631-634 Trilogy of Life

[Rayon Vert]

Yeah, I've always known those authors as Mediaeval (Dante especially), the fourteenth century as the Late Middle Ages, and the Renaissance beginning with the fall of the Byzantine Empire in the late fifteenth century. But the edges of these kinds of retrospective periods are always arbitrary and up for debate.

Indeed. However, I do value recognizing Pasolini's film as taking place at the beginning of the Renaissance (again, made explicit to some degree by basing his film on a Renaissance humanist text, and having Pasolini portray the first great Renaissance artist) because his anti-puritanical attitude towards sex harmonizes with the more welcoming sensibility towards the body and sensuality that was emerging among artists and intellectuals in this period. From [url]the following website on the Renaissance:

Before the Renaissance, sex and sensuality were seen as sins to be repressed. Its purpose was strictly for reproduction. Religion guarded daily life and each moment in life was spent on the goal of attaining salvation. After the Black Plague, secularism spread and people were less focused on salvation than enjoyment of their short lifetime.

In the Renaissance, sex and sensuality were seen as the first steps towards salvation. From the Neo-Platonist philosophers under Lorenzo de Medici, it was concluded that love of the body was the first step on the long ladder towards a love of wisdom and ultimately of God and therefore it was to be embraced and not hidden away.

I'm thinking this is particularly reflected in the lovely scene of the teenage girl and her boyfriend joining her in secret on her balcony, and how the parents react surprisingly positively when they are discovered.

[Mr Sausage]

That could be how Pasolini saw things, although it's based on a gross caricature of the middle ages.

You could equally argue that Pasolini was trying to revive and embody a version of Mediaevalism: the bawdy, earthy, demotic element that gets lost behind the austere religious element and that was subsumed into high intellectual life in the Renaissance. Hence the tone and aims of this film are quite the same whether the source is Italian Renaissance (as you claim for this one), or Mediaeval England (The Canterbury Tales), or Mediaeval Persia and Arabia (The Arabian Nights). And even if these books could be argued as Renaissance, the stories they compile come out of a much older mediaeval tradition. Plus despite the presence of Pasolini as a major writer in each one, there is little in the way of intellectualism. The stories are all deliberately low and much more concerned with an atmosphere of physicality and with demotic modes of oral story-telling that, again, are more mediaeval than Renaissance and very much not humanist. Regeneration, in this trilogy, is not a product of self improvement through learning and knowledge as in Humanism, but entirely through unmediated physical experiences (sex, food, nature, adventure, ect.).

[Rayon Vert]

That could be how Pasolini saw things, although it's based on a gross caricature of the middle ages.

You could equally argue that Pasolini was trying to revive and embody a version of Mediaevalism: the bawdy, earthy, demotic element that gets lost behind the austere religious element and that was subsumed into high intellectual life in the Renaissance. Hence the tone and aims of this film are quite the same whether the source is Italian Renaissance (as you claim for this one), or Mediaeval England (The Canterbury Tales), or Mediaeval Persia and Arabia (The Arabian Nights). And even if these books could be argued as Renaissance, the stories they compile come out of a much older mediaeval tradition. Plus despite the presence of Pasolini as a major writer in each one, there is little in the way of intellectualism. The stories are all deliberately low and much more concerned with an atmosphere of physicality and with demotic modes of oral story-telling that, again, are more mediaeval than Renaissance and very much not humanist. Regeneration, in this trilogy, is not a product of self improvement through learning and knowledge as in Humanism, but entirely through unmediated physical experiences (sex, food, nature, adventure, ect.).

Great stuff. Mr. Sausage, I completely agree with everything you're saying here. I was only highlighting a (slight) "correspondence" that adds to my own enjoyment of The Decameron, but I wouldn't make too much of what I just said, and I think you're much more accurate in your reading of Pasolini here in the Trilogy (and pretty much throughout his entire oeuvre): physicality bypassing intellectualism, etc.

[Mr Sausage]

Sorry, not trying to refute you. I can kind of see it both ways. However you want to name it, I think Pasolini was trying to return us to a more authentic state of being showing us that what he saw as the the true tradition of Indo-European culture was actually located in the 12th and 13th centuries, a tradition summed up by the ethos of the comic folk tale. He uses cultural and literary history to forge a myth of natural man, a myth that seems more authentic and less personal when connected in this way to history and artistic tradition. Reminds me of the English Romantics' claim that, unlike the neo-classicists of the 18th century, with whom they were breaking, the Romantic project was a continuation of the true tradition of English poetry, the tradition of energy and the imagination as embodied by earlier Renaissance poets like Milton and Spenser, poets on whom the Romantics often modeled themselves. In this way they could claim that their poetry was the authentic poetry and that it was the neo-classicists who were breaking from tradition. I can't think of any filmic parallels to Pasolini's project here, tho'.

[Drucker]

The blu ray of this is listed as currently unavailable on the Criterion website. Any idea what gives?

[therewillbeblus]

The blu ray of this is listed as currently unavailable on the Criterion website. Any idea what gives?

I noticed that before the B&N sale started up when I was scouting for titles to pick up, but hopefully like with Flowers of St. Francis, also still listed as such, it just means that since Criterion is working remotely, they haven't been able to print/get to more copies, etc. - rather than it being an OOP situation

[domino harvey]

The blu ray of this is listed as currently unavailable on the Criterion website. Any idea what gives?

Surprised to hear the BFI was listed at all (moving this now... )

[rrenault]

For people based in the Paris region, I just wanted to let you know the entire trilogy will be running in 35mm at the Filmothèque du Quartier Latin in central Paris later this month.