The Canterbury Tales (DVD)

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The Lost Body of Alibech (2005), a documentary by Roberto Chiesi about a lost sequence from The Decameron

Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury, Kent - cathedral appears at the end. The travelers have reached their destination. YouTube, a Google company. YouTube. Archived from the original on 22 October 2020 . Retrieved 17 January 2021.The lengthier documentary did little for me, though I appreciated the look into the deleted material from the film, but the remaining features, if not very deep, were all informative and worth viewing. Closing

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 The final tale of the film is The Summoner’s Tale. A summoner is one who gives notice to others to appear in court, literally a summoner presents a “summons”, more generally, a summoner, takes or sends someone from one place to another, a transporting, in the case of this film, to Hell. Set in England in the Middle Ages, stories of peasants, noblemen, clergy and demons are interwoven with brief scenes from Chaucer's home life and experiences implied to be the basis for the Canterbury Tales. Each episode does not take the form of a story told by different pilgrim, as is the case in Chaucer's stories, but simply appear in sequence, seemingly without regard for the way that the tales relate to one another in the original text. All the stories are linked to the arrival of a group of pilgrims at Canterbury, among whom is the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, played by Pasolini himself. 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 form of the Chaucer is duplicated in Pasolini’s film where Pasolini ‘plays’ Chaucer, pretends, like Chaucer pretends, to speak and inhabit other voices and other characters. Pasolini’s film goes further since Pasolini assumes the role of Chaucer and the roles of the various pilgrims. In both cases, in language, in dress and in gesture, the works are masquerades, everything and everyone disguised, including the authors who are not what they pretend to be.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. Pasolini 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. 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 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. Chaplin’s films, their essence and the essence of his character Charlie, are constructed around the double, where whatever is, is seldom what it appears to be or could be (for example, a cake as a hat, a hat as a cake, infinite translation and unending, riotous metamorphosis), as if the only acceptable attitude is founded on opposition, refusal as a precondition for any change. Reality is a state of mind that can be refashioned, thought differently, not immutable, and therefore easily reimagined and transformed. The delight of Chaplin’s work depends on this possibility of difference, no matter what. She has written for Communications Daily, Discover Hollywood, Hollywood Today, Television International, and Video Age International, and contributed to countless other magazines and digests. There are two homosexuals accused in the film, one rich, one poor. The poor one, unable to pay the money demanded by the Church, pays with his life. He is burned alive in religious pomp and ceremony, ‘barbecued’: “You are fried”. Franco Citti mingles with the crowd attending (and enjoying) the ‘frying’. He sells hot frittelle (fritters) as at a sporting event. 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.Every Pasolini film is based on a literary text, like I racconti di Canterbury is based on The Canterbury Tales. The shift—translation is always a shift—from one language to another, one medium to another, one practice to another, is not for Pasolini adaptation where one term disappears to become an other term, but rather a comparison between elements simultaneously like and not like, that move ‘between’, where what is crucial is not one thing nor the other, but a relation, like the copresence of Friulian and Italian, Neapolitan and Middle English, Roman slang and literary Italian, street kids and Renaissance art. However I don't think it's true. In these movies, Pasolini introduces to the audience an incorrupt world where people don't care about 'material aspects of life', they try to live at the full stretch, they seek love and, of course, sex and they do not respect 'the repressive limits imposed by religious and bourgeois morality' (Gino Moliterno). This is probably why Pasolini later declared that these three films were most ideological of his career (in his famous and long interview with Massimo Fini). I suppose Pasolini tried to confront such 'primitive' world with the world he had lived in and which he had hated so much (this confrontation is present all the time, especially by the contrast between the love and the death, by the contrast between the first tales, in which the human naked body dominates, and the last two tales in which pursuit of money causes death and perdition. Because of such end it is also suggested that I Racconti di Canterbury are very close to Pasolini's disillusioned last movie, Saló). St. John's College, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire - where Alan and John are scholars and their manciple falls ill.

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. 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 TalePasolini" 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. The close up and the cutting out, the rejection of continuity by Pasolini, has a double yield or consequence. 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. 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. 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.