The Canterbury Tales (DVD)

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She has written for Communications Daily, Discover Hollywood, Hollywood Today, Television International, and Video Age International, and contributed to countless other magazines and digests. 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

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. 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. PLUS: New essays by critic Colin MacCabe; Pasolini’s 1975 statement “Trilogy of Life Rejected”; excerpts from Pasolini’s Berlin Film Festival press conference for The Canterbury Tales; and a report from the set of Arabian Nights by critic Gideon Bachmann

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Wells Cathedral, Wells, Somerset - Absolon attends a dance here, and the Wife of Bath marries the young student in the Lady Chapel. Film locations for The Canterbury Tales (1972), in the UK". The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations . Retrieved 19 April 2023. 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. 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. One way of understanding the importance for Pasolini of the plurality of languages and reality and their differences and range is by the ubiquity of translations in his work whereby one thing is translated into another and in such a way that both survive, openly make-believe, a possession, a ventriloquism, an ‘act’, theatre (often of the absurd).

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. Some of the music was composed by Ennio Morricone on period accurate instruments. He said he did not enjoy working with bagpipes so the film was a bit challenging for him. [17] See also [ edit ] 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. Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire - Chaucer sets up his tale of Sir Thopas and the Host and other travellers ask him to stop (deleted scene). [12]

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Vicars' Close, Wells, Wells, Somerset - May's original home before marrying Sir January and the street where January inspects the behinds of young women. 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. Canby, Vincent (30 May 1980). "Film: 'Canterbury Tales': Chaucer a la Pasolini". The New York Times. New interviews with production designer Dante Ferretti, composer Ennio Morricone, and film scholar Sam Rohdie The Canterbury Tales is Pasolini’s second film in his Trilogy of Life—landing between The Decameron (1971) and Arabian Nights (1974)

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. St. John's College, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire - where Alan and John are scholars and their manciple falls ill.Coggeshall Grange Barn, Grange Hill, Coggeshall - The Tabard Inn, also the brothel in the Pardoner's Tale. All of Pasolini’s films and especially his later ones including, I racconti di Canterbury, are indebted to these traditions. One way of understanding his I racconti (and also, I think, provocatively, the Grand Guignol terror of his Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma [1975]) is as burlesque theatre. 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. Mount Etna, Sicily - Hell in the Summoner's Tale and also where the deleted Tale of Sir Topas was filmed.