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The Canterbury Tales (DVD)

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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".

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 With the "Trilogy of Life", Pasolini sought to adapt vibrant, erotic tales from classical literature. With The Decameron, Pasolini adapted an important work from the early era of the Italian language. With The Canterbury Tales he set his sights to the earthy Middle English tales of Chaucer. Behind the scenes, Pasolini broke up with Ninetto Davoli and said in retrospect, he was not in the right frame of mind for this kind of silly, lighthearted trilogy, yet it remains one of his most important films. 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). 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.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. Film locations for The Canterbury Tales (1972), in the UK". The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations . Retrieved 19 April 2023.

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. I racconti di Canterbury can be thought of as ethnogaphy and Pasolini as a social anthropologist recording the customs of a newly discovered outlandish people, obscure, unique, unknown, the Pasolini tribe. His film is crowded with persons, each different by social class, by appearance, gesture, speech, comportment and bizarre customs seldom ever seen before. And, though these ‘persons’ are ‘characters’, the reality of their person is never absorbed by the fictional roles that they play. The best of such ‘primitivism’ is its ritualised behaviour. It seems that all persons in the film are in disguise, in crazy costume, describing grotesque movements. It is disguise, however, that reveals what is beneath the mask. Pasolini’s stress on language in its variety and multiplicity and that included the particularity and uniqueness of poetry, plays upon incomprehensibility, even the opaque, what is alien, restricted, marginal, antique, nonsensical, sometimes scandalous, obscene and outrageous, in any case, what is incomplete and unresolved and traditionally unacceptable. Its purity and presence as language, for Pasolini, rather than as representation, is a process rather than a finality. It calls language itself into question: “What is this for? “What does it mean?” “What is going on?”, “Where is it leading to?”, without providing answers. It resists a resolution or harmony or agreement that might efface representing and language by becoming invisible and instrumentalised with only the represented, one-sided, intact, present and irrefutable. 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-minutesRolvenden 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. Traditional films have tended to hide the film behind an illusion that what is represented is real. For the illusion to be convincing, a series of dramatic and stylistic mechanisms are set in motion to eliminate anything other than the fiction, as if there is no contrary to it, no other reality, but itself. The essential relation is between what is represented—the subject, the ‘content’—and the representing of it—‘form’, languages.

Wells Cathedral, Wells, Somerset - Absolon attends a dance here, and the Wife of Bath marries the young student in the Lady Chapel. She has written for Communications Daily, Discover Hollywood, Hollywood Today, Television International, and Video Age International, and contributed to countless other magazines and digests.

But he was just as well known for the way he lived his life, and the way he articulated his views about Italian, Western, and global society—of the whole civilization, really. He was a Communist, an atheist, and a sharp critic of authoritarian government, capitalism, and the intersection of the two. He also lived a relatively open life as a gay man, which was rare for that time and place. He died at 53 in 1975, when he was beaten to death and run over on a beach, in a gay-bashing incident that some believe was also a targeted political killing. At the time of his murder, he had just completed his most notorious feature, "Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom," based on the Marquis de Sade's book. 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. 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. John Webb's Windmill, Thaxted, Essex - home of the elderly widow in the Friar's Tale where the devil takes the summoner and the pitcher down to Hell with him. Recommend but not in the top 10 of 1972—closer to the edge of the archives. Teorema is far better, as is something like Life of Brian from the Monty Python crew

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