The Canterbury Tales (DVD)

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I racconti di Canterbury begins somewhat differently, most of the characters, are of the ‘people’ have bad teeth, poor complexions (blotchy, pimpled), are obese or scrawny, often ugly, decrepit, drooling, disgusting, dopey, lecherous, like the old man in The Merchant’s Tale (and like the libertines in Salò), have unpleasant grating voices. There are some few characters, however, such as the young bride whom the Merchant marries in a scene that mirrors the marriage scene in Salò, or who are perfect as in The Cook’s Tale: pretty young girls, heads covered like nuns, but otherwise completely naked, their bodies moving to music, seductive and charming, who sing and dance at a wedding celebration, joined by Ninetto Davoli. He imitates the movements of the young girls, parodies them and in so doing ‘brings out’ their movements, parody and outrage as instruments of emphasis, of highlights. The 1975 Pasolini film, Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, is based on a text by the Marquis de Sade. It begins with a round up of young boys and girls by a Fascist militia. The young people are then housed in a villa in Salò. Four libertines representing Power (sacred and profane) are in charge. They first select their victims on the basis of the most desirable, those without a blemish, those physically perfect. There would be little force or pleasure to defilement if victims were less than perfect. What could be more sublime than besmirching the pure, like the rape of nuns? There is on the one hand, Beauty and Innocence, and on the other, ugliness and corruption. They require each other, assume each other more, not for the sake of a reality, but for the sake of an opposition and a comparison, a linguistic trope, a semiotic form, and a metaphor, not one without the other. 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. Three films - The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales and Arabian Nights - that delivered Pier Paolo Pasolini's refreshingly honest and gritty take on human nature, via some of the world's most enduring literary endeavours. Here he uses Boccaccio, Chaucer and ancient Arabic texts as a springboard for some very funny, bawdy picaresque tales which practically spawned a whole genre of far less intellectually minded ribald period romps for Italian cinema. Employing mostly non-professional performers and real locations, these films plunge the viewer into an earthy, visceral world that makes brings the source literature to life. The appearance of Chaucer's wife Philippa Roet in one of the interlude scenes is also anachronistic as she was already long dead by the time Chaucer began writing The Canterbury Tales.

The Pardoner delivers his tale. He begins with a rambling confession about his own avarice: "I preach against greed – the sin I commit every day". Wells Cathedral, Wells, Somerset - Absolon attends a dance here, and the Wife of Bath marries the young student in the Lady Chapel. Henkel is not Henkel yet he is. Hitler is not Hitler and yet he is. Henkel is not Hitler and yet he is. The same is true for Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and true for all of Chaplin. He is Charlie (the character) and Chaplin (the person) all at once. His films move within a space of comparatives where each resemblance is revealed as a difference. During his career amajor source of Pasolini’s notoriety was his open homosexuality, athen-rare position that he actually had little choice in establishing. In 1949, while living and teaching as aregional poet in northeast Italy, Pasolini was outed and promptly charged with corrupting aminor, resulting in the loss of both his teaching post and his membership in the Italian Communist Party. The subsequent scandal prompted Pasolini to flee to Rome and, in retrospect, may have inadvertently hastened his rise to prominence in Italian literature. Today Pasolini’s grisly and still unsolved murder, perhaps at the hands of ateenaged hustler, has permanently linked his homosexuality to his public profile.

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Nowhere is the contemporary aspect of these medieval tales more evident than in the treatment of the human body. Pasolini uses male genitals and female pubic hair with a freedom that had never been seen in legal cinema. This led to numerous court battles that were part of a general movement that saw much greater license given to the cinema than it had ever before enjoyed. Part of Pasolini’s ultimate disillusionment with his trilogy was that the films immediately inspired a slew of soft-porn imitations, as commercial filmmakers cashed in on his bravery. It is important to remember today, when there is very little censorship of explicit sex and pornography is widely available, that nudity and the depiction of sex were an integral part of European art cinema in the fifties and sixties. The relaxation of sexual censorship in the midseventies was one of the major factors in the demise of a separate art cinema distribution circuit. TheCanterbury Tales is one of the last films to cross explicit sex with an explicit aesthetic vision.

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 She has written for Communications Daily, Discover Hollywood, Hollywood Today, Television International, and Video Age International, and contributed to countless other magazines and digests.Traditional montage is linear and consequential, linking differences to create a logic of continuity as its instrument for erasing the evidence of representing, the form of things, what in France is referred to as mise en scène, for the sake of the ‘reality’ of the representation. D.W. Griffith was the master of such editing, the father of the narrative cinema and of its industry, Hollywood. 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).

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 Pasolini ascribed this darkness of tone both to his own personal unhappiness while he was shooting the film and to Chaucer’s text itself. For Pasolini, Chaucer had a darker view of life because of the grayness of the Northern European climate, while sunlit Tuscany allowed Boccaccio his brighter outlook. Certainly, the gray and overcast skies of England are an essential part of the film. However, it must also be said that this is a much more faithful adaptation than its predecessor in Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life, and that the fusion between the past world of Boccaccio’s Florence and the contemporary shantytowns of Naples has no such powerful parallel here. 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.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. At the beginning of the tale, a friar attends the deathbed of a dying man from whom he asks a bequest to the Church. The man responds by bestowing the friar he says, with his most “precious” gift, a loud smelly fart in the face. In the next scene, a Summoner appears, played by a pretty young boy costumed as an angel and framed in a doorway as if from a painting. He transports the friar to the scene of The Last Judgement, itself a caricature. Its figures are painted in various colours, outlandish, garishly dressed as devils and acting like whores. Satan himself is painted an elaborate vulgar red. Out of his arse hole, like little turd balls (metaphors to the end, at the end—an arse hole), come noisy farts that accompany an explosion of miniature leaping devils flying through the air, as if liberated, a hellish, devilish fireworks. 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. 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. The Summoner begins his tale. He states "Everyone here knows how friars are such frequent visitors to Hell.