera’s strength lies in its ability to sustain all these images without being exhausted by any of them. Every film opens a door and leaves something outside the frame. The Journal’s critical task is to reconnect what the screen separates: view and dwelling, stone and bodies, recognition and loss, the set and the city that continues after the final take.

This is also the point of departure for Io, Matera. Biography of an Urban Organism Carved from Rock. In the book, the city speaks again from the side of matter: stone, water, caves, thresholds, emptied homes, figures and rituals. The countershot restores what the universal image tends to compress and allows us to pass through cinema without confusing it with the whole city.