631-634 Trilogy of Life

[bamwc2]

I'm really on the fence about the Trilogy of Life. Other than St. Matthew, what I've seen of Pasolini has not done it for me. Anybody care to espouse the virtues of the Trilogy?

I love Pasolini, but The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales are my least favourite of his features, by far. The trilogy is pretty interesting as an idea, and in the context of Pasolini's career, however, and Arabian Nights is great.

The Gospel is not a particular favourite of mine either, though I like a lot of things in it. If you're tentative about Pasolini, I'd highly recommend checking out MoC's Accatone, Oedipus Rex and Pigsty, or BFI's Medea and Teorema, first. To me, they're all much closer to Pasolini's spiky core values, and much more successful on their own terms.

Of the remaining features, Salo is obviously a special case, and way too off-putting to recommend as a starting point; Hawks and Sparrows needs a lot of contextualization and doesn't really give you much of an impression of what Pasolini's other work is like; and Mamma Roma also seems to me somewhat unrepresentative, in that you could see it and assume that his work is all about updating neorealism.

I agree with you that The Arabian Nights is the strongest of the series, but I think that The Canterbury Tales is a work of pure genius (though very different in tone/form from the other two), and The Decameron in the good, but not great category. I also consider two of the other films that you mentioned The Gospel According to St. Matthew and Salo to be full fledged masterpieces as well, but I can certainly understand why someone wouldn't care for either of them; they're both difficult works to say the least. In all honesty, there are only three films of his that I'm not a fan of: Mama Roma, Medea, and Oedipus Rex. I respect all three more than enjoy, but in all honesty, I've only seen each once and that was over a decade ago. I suppose that repeat viewings might change my mind.

[rohmerin]

I think Pasolini is dubbed by other. But I am not sure because He doesn't speak a lot (only one sentence) or I don't find where He speaks more (here in youtube, all the film with English subtitles).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ6Zcvyl ... re=related" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I want this box set but my bloody Blu Ray is not region free. Damn ! What a wonderful extra featurettes !

[warren oates]

I haven't seen any of the trilogy, but like bamwc2 I'm a huge fan of The Gospel According to Matthew and Salo. Also really like Teorema and Pigsty. And I've always been interested in the literary source material of all three films, as well as the challenge of making features with multiple episodic storylines.

[TMDaines]

All of Pasolini's released films are now in print, all but one with English subs, and there are a lot of 'minor' / more obscure works among them.

Taking it from the top, with best source indicated:

La ricotta (episode of portmanteau film, 1963) - RoGoPaG (MoC)
La Rabbia (half of feature documentary, 1963) - La Rabbia (Raro Video)
Comizi d'amore (documentary feature, 1964) - Accattone (MoC)
Sopralluoghi in Palestina (essay film, 1965) - The Gospel According to Matthew (MoC)
La terra vista dalla luna (episode of portmanteau film, 1967) - The Witches (MGM R1)
Che cosa sono le nuvole? (episode of portmanteau film, 1968) - Cappriccio all'italiana (Filmauro R2 Italian - NO ENGLISH SUBS -but a subtitled version is up on YouTube)
Appunti per un film sull'India (essay film, 1968) - Pasolini Vol. 2 box set (Tartan OOP)
La sequenze del fiore di carta (episode of portmanteau film, 1969) - Love and Anger (NoShame OOP)
Appunti per un'Orestiade africana (essay film, 1970) - The Decameron (BFI)
Le mura di Sana (documentary short, 1971) - La Rabbia (Raro Video)

There's also the reconstructed version of La rabbia by Bertolucci Jr. available from Raro Italy.

[zedz]

I also consider two of the other films that you mentioned The Gospel According to St. Matthew and Salo to be full fledged masterpieces as well, but I can certainly understand why someone wouldn't care for either of them.

Oh, I like both of those films a lot, and would probably concede that they're masterpieces. Matthew is certainly one of his most beautifully and intelligently conceived films (though I find it a bit draggy in execution). The problem with Salo is recommending it as an entry point to Pasolini's work, as it's unlike anything else he did (unlike anything else anybody did, really) and has the serious downsides of either completely misleading those people who can handle the material or completely alienating those who can't.

Thinking about it further, I think my issue with The Gospel According to Matthew is that, after a half-hour or so, you understand Pasolini's radical approach to the material, and the rest of the movie plays out pretty much as you'd expect, given that knowledge. Whereas in his other great 'mythic' films, Oedipus Rex and Medea, even though you know what's going to happen, how Pasolini chooses to make it happen is a surprise. The same applies to Arabian Nights, but in that case it's clear from very early on that he's devised an entirely original structure for that work.

[Drucker]

As I read up on these films, I'm still not sure if they'll be my cup of tea, though I greatly enjoyed Mama Roma and Accatone. Based on what I've read, would it be fair at all to compare these films to Bunuel? The social satire, character behavior, etc.?

[knives]

I suppose there are some thematic similarities, but even than how he explores them and to what purpose is radically different. I wouldn't make that comparison at all.

[Tommaso]

Me neither. Pasolini's films are the expression of a very personal vision, steeped in his anger about the loss of a mythic/archaic world because of modernisation/capitalism, and there's certainly nothing in them that compares to Bunuel's surrealist irony. As to the Trilogy: at least "Decameron" and "Arabian nights" are very 'beautiful' films, intentionally 'simple' in some way - the films from the 60s are far more complex in terms of narrative -, but entirely captivating if you're not put off by a certain bawdyness, which is most apparent in "Canterbury", but is practically absent from "Arabian nights". I'd recommend the latter as the ideal starting point for anyone not familiar with Pasolini, together with the entirely different "Accatone".

[lubitsch]

Obviously I belong to those people who consider Pasolini's films more of a bizarre private mythology than being substantial works of art. But it's pretty safe to say that these films are the nadir of his output and the apt point of comparison would be less Bunuel and far more all the softsex comedies of the 70s. I wonder if the name Pasolini weren't on them if anyone would seriously look at them, parts remind me strongly of the notorious Schoolgirl report films. As far as I remember he himself considered the films being failures anyway.

[Tommaso]

I was about to write something similar with regard to the softsex comedies, but in the end found the comparison misleading, because Pasolini's motivations were quite different. Using the filmic language of sexploitation films to make serious points about a 'paradise lost' is pretty idiosyncratic, and I would even agree that "Canterbury" is his worst film, but on the other hand there's "Arabian Nights", which is a perfect film in almost every respect - even the notorious rough cutting that characterises the other two films is largely absent, and the acting is far better - in which he successfully brings across his archaic/utopian ideals. And he didn't consider these films as failures later, but rather his hopes and ideals that informed them in the light of what he couldn't ignore any longer: the realities of Italian politics and society in the early 1970s. Which is why he followed the Trilogy with "Salo", as a kind of counter-statement which addresses these realities more directly, though again in some sort of metaphorical way.

[MichaelB]

Using the filmic language of sexploitation films to make serious points about a 'paradise lost' is pretty idiosyncratic

Artistically idiosyncratic, certainly, but commercially very astute indeed.

[ellipsis7]

Of course, as literature, Boccaccio's DECAMERON and Chaucer's CANTERBURY TALES are first works in their respective languages of Italian and English written in a vernacular spoken by ordinary people, rather than in more formal and highbrow Latin (or even French)... This was surely a key element of their appeal to Pasolini as he adapted them for the screen...

[Sloper]

Sorry to be pedantic, but that certainly isn't true of Boccaccio - Dante was the first (as far as we know) to write poetry on a grand scale in Italian; there were great Italian lyric poets before him, and of course he meets some of them in the Divine Comedy. Indeed, Dante's two great disciples, Boccaccio and Petrarch, were both quite ambivalent about the capacity of the vernacular to stand the weight of a great literary enterprise, and both wrote substantial works in Latin as well. I believe Boccaccio even said once that the Divine Comedy would have been a greater work if it had been written in Latin. The Decameron is still a ground-breaking work of vernacular literature offering a broad-ranging vision of contemporary society, in a way that Dante's great poem had not, and as such it was very possibly an influence on The Canterbury Tales (I think there's some controversy over this). (I have to admit I haven't quite read all of The Decameron...)

As for Chaucer, there was a lot of English poetry before him, most famously Langland and possibly also the Gawain-poet (plus a lot of lesser-known works before them which I'm not very familiar with). Chaucer's contemporary and friend, John Gower, was arguably not much less important for his innovative use of the vernacular, which he decided to use after writing vast works in French and Latin. Chaucer was credited by subsequent generations of writers as the first poet to legitimise the English language as the medium of great and beautiful poetry, for various complicated reasons - I think one of the biggest was his skilful exploitation and imitation of classical and European models, including Dante and Boccaccio. Few great poets in any language have had Chaucer's range and versatility.

Like The Decameron (only more so), The Canterbury Tales is remarkable for the way it tries to show a cross-section of contemporary society. Actually I don't really know of any precedent for what Chaucer does here. It begins with the chivalrous, high-flown Knight's Tale (based on a Boccaccio poem that was itself a deliberate attempt to imitate classical models - I think it's exactly the same length as Virgil's Aeneid), then the host of the pilgrimage suggests that the Monk go next, perhaps because he's the highest-ranking representative of the clergy among the pilgrims, just as the Knight is the highest-ranking representative of the nobility. But the drunken Miller interrupts and insists on telling his bawdy, scatological tale, whose love-triangle plot clearly parodies the pretensions of the preceding story. The transition between the two tales is one of the richest and funniest moments in English literature. I can't remember whether Pasolini retains it in his film? And then the Reeve is offended by the Miller's Tale, so tells an even nastier one...

The whole opening fragment of the collection is a brilliant meditation on the nature of story-telling, our reasons for telling stories, the ways in which we shape stories to serve our own interests or attack others, the ways different stories can be used to represent different classes, outlooks, philosophies (about love, sex, intelligence, physical strength, poetry, language etc). The main problem I remember having with Pasolini's film when I saw it several years ago was that it only seemed interested in one outlook, one philosophy - if you only listen to the 'low', proletarian voices in Chaucer, you miss not only the beauty and pathos of the higher registers, but also the contrasts that make figures like the Miller, the Reeve and the Wife of Bath so vivid and lively, such a breath of fresh air. But if I'm not being fair to Pasolini here, please do jump in and correct me.

Anyway, I'm sure your point is a good one, ellipsis - I just felt like jumping in to ramble about medieval poetry.

[ellipsis7]

Yes, I am aware of the position of LA DIVINA COMMEDIA di Dante Alighieri, sorry I meant 'first' as in 'early' not as in 'the first'... I like what you say, Sloper - clearly IL DECAMERON di Boccaccio and Chaucer's THE CANTERBURY TALES, share their use of the vernacular with their popular and earthy subject matter...

[Mr Sausage]

I like how there was no real concept of plagiarism during the middle ages. Authors would freely take each other's stories, or pinch them from Chronicles which were themselves borrowing stories from other sources, and with no sense of giving credit would represent them in their own language. To further the link between Chaucer and Boccaccio mentioned above, the former's Troilus and Creseyde was directly taken from a Boccaccio story.

What's interesting to me is how the three works in question just beg for a post-modern sort of take. They're so focussed on stories and story-telling and what would become narratology that you might expect adaptations that constantly switch styles and registers, or even mimic the styles of other prominent filmmakers. But it seems Pasolini has no interest in that, and prefers to mine these books exclusively for their comic, bawdy tales in order to construct a personal myth about a lost connection with a more natural (and hence more sexual) way of living. The earthiness of some of the tales (merely appropriate for their subject matter) becomes an actual, pastoral virtue and comes to represent Pasolini's ideal way of living, I gather.

Fascinating that the three great works of world literature about story-telling would be made into movies not terribly interested in that as a subject.

[knives]

In the case of Pasolini at least I don't think he had any interest in post-modernism and from his writings I think he was trying to rebel against it with something of a more modernist approach. Usually in a situation like the one you've outlined that annoys me (Rashomon), but I think here Pasolini manages to work these concepts toward his 'sub-proletariat' idea in a way that transforms the stories away from that need for post-modernism.

[matrixschmatrix]

Reflecting only one worldview from the Canterbury Tales seems almost a crime, though, as one of the key themes of the work as a whole is the sense in which a cross section of society mutates into a functional group through the shared space of storytelling (even while any number of them hate each other.) It's one of those books that's fairly easy to mistake for a book of short stories with some linking material, but there's a really extraordinary interplay between tale and teller, both in obvious ways (the Summoner and the Friar hate one another, so they have tales that attack the other's profession) and subtle (the Parson's generally positive portrayal is undermined in his stiff necked refusal to tell any kind of interesting fable and instead delivering a long, horribly boring sermon.) Mining the book for just a couple of interesting stories doesn't seem like a reasonable representation of what the book does.

[knives]

To be fair it would be almost impossible to do what the book does on that front in the space of two hours. Remember even it is largely incomplete.

[Sloper]

Yes, I am aware of the position of LA DIVINA COMMEDIA di Dante Alighieri, sorry I meant 'first' as in 'early' not as in 'the first'...

I thought perhaps that was what you meant; it may well be that illegitimate-son-of-a-banker Boccaccio's work evinces a more populist, down-to-earth spirit than does fallen-aristocrat Dante's. I love the story (which I think may have been told by Boccaccio himself) about Dante hearing a blacksmith singing (incorrectly) one of his poems. He strode into the blacksmith's workshop and proceeded to throw all his tools onto the floor. 'What are you doing?' asked the blacksmith. Dante replied: 'You're ruining my work, now I'm ruining yours.' Or words to that effect.

I like how there was no real concept of plagiarism during the middle ages. Authors would freely take each other's stories, or pinch them from Chronicles which were themselves borrowing stories from other sources, and with no sense of giving credit would represent them in their own language. To further the link between Chaucer and Boccaccio mentioned above, the former's Troilus and Creseyde was directly taken from a Boccaccio story.

Yes, when you get into it this is one of the most fascinating aspects of medieval literature: not only does Chaucer translate Boccaccio's Il Filostrato into Troilus and Criseyde, he also claims throughout the poem that he is translating from an author called 'Lollius', who has never been identified. And although he makes it sound as though his work is totally unoriginal, in fact he adds an enormous amount to his source in the process of adapting it: what had been an sophisticated, Ovidian, tragicomic romance becomes a painfully earnest philosophical tragedy, with a level of emotional and psychological depth you would normally expect from a great novel rather than a medieval poem.

As to the rest of the discussion, I did feel when I saw Pasolini's The Canterbury Tales several years ago that it had very little to do with Chaucer. First of all, there's the narrowness of focus: only looking at the bawdy side of things means shutting off a huge part of what Chaucer was trying to do, as matrix has said. If you want to make a film about medieval people fucking and farting, that's great, but why call this film 'The Canterbury Tales'?

Then again, I could accept that a film-maker might (given time constraints, and/or a particular ideological bent) deliberately narrow their focus to Chaucer's bawdy and scatological tales - but I couldn't help feeling that even within these limits, Pasolini wasn't that interested in the specifically Chaucerian qualities of these stories.

Why, for instance, does he take the incomplete Cook's Tale and make up a bizarre continuation, when elsewhere in the film he stops the Summoner's Tale mid-flow? I mean if you really want to get to grips with Chaucer's toilet humour, you need to do more than show the old guy farting into the friar's hand. You need to show the subsequent hand-wringing over precisely how this bequest is to be distributed equally to all the friars of the order. Surely Pasolini would have relished the opportunities for vivid dramatisation such an episode offers - perhaps he wanted to hold back the full-on scatology until his climax, but then why tell the Summoner's Tale at all? Stopping it where Pasolini does turns it into a mere crude anecdote.

As Mr S has pointed out, these tales are all indebted to one source or another, so what makes them 'The Canterbury Tales, by Chaucer' is the way they're told. The Merchant's Tale is a story with about seven or eight layers of narrative perspectives, all of them commenting ironically upon each other's veracity, tone, motivation; but (from what I remember) Pasolini only seems interested in the basic narrative of the foolish old cuckold. Inevitably not all aspects of a written text are capable of being translated into cinematic terms, but so little of Chaucer's irony seemed to survive here that I wondered why Pasolini bothered.

All this said, I think I'd be much more sympathetic to the film now than I was when I first saw it - I was more of a purist then. I'm really looking forward to getting this set, and may come back to this discussion when I know a bit more of Pasolini's work. (To my shame, the only other one I've seen so far is Medea, which I loved, not least because it was such an irreverent but brilliant commentary on Euripides' play. And Maria Callas, obviously.)

[matrixschmatrix]

Yeah, cutting off the Summoner's Tale is like stopping a dirty joke before you get to the Ding Dong, Goddammit!, plus it takes away my absolute favorite part- that, apart from being a really delightful piece of toilet humor, it also works as a sort of false Last Supper, dividing the ineffable amongst the thirteen.

On the other hand, I think a lot of people are totally unaware of the earthy side of Chaucer- which is amazing, as it indicates that you have not read even the tiniest bit of his work, but still- and highlighting that as a corrective still has some value. There's an image of the Middle Ages generally that has everything as high and noble and chivalrous, and in some ways Pasolini's project here works the same way Monty Python and the Holy Grail does, turning down Don Quixote and turning up Sancho Panza. It's not more correct in of itself, but in a world that always does it the other way around, it's pretty understandable.

[Mr Sausage]

As far as integrated visions of the middle ages go on film, The Seventh Seal is the one that does it the best. It's a movie that can treat the spiritual, intellectual, and moral sections of that era with real seriousness and real feeling while at the same time treating the comic, bawdy, earthy elements with an equal sense of feeling and seriousness. It's a movie both with a real sense of the physical textures of mediaeval life (love the taverns, with the beers mugs, the knotted and carved up tables, the dripping taps) as well as the abstract and conceptual textures that were so pervasive (the chess match and the final image, naturally).

I gather Pasolini wasn't interested in historical reality at all, but rather was interested in his own counter-myth to the chivalrous (and religious) myth of that same time. He wanted to counter Mallory and Dante with the opposite extreme. And Pasolini, not a scholar, was only interested in those elements of Chaucer and Boccaccio that spoke to him the most: the sexual and physical elements and the parodies and critiques of religion. I don't know that his task was all that successful (a lot of people here don't seem to be fans of his Decameron and Canterbury Tales), but oh well. I do agree with Sloper, tho', that given the general air of plagiarism at the time, he ought to have followed suit and called his movies Pasolini's Canterbury Tales and so on since, in a sense, that's what they are.

[knives]

I think it's fair to say that in all of his adaptations (certainly it is not limited to these three) he wasn't so much adapting as he was utilizing random story elements to further his own philosophical ideas. The Gospel for instance is about Jesus or the gospel as much as it is about a ham sandwich. So coming at any of these films as a fan of the source may be the worst way to tackle them. This certainly isn't Cronenberg's Naked Lunch.

[Mr Sausage]

Out of curiosity, matrixschmatrix, did you read The Canterbury Tales in a translation or in the original?

[matrixschmatrix]

Both- I did a Chaucer specific course for my degree, and we had a side by side translation and would read passages from the original out loud, as that was the only way the majority of the class could catch the meaning. The original language, to me at least, is gorgeous sounding, but I'm at best only a fair reader of it at this point.

[Sloper]

On the other hand, I think a lot of people are totally unaware of the earthy side of Chaucer- which is amazing, as it indicates that you have not read even the tiniest bit of his work, but still- and highlighting that as a corrective still has some value. There's an image of the Middle Ages generally that has everything as high and noble and chivalrous, and in some ways Pasolini's project here works the same way Monty Python and the Holy Grail does, turning down Don Quixote and turning up Sancho Panza. It's not more correct in of itself, but in a world that always does it the other way around, it's pretty understandable.

I wonder whether things haven't shifted to the other end of the spectrum, though? I feel like I've been brought up on the Python/Pasolini version of the Middle Ages, with Chaucer standing more or less as a by-word for 'earthy' humour. These were the expectations I brought to Chaucer when I first studied him, but reading The Merchant's Tale was a revelation: there was the freewheeling bawdiness alright ('This Damyan gan pullen up the smok, and in he throng...ye, algate in it went!'), but alongside it were passages of great lyrical beauty, and as I mentioned before a more complex and subtle use of irony than I had (or have) ever encountered in any other work of art. Only focusing on the 'idealised' level of medieval art is dangerous, of course, but so is the other extreme, which can be sentimental and patronising.

Interesting that Mr S brings up The Seventh Seal; I particularly remember the scene where Death saws down the tree, which combines a terror in the face of mortality with a surprisingly casual gallows humour, in a way that I would perhaps call 'authentically medieval', whatever that means. Great scene, anyway. The main problem I had with that film, though, was the rather mawkish treatment of Jof and his wife, who seemed to be emblems of simple-minded 'merrie medievalism'; maybe that's reductive but it's how they came across to me.

To some extent I have the same problem with Chimes at Midnight. The Henry IV plays are in part about the lure of sensuality - represented by Falstaff, the tavern, Mistress Quickly, Doll Tearsheet, Poins etc - and how Hal has to experience this before gradually putting it behind him (or absorbing and subordinating it) to fulfil his more austere responsibilities. The plays expose the limitations of that superficially attractive world of conspicuous consumption, so that Falstaff's final humiliation seems both inevitable and (if we're being cruel) deserved; but they also show how beautiful and essential that world is, and they lament the loss and betrayal at the end of the second play. Welles manipulates his source texts to emphasise the beauties of 'merrie England' and the cold inhumanity of what replaces it, and at times I think he is guilty of sentimentalising that ideal old world and its values; certainly he simplifies the ambiguities of the plays. But he does it so earnestly, and with such flair, and often such subtlety, that in the end I really don't mind - and perhaps this is especially because he is quite open about this being his version of events, not Shakespeare's. His title, his arrangement of narrative events, and two-and-a-half plays (plus bits of two others) in under two hours. A very medieval appropriation of someone else's work, I suppose...

Now that I'm trying to make my way as a researcher, it seems that almost everybody in academia buys into a picture of the Middle Ages that sees these past authors as celebrating sensuality and critiquing religion (as is so often the case in atheistic discourse, there's an awful tendency to conflate 'religion' as such with 'the clergy'; I say this as an atheist myself, but I'd have thought any good Christian ought to have a pretty low opinion of organised religion and its representatives. Jesus certainly did). It's as if we can't stay interested in medieval artists unless we make them look like us. I don't have a problem with someone manipulating Chaucer's text in line with their own ideologies, if they're open and honest about what they're doing; the danger comes when they present their interpretation as objective, as an 'accurate' representation of what the text is really saying, while simply ignoring those passages that don't fit the secular/liberal/atheist/sensual model they're working with. I hasten to add that I'm in sympathy with that model, just not with the practice of dealing with something alien and troubling by pretending that it's familiar and safe. Such a practice displays a depressing lack of intellectual curiosity, and (without getting too hysterical about it) is morally problematic as well.