The Canterbury Tales (DVD)

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The actors in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Canterbury Tales ( I racconti di Canterbury [1970]) are English and Italian. The film has an English and an Italian version, both dubbed. The speech of the characters in the two versions is ‘popular’, the speech of ordinary people.

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. Vicars' Close, Wells, Wells, Somerset - May's original home before marrying Sir January and the street where January inspects the behinds of young women. The Merchant’s Tale (First Tale): The elderly merchant Sir January (Hugh Griffith) decides to marry May (Josephine Chaplin), a young woman who has little interest in him. Atypical of a Pasolini film, he chose some of the finest British actors such as Hugh Griffith and Josephine Chaplin. This has probably the most famous cast of a Pasolini film. After they are married, the merchant suddenly becomes blind, and insists on constantly holding on to his wife’ wrist as consolation for the fact that he cannot see her. Meanwhile, Damian (Oscar Fochetti), a young man whom May has interest in decides to take advantage of the situation. May has a key to January’s personal garden made. While the two are walking in the private garden, May asks to eat mulberries from one of the trees. Taking advantage of her husband’s blindness, she meets with Damian inside of the tree, but is thwarted when the god Pluto (Giuseppe Arrigio), who has been watching over the couple in the garden, suddenly restores January’s sight. January briefly sees May and her lover together and is furious. Fortunately for May, the goddess Persepone (Elisabetta Genovese), who also happens to be in the same garden fills her head with decent excuses to calm her husband’s wrath. May convinces January that he has hallucinated and the two walk off together merrily. Perkin (Ninetto Davoli) in bed with a prostitute and her client The presence of Chaplin in Pasolini’s films and especially perhaps in films like I racconti di Canterbury and the two other Pasolini films of La trilogia di vita, is not exceptional. Chaplin, I believe, was the only filmmaker to be cited and present in virtually every Pasolini film and to whom Pasolini paid homage, a citation indeed, a medal of distinction, of high art in low wrappings.

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Roman and Friulian were, for Pasolini, ancient languages, a survival from the past. The Roman borgate was for Pasolini a Paradise, albeit shabby. More romantically still it was Paradise Lost, a remnant and, like its inhabitants, in rags, and like Roman and Friulian, threatened with extinction by modernisation. This set up a series of reversals for Pasolini whereby the ancient had more value than the modern and the despised was more sacred than the Sacred. All that society said was good, he rejected , and all it rejected Pasolini embraced. The film credits role as the traditional ballad Ould Piper plays over top, about an elderly piper from Ballymoney who dies and is sent to Hell where he annoys the Devil with his terrible singing. The characters from the later stories are introduced chattering to one another at the Tabard inn. Chaucer (played by Pasolini himself) enters through the gate and bumps into a heavy man covered in woad tattooing, injuring his nose. The wife of Bath delivers long-winded monologues to disinterested listeners about her weaving skills and sexual prowess. The Pardoner unsuccessfully attempts to sell what he claims are pieces of cloth from the sail of St. Peter's boat and the Virgin's veil. Some other travelers enter and suggest they tell stories to make the journey more entertaining which leads into the main stories of the film. Chaucer opens his book and begins to write down their stories. The Canterbury Tales is Pasolini’s second film in his Trilogy of Life—landing between The Decameron (1971) and Arabian Nights (1974)

Prologue: The film credits roll as the traditional ballad Ould Piper plays over top, about an elderly piper from Ballymoney who dies and is sent to Hell where he annoys the Devil with his terrible singing. The characters from the later stories are introduced chattering to one another at the Tabard inn. Geoffrey Chaucer (played by Pasolini himself) enters through the gate and bumps into a heavy man covered in woad tattooing, injuring his nose. The Wife of Bath (Laura Betti) delivers long-winded monologues to disinterested listeners about her weaving skills and sexual prowess. The Pardoner (Derek Deadman) unsuccessfully attempts to sell what he claims are pieces of cloth from the sail of St. Peter’s boat and the Holy Virgin’s veil. Some other travelers enter the Tabard Inn and suggest they tell stories to make the journey more entertaining which leads into the main stories of the film. Chaucer opens his book and begins to write down their stories. The shots of Chaucer at work in his study are based on the painting of “Saint Jerome in His Study” (1472) by Antonello da Messina. Pasolini directing the scene of the devils in Hell from The Summoner’s Tale Canby, Vincent (30 May 1980). "Film: 'Canterbury Tales': Chaucer a la Pasolini". The New York Times. 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). Almost certainly Chaucer’s poem in Middle English went through a series of transformations for the different language versions of the Pasolini film. Middle English was modernised into everyday English in turn translated into Italian. The Italian was then retranslated into Italian common speech and slang, much of it Neapolitan, while the English dubbed version, a long way now from Chaucerian Middle English, became colloquial English ‘modern’ speech and slang, that is ‘like’ Chaucerian English but not Chaucerian English. The similarity between the two linguistic versions and their differences are simultaneously present as the precondition for a comparison between languages and the historical and social differences and above all linguistic-poetic differences that unite and oppose them.Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury, Kent - cathedral appears at the end. The travelers have reached their destination. Some of the music was composed by Ennio Morricone on period accurate instruments. He said he did not enjoy working with bagpipes so the film was a bit challenging for him. [17] See also [ edit ] 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.

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. Mount Etna, Sicily - Hell in the Summoner's Tale and also where the deleted Tale of Sir Topas was filmed. All of Pasolini’s films and especially his later ones including, I racconti di Canterbury, are indebted to these traditions. One way of understanding his I racconti (and also, I think, provocatively, the Grand Guignol terror of his Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma [1975]) is as burlesque theatre. A vendor witnesses a summoner who is spying on two different men committing sodomy. He catches both and turns them over to the authorities. While one man manages to escape persecution by bribing the authorities, the other is sentenced to burn on a "griddle". During his execution, the vendor walks through the crowd selling griddle cakes. Afterwards, the vendor meets the summoner, who is unaware he was being followed. The two vow to be friends but the vendor reveals himself to be the devil. The summoner does not care about this and says they will make great partners as they are both out for profit. The summoner then explains that he must collect money from a miserly old woman. When they meet the old woman, the summoner levies false charges against her and tells her that she must appear before the ecclesiastical court but says that if she pays him a bribe in the amount she owes, she will be excused. The old woman accuses him of lying, and curses him to be taken away by the devil if he does not repent. She says the devil can take him and the pitcher she owns which is her most valuable possession. The devil asks her if she truly means what she says and she assents. The summoner refuses to repent and the devil proceeds to take him (and the pitcher) to hell as they are now his by divine right. PLUS: New essays by critic Colin MacCabe; Pasolini’s 1975 statement “Trilogy of Life Rejected”; excerpts from Pasolini’s Berlin Film Festival press conference for The Canterbury Tales; and a report from the set of Arabian Nights by critic Gideon BachmannPasolini was born and educated in Bologna in Central Italy. During the war, he, with his mother, lived in Casarsa, in the Italian countryside of Friuli at the extreme North East of Italy where Pasolini taught school. What was spoken in Casarsa, besides Italian, was Friulian, the local language. Pasolini loved Friuli and its language. He studied it and adopted it and partly was responsible for reviving and preserving it. He adopted not only the language, but the place and also its people. It was as if the sophisticated, highly educated Italian, a student of the Fine Arts, was in masquerade in Friuli playing a rural figure, not what he was but what he would have liked to have been. And what he would have liked to have been, his fiction, is what he fundamentally became and at heart and by sympathy what he was, at once himself and other than himself, as if possessed by that ‘other’ as more real, his dream a reality. 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. Criterion has then recorded two new interviews. First is a 9-minute one featuring composer Ennio Morricone who recalls working with Pasolini. Interestingly he talks about how he usually hates it when a director tells him what they want, but with Pasolini, who usually gave Morricone free reign, he didn’t mind taking directions, as was the case with the trilogy. Production designer Dante Ferretti then talks about the set designs constructed for the film, and the various paintings that were influences on certain sequences. His interview runs 18-minutes

Scenes depicting all five of the Wife's husbands and the death of her most recent, much younger husband, with the line "May God save his soul from Hell. Now I await my sixth husband". Next is a 47-minute documentary from 2005 entitled Pasolini and the Secret Humiliation of Chaucer, which looks a little at the making of the film but eventually focuses on the many edits the film went through and all of the footage deleted (all now lost of course,) which included one entire sequence and then about 20 scenes from the other stories. It looks at the various cuts that were made before it finally premiered for the jury at the Berlin Film Festival, and then offers an edit of sorts for the removed sequence using photos and translations of the script. A little long yet not all that engaging when it looks at some of the production, it’s worth watching just for the material on the deleted sequences. The subject is, of course, Pier Paolo Pasolini, the director of "The Gospel According to Matthew," "Teorama," "The Canterbury Tales," "Arabian Nights," and other art house classics. Pasolini, played by Willem Dafoe, was a public intellectual and artist, of a type that was more common in the mid-20th century than today. He was a novelist, an essayist and a philosopher as well as a writer and director of feature films. The Summoner's Tale was also much longer and included scenes of the Friar sexually harassing the dying Thomas' wife. Rolvenden Windmill, Kent - Mill and home of Simkin the Miller and his family, and is also the location of the festival where the wife of Bath gives a handjob to Jenkin.

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Pasolini" is the sort of film about which a term like "successful" doesn't seem to apply, because if you used it, the follow-up question would have to be, "Successful according to whose terms?" And the answer would be either "Abel Ferrara's terms" or "Those of pretty much every other commercial filmmaker." Then you'd be left with your own subjective response to the movie, which is something like walking across a ravine on a board that you won't know is properly anchored until you stand on it. That this is a distinguishing feature of Pasolini's filmography as well as Ferrara's (along with an abiding interest in suffering, martyrdom, sensuality, and taboo) stands the project in good stead, no matter what you think of it as a complete work of art. Chaucer and his tales are cited, rather than represented, which is equally the case in Pasolini’s films that cite myth: Edipo re (1967), Medea (1970), Porcile (1969), Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (1964), (which Pasolini noted was his film closest to Il Decameron [1970]). Il fiore delle mille e una notte (1974) set in a mythical Arabia is a series of mythical tales whose structure is similar to the other two films in the Trilogia di vita, and, as he himself said, to Il Vangelo. New interviews with production designer Dante Ferretti, composer Ennio Morricone, and film scholar Sam Rohdie The Summoner begins his tale. He states "Everyone here knows how friars are such frequent visitors to Hell. 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.