The Canterbury Tales (DVD)

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John Webb's Windmill, Thaxted, Essex - home of the elderly widow in the Friar's Tale where the devil takes the summoner and the pitcher down to Hell with him. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ability to simultaneously embrace conflicting philosophies—he was both a Catholic and a Marxist; a modern-minded, openly gay man who looked to the distant past for inspiration and comfort; a staunch leftist who at one point in the late sixties infamously spoke out against left-wing student protests (sympathizing instead with the working-class police)—was matched by the multifariousness of his professional life, as a filmmaker, poet, journalist, novelist, playwright, painter, actor, and all-around intellectual public figure. What he is best known for, however, is undoubtedly his subversive body of film work. He was a student of the written word, and among his earliest movie jobs was writing additional dialogue for Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957). Soon he was directing his first film, Accattone (1961), a tale of street crime whose style and content greatly influenced the debut feature of his friend Bernardo Bertolucci, La commare secca (1962), for which Pasolini also supplied the original story. The outspoken and always political Pasolini’s films became increasingly scandalous—even, to some minds, blasphemous—from the gritty reimagining of the Christ story The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) to the bawdy medieval tales in his Trilogy of Life (1971–1974). Tragically, Pasolini was found brutally murdered weeks before the release of his final work, the grotesque, Marquis de Sade–derived Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), still one of the world’s most controversial films. In Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), Chaplin is Henkel and Henkel is Hitler and both are Chaplin, the Jewish barber, and the Jewish barber is all the Jews. These are relations of resemblance, of similitude. One of the great scenes of the film is when, at the end, the three characters threaten to meet and unravel the masquerade and deceit on which the film depends: Henkel, a citation of Hitler, the Jewish barber (who suffered amnesia), and Chaplin himself who is never not Chaplin, anymore than Charlie is never not Chaplin, or Pasolini never not Pasolini no matter what role he plays, or Orson Welles in La ricotta or in Welles’ own films never not Welles, made explicit in Welles’ F for Fake (1974) and Mr Arkadin (1955). The impersonations are self-evident, like circus masquerade and are satires and parodies not only internally, but of reality itself, which is permanently called into question, burlesqued.

I racconti di Canterbury can be thought of as ethnogaphy and Pasolini as a social anthropologist recording the customs of a newly discovered outlandish people, obscure, unique, unknown, the Pasolini tribe. His film is crowded with persons, each different by social class, by appearance, gesture, speech, comportment and bizarre customs seldom ever seen before. And, though these ‘persons’ are ‘characters’, the reality of their person is never absorbed by the fictional roles that they play. The best of such ‘primitivism’ is its ritualised behaviour. It seems that all persons in the film are in disguise, in crazy costume, describing grotesque movements. It is disguise, however, that reveals what is beneath the mask.Traditional films have tended to hide the film behind an illusion that what is represented is real. For the illusion to be convincing, a series of dramatic and stylistic mechanisms are set in motion to eliminate anything other than the fiction, as if there is no contrary to it, no other reality, but itself. The essential relation is between what is represented—the subject, the ‘content’—and the representing of it—‘form’, languages. Recommend but not in the top 10 of 1972—closer to the edge of the archives. Teorema is far better, as is something like Life of Brian from the Monty Python crew There are similar scenes of agonising death and corruption, equally absurd, ghastly and comic in Salò. And, equally, there are the mechanisms of differences, the comparative, metaphors, the linguistic formed by bodies. New interviews with production designer Dante Ferretti, composer Ennio Morricone, and film scholar Sam Rohdie

Translation can be generalised beyond the movement of one language displacing another. The displacement may involve prose to poetry, writing to film, reality to fiction, words to gestures, the past to the present, the abstract to the physically concrete, that is, as some kind of transposition between forms and genres. One of Pasolini’s most interesting essays relating to the cinema—written in 1965—is entitled La sceneggiatura come “struttura che vuol essere altra struttura” ( The screenplay as “a structure that seeks to be another structure”). The title could be applied to most if not all of Pasolini’s work, and to the conduct of his life, where ‘another’ is a quest, a shifter and a value and where context and language meet and redefine each other. With Pasolini, there is always a distance between terms and practices made evident and once made evident set into play, a precondition for comparatives, for metaphor. The film ends with the pilgrims arriving at Canterbury Cathedral, and Chaucer at home writing (in transl.) "Here ends the Canterbury Tales, told only for the pleasure of telling them. Amen": a line original to the film. The brief scene differs starkly from the original text. While the real Chaucer asks his Christian readers to forgive the more immoral and unsavoury aspects of his book, Pasolini's Chaucer is unashamed of sexuality and pleased to tell these ribald tales. The pattern is the same in Pasolini’s I racconti though set off by further differences, not only Pasolini to Chaucer, but Italian to Middle English, and an Italian often in dialect, and, as with Chaucer, a language of everyday. In this respect, the difference, verse to prose in Chaucer, rhymes with the difference standard Italian to dialect Italian in the Pasolini. There are further rhymes between the two works of the physical (appearance) to the spiritual (character), the common to the High, the vulgar to the sacred, parody to the serious.

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Salò is a small town in the province of Brescia in the northeast of Italy. From 1943 to 1945, it was the capital of the fascist Italian Social Republic under Benito Mussolini, created by the Nazi’s after Mussolini’s government fell to the Allies in 1943 and Mussolini was replaced by Marshal Badoglio under the Allied armies. Italy overnight went from being an ally of Germany to its enemy. Guns were turned around, friends became foes and foes friends. The sub-proletariat Roman slang was uttered not simply by their tongues, but by their bodies and gestures, their being. If, from an established social perspective those of the Roman borgate might be thought of as degenerate or vile or worse, from Pasolini’s perspective they had the virtue of being genuine and that virtue, their rejection and refusal of what conformed to social norms, made the vile something positive to him, even noble. The Coolin - played on flute by a sprite in Sir January's garden/ musical theme of Pluto and Persephone in the Merchant's Tale. The film was shot in England, and all the dialogue was filmed in English, which Pasolini considered the primary language of the film. [6] No live sound was recorded, and so English and Italian dialogue were both dubbed over the film afterwards. For written scenes in the film, both Italian and English language shots were filmed. In the Italian version, the dubbing is done by actors from Lombardy. Pasolini made this choice because in Italy, the Lombard accent is considered prim and sophisticated making it a suitable stand-in for English accents. [7] Pasolini chose actors from the outskirts on the edge of Bergamo because he considered the pure Lombard accent tainted by writers such as Giovanni Testori. Most of the voice actors were illiterate so Pasolini would have to actually tell them what to say. [8] Neither version uses the original Chaucerian English. For this movie's script, Pasolini used a modern colloquial English adaptation of the original Middle English which was then translated into Italian. [9] This has been described by film commentator Sam Rohdie as "like Chaucerian English but not Chaucerian English".

If someone were to ask "what happens" in this movie, the answer might sound like a put-on. We see Pasolini give interviews. We see him sketching storyboards, typing at a manual typewriter, and having dinner with his mother Susanna ( Adriana Asti) and his friend Laura Betti ( Maria de Medeiros), who played Emilia the servant in " Teorema" and would go on to direct a documentary about Pasolini's life, 2001's "Pier Paolo Pasolini e la ragione di un sogno." There are two scenes of Pasolini driving in his Alfa Romeo late at night, cruising for young men, and a scene in a restaurant where he dotes on a baby. The re-creation of Pasolini's death is one of the longest scenes, a kind of crucifixion, leaving Pasolini with no dignity, only agony and degradation. It's cinema as violation, as difficult to watch as the brutality in a Pasolini film, or for that matter, Dafoe's final moments in " The Last Temptation of Christ" and " Platoon" (he has died many martyr's deaths onscreen, all stunning). It’s a notch below the lovely transfer Criterion delivered in their Blu-ray of the first film in the trilogy, The Decameron, but a slight notch. We still get a very film-like presentation, yet again delivering some wonderful looking colours with some particularly striking reds, and excellent definition with a high level of detail. Film grain is yet again nicely rendered, though some minor bits of noise are more noticeable here and there in its rendering. There are a few moments that also come off a bit softer in comparison to the rest of the film but this looks to be an issue in the source materials and not a problem with the transfer. Chaucer bumps into both the Cook and the Merchant, injuring his nose. He delivers the line "Between a jest and a joke, many a truth is told" twice.Each of the Tales of Chaucer or those ‘translated’ and ‘transposed’ into Pasolini’s I racconti have repetitive themes which are essentially similar. Each tale is like another. Each involves desires that require some kind of duplicity, betrayal, dishonesty, deceit to be satisfied and realised, hence their comedy. Such themes belong to what the tales in their various languages and various contents represent. Because the contents are repeated they function as rhymes. Each tale is a return, and each a variation, likenesses proliferate as comparisons. Chaucer reads a funny story from The Decameron. His wife scolds him for wasting time so he sits down to write his own story. This is the Miller's Tale. [1] Canby, Vincent (30 May 1980). "Film: 'Canterbury Tales': Chaucer a la Pasolini". The New York Times.

The images of paintings Pasolini cites are citations of their forms. They are shot frontally, in close up, in counter point to other images, like rhymes, close-up to close-up, movement in one direction to movement in reverse, shots and sequences organised symmetrically. The shot isolates the image, each shot a register not so much of a reality than of an ideal reality cut out and marked, consecrated, at once sacred and mythical as in an altar piece … or a fetish. Salò is perhaps Pasolini’s most evident filmed fetishism, though the image as fetish and myth is the dominant feature even of his earliest films. The Chaplin film, The Great Dictator, is composed of layers of parallel doubles and duplicities, of likenesses that overlap and in overlapping disturb. The film is a riot of impersonations and metaphors. Eisenstein’s Strike (1925) is a perfect example of this aesthetic undermining and overturning, as are scenes in his The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1928). In such theatre and in the films that developed from it, acting and character do not coalesce, acting is not an expression of psychology or drama, nor of ‘reality’, but a defiance, an anti-(bourgeois) theatre that constructs by dismantling. In Rome, Pasolini found another Paradise among the sub-proletariat of the Roman slums. They became, as Friuli and Friulian had been, a social, poetic and linguistic model, but this time, it consisted of a different ‘other’, not the bucolic, but the reviled and the marginalised of the Roman slums: thieves, whores, pimps, slobs, cheats, criminals, those for whom work was, if not a curse to be avoided, a sign of belonging to a society they had rejected or had rejected them, a rejection romanticised by Pasolini as a purity of the refusal to conform, even thereby a sacredness.

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This film also uses Pasolini regulars such as Ninetto Davoli and Franco Citti. Franco Citti plays the Devil in this film which follows a theme in The Trilogy of Life of Citti playing demonic and immoral characters (he plays Ser Ciappelletto in The Decameron and is an ifrit in Arabian Nights).