631-634 Trilogy of Life

[Tommaso]

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.

Funnily, that's exactly what happened with the German distribution title at the time, which was "Pasolini's tolldreiste Geschichten" (roughly: Pasolini's 'bold as brass'-tales). Of course German titles of Italian (s)exploitation films of that era usually made nonsense of the original title, and I guess they changed the title because they thought Pasolini was better known than the Canterbury Tales to a general audience (probably true), but in this case it really reflects the film. These are basically Pasolini's tales which take their plots from Chaucer, but after all they are almost exclusively about his own ideas, perhaps even more so than with the other two films of the trilogy.

[MichaelB]

An Italian rip-off from 1973 initially went under the title Le mille e una notte di Boccaccio a Canterbury, presumably until someone informed the producers that Canterbury wasn't the name of a person.

Which suggests that Chaucer's Canterbury Tales weren't anything like as famous in Italy as they were in Britain, where I can't imagine any producer making a mistake like that.

[Tommaso]

Lol. I also really like the later title of that rip-off film: "Novelle licenziose di vergini vogliose"...

[matrixschmatrix]

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.

Well, that's the problem with trying to force a pendulum to swing back, is that when you succeed you wind up with essentially the same problem. I suspect the situation was different in the early 70s, though.

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.

Well, I think the distinction between 'religion' and 'the Church' is harder to make in a society with a totally monolithic religion, though the Lollards obviously managed to do so anyway. There's a lot of discussion as to whether Chaucer fits amongst their ranks, but it seems silly to assume he was anything but a Christian- for all the fun he makes of individual members of the Church, his devotion to religion (and habit of weaving religious themes and metaphors in amongst his work) seem fairly clear.

The tricky thing, of course, is that everyone had to appear to be religious at time, lest they be, you know, burnt at the stake- Chaucer's England was undergoing a major inquisition brought about by the question of Lollardy and its rejection of transubstatantion doctrine (or more cyncially, its disinterest in the utter materialism of the Church as it then existed) and as I recall, both Henrys IV and V allowed the Church unprecedented political power in exchange for its continued support of their iffy-at-best claim to legitimacy. Which means that anything but a total apparent devotion would be physically dangerous as hell.

[Mr Sausage]

There is definitely a distinction between a general criticism of religion and a criticism of certain religious classes. There was in the middle ages a widespread received idea that monks and friars were exceptionally gluttonous and licentious, no doubt arising partially from the general fears that unconventional or strange lifestyles tend to provoke ("what do those nuns and monks get up to in their convents and monasteries?"). So there were a lot of folk tales and stories floating around involving horny monks trying to abscond with virgins, a lot of which were picked up and adapted by Boccaccio in his Decameron and later by Marguerite de Navarre in her Heptameron (if you love the former definitely read the latter). Amidst all the stories about cuckolded husbands are a lot of randy monk tales that are hilariously stereotyped and exaggerated. But this shouldn't be confused with a criticism of religion, because in many ways the prevailing sentiment is that these men are not truly religious but merely benefiting from the power that their social station within the church afforded. Not to mention that these stories reflected received ideas and false assumptions (often made by those who'd never met any monks), so that any criticisms that Boccaccio, Navarre, or even Chaucer evince are inherent to the type of story they are repurposing and therefore do not necessarily reflect their own opinions on the matter. Literature in the mediaeval period was a lot less personal than in later eras; the overall tendency was to take a subject, often one provided by a patron or a foreign book, and then do your own version. You cannot count on a personal connection to the subject. A poem in praise of a lady may have no lady in mind except those in prior poems that the poet is trying to overgo, proving that he is the best at the form (rather than the best in real-world love).

[matrixschmatrix]

I think there are places where the placement and contextualization of the Tales works as a critique or comment upon their actual content, though Chaucer's own viewpoint is always hard to distinguish from the worldview whatever character is speaking. It's defintely clear that the bawdy monks and irreproachable knights that Chaucer appropriated from other sources are meant to be viewed as stories being told and not as recieved truth, though- I'm never sure of how much credence to give the view that the tales were essentially a greatest hits compilation, but definitely it was expected that most of the audience would already be familiar with the meat of the story, and that Chaucer's own contributions were primarily in the wording, the context, and the fact that he was actually setting them down in the vernacular.

[zedz]

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.

Arabian Nights doesn't do this exactly, but it does take on the whole story-telling idea lustily, with a gleeful nesting of tales-within-tales where characters within one tale suddenly turn into narrators, and then characters within their tale also start digressing. I think at its most extreme we get five stories deep (when a character relates a dream they had, enacted by animals) before we start to resurface. So that film really does come to terms with the reasons why we tell stories, and has a lot of self-reflexive fun with the idea of deferral, which Pasolini mainfests in a completely different way from the original work with this nesting strategy: it's not sleep that interrupts the narrative, it's another damn narrative!

[Mr Sausage]

The Thousand and One Nights actually does have multiple stories within stories, sometimes going four or five layers deep, so Pasolini is being faithful in that regard. I think the most famous instance is Sindbad the Sailor, whose story involves him telling someone else about his adventures. This aspect of the book was the inspiration for the second half of John Barth's career (especially his The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, which is an endless spiral of nested stories).

[colinr0380]

While we are on The Canterbury Tales, I would be interested in how people with a better knowledge of these things that I have rate that S4C/BBC/Russian animated series of them. There are a couple of clips on YouTube of The Pardoner's Tale and The Wife of Bath, and there is a segment of The Miller's Tale here. I like the way that a different animation style is used for the various tales, as shown here. I also seem to remember that this was produced in a Middle English version as well, although this introduction to the series suggests that there was quite a lot of compression of the material down into the three episodes.

[Roger Ryan]

...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...

Since the comparison has been noted a couple of times, I'll point out that Terry Gilliam has been quoted as saying that the look (if not some of the content) of HOLY GRAIL was directly inspired by Pasolini's treatment of the Middle Ages.

[MichaelB]

And of course the Pythons are on record as being Pasolini fans - or at the very least acquainted with his work.

[domino harvey]

Their Ken Russell parody is even better

[MichaelB]

Though their Sam Peckinpah tribute is the most famous/notorious.

Right, back to Pasolini...

[Sloper]

While we are on The Canterbury Tales, I would be interested in how people with a better knowledge of these things that I have rate that S4C/BBC/Russian animated series of them. There are a couple of clips on YouTube of The Pardoner's Tale and The Wife of Bath, and there is a segment of The Miller's Tale here. I like the way that a different animation style is used for the various tales, as shown here. I also seem to remember that this was produced in a Middle English version as well, although this introduction to the series suggests that there was quite a lot of compression of the material down into the three episodes.

I liked it - much like 'The Animated Shakespeare' before it, the series did a great job of compressing the original texts for a young audience, while retaining enough colour and detail to actually give an impression of what those original texts are like. And yes, the different animation styles were a nice touch. Great idea to intercut the Miller's and Reeve's tales; not Chaucer's idea, but it gets Chaucer's point across effectively and economically. (Which is a very dry way of saying that it's funny.)

I'm glad to hear that you remember the Middle English version, because I vaguely remember that too - I'm sure I saw a bit of this when it first came on, long before I actually read any Chaucer. Sadly my DVD only has the one audio track, in modern English; I thought I must be mis-remembering the original broadcast, as it seems bizarre that they wouldn't release that version having gone to the trouble of making it... The disc must be out of print now, because it's going for £80 second-hand on Amazon.

Anyway, even better than those animated films was the stage version of The Canterbury Tales I saw in Stratford in 2006. Adapted by Mike Poulton and directed by Gregory Doran, it covered most of the tales in two three-and-a-half-hour shows, both of which I saw in one day. The second half flagged a little (mainly because it featured the slightly less talented cast members), but overall the show was a spectacular success. The hybrid Middle/Modern English used was perfectly judged so that every word was comprehensible, but there was still an authentic medieval flavour to the whole thing. Mark Hadfield was wonderful as Chaucer, weaving in and out of the pilgrims on stage and introducing the audience to them, the staging was consistently inventive, and it was genuinely funny, touching and scary in all the right places. Even the (completely un-ironic, I thought) ultra-religious ending was stirring, and the audience when I saw it seemed to love every minute. It almost felt like Chaucer was better suited to the stage than Shakespeare!

[ellipsis7]

Pasolini gets to have his own say on ARABIAN NIGHTS in an addition to the specs...

Introduction to Arabian Nights by director Pier Paolo Pasolini

[Revelator]

I'd like to pick the brains of my fellow board members.
I plan on buying this set, but before watching each film I'm going to read the literary works they were based on. With that in mind, is anyone able to list the specific stories adapted by Pasolini? I tried searching online but had no luck. The Arabian Nights and the Decameron are long books, and while I plan on reading all of the stories in them, knowing which ones Pasolini used will be convenient for after-viewing comparisons. As for Canterbury Tales, I plan on getting the Norton edition, which has modernized spelling but doesn't include every tale, and I'd like to make sure it has all the tales Pasolini adapted. Thanks in advance to anyone who can help!

[matrixschmatrix]

I would get a side-by-side translation of the Chaucer if I could, the original language is incredibly beautiful in a way that's more or less legible to a modern English reader.

[Matt]

I agree. This is the Canterbury Tales you want. It has the original text on one page and a decent modernization on the facing page. And it's cheap.

Can't help you with your actual question, though.

[matrixschmatrix]

Though if you or anyone else ever feels like splurging, this is the one to get- it's side-by-side, a gorgeous copy, it's got the complete known works of Chaucer, and all the scholarly notation, afterwards, definitions, and other things that help you get lost in the text.

[Revelator]

Still looking for the names of the stories he adapted from The Arabian Nights

I can now answer my own question, thanks to the discovery of a very helpful article in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram (http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/News/4841/23 ... ights.aspx). According to its author, David Tresilian, Pasolini used nights 308 to 327 as his framing tale, with interpolations from nights 381-3,
385-6, and 112-28.

[matrixschmatrix]

Thanks--it looks like the paperback edition is much cheaper, for those looking to invest.

It is, but it also doesn't last too long- I took a Chaucer class, and the professor specifically recommended the hardcover as it was his experience that the paperback ones fell apart about halfway into the semester. Though that might entail more and harder wear than most people put on a book.

[Mr Sausage]

This is a good (and less expensive) critical edition of the full Canterbury Tales, if you want to make sure you read every tale Pasolini used and aren't sure about the Norton.

Also, just so you know how long it'll be before you'll be able to actually get to the films, the complete 1001 Nights (at least in Penguin's recent three volume complete translation) is about 2700 pages. Both The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales are around 800 pages each. You've got a lot of reading ahead of you.

Anyway, this lists some of the ten stories Pasolini used in The Decameron.

Canterbury Tales uses at least: Cook's Tale, the Friar's Tale, the Miller's Tale, the Summoner's Tale, the Wife of Bath's Tale, and the Merchant's Tale.

Don't know about Arabian Nights.

[Zaki]

Pasolini's Arabian Nights is based on the story of 'Ali Shar and Zumurrud. It also makes use of some other famous tales such as 'Aziz and 'Aziza and The Porter and the Three Ladies (these are the ones coming to my mind at the moment). In addition, he uses references and motifs from many other tales in a way that reflects pretty well the spirit of the Nights . He also creates a tale within a tale rearrangement of the stories which is one of the main characteristics of the collection.

I believe that some familiarity with the literary work increases significantly one's understanding of the film and appreciation for the director's achievement. Malcolm Lyons's relatively new translation in three volumes (Penguin Classics) of the Calcutta II Arabic edition is a good one, and I would recommend reading at least the frame story of the Nights and the tales mentioned above.

For those interested in a good introductory work on the Nights, I would recommend Robert Irwin's The Arabian Nights: A Companion (2nd ed., 2004).

[Revelator]

Thanks to Mr. Sausage and to Zaki for the extremely helpful information. I've finished the first volume of the Lyon translation of Arabian Nights and am a quarter through the second. After finishing all the volumes, Canterbury and the Decameron should be a doddle. However, I am slightly worried, since legend says that whoever reads all one thousand and one Nights will die shortly afterward...
But should I survive, I will have read three of the greatest classics of world literature and watched three classic films. I figure that's worth risking death for!

[knives]

I believe that some familiarity with the literary work increases significantly one's understanding of the film and appreciation for the director's achievement. Malcolm Lyons's relatively new translation in three volumes (Penguin Classics) of the Calcutta II Arabic edition is a good one, and I would recommend reading at least the frame story of the Nights and the tales mentioned above.

It's probably really good to emphasize this. Just from personal experience I found Decameron less easy to get into than the other two and that's the only one I haven't read anything from (something I should change someday). He does play with the works, what is expected of them, and what is actually there in a pretty interesting way.