The Canterbury Tales (DVD)

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Almost certainly Chaucer’s poem in Middle English went through a series of transformations for the different language versions of the Pasolini film. Middle English was modernised into everyday English in turn translated into Italian. The Italian was then retranslated into Italian common speech and slang, much of it Neapolitan, while the English dubbed version, a long way now from Chaucerian Middle English, became colloquial English ‘modern’ speech and slang, that is ‘like’ Chaucerian English but not Chaucerian English. The similarity between the two linguistic versions and their differences are simultaneously present as the precondition for a comparison between languages and the historical and social differences and above all linguistic-poetic differences that unite and oppose them.

Fellini’s La Strada is a perfect example of such clowning, where the clash between Zampano and Il Matto ends in a terrible death, a prank gone wrong (the same is true in Il Bidone [195x]). The entire film, like other Fellini films, derives from the circus. 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. If someone were to ask "what happens" in this movie, the answer might sound like a put-on. We see Pasolini give interviews. We see him sketching storyboards, typing at a manual typewriter, and having dinner with his mother Susanna ( Adriana Asti) and his friend Laura Betti ( Maria de Medeiros), who played Emilia the servant in " Teorema" and would go on to direct a documentary about Pasolini's life, 2001's "Pier Paolo Pasolini e la ragione di un sogno." There are two scenes of Pasolini driving in his Alfa Romeo late at night, cruising for young men, and a scene in a restaurant where he dotes on a baby. The re-creation of Pasolini's death is one of the longest scenes, a kind of crucifixion, leaving Pasolini with no dignity, only agony and degradation. It's cinema as violation, as difficult to watch as the brutality in a Pasolini film, or for that matter, Dafoe's final moments in " The Last Temptation of Christ" and " Platoon" (he has died many martyr's deaths onscreen, all stunning).Pasolini" 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.

Soon after, in the early 1950s, Pasolini was forced to flee Friuli for Rome, once again with his beloved mother. He had been accused of sexually molesting young boys, and, he was, and perhaps even worse, a Communist, a double outrage, sexual and political. The flight from Casarsa for him was like an expulsion from the Garden of Eden, or so he imagined it to be. New interviews with production designer Dante Ferretti, composer Ennio Morricone, and film scholar Sam Rohdie The scene of selection is not unlike the casting for a film (it is in fact a parody of casting) as in Fellini’s Intervista (1987). It is like throwing out a net, to catch the right, appropriate, desired, suitable, beautiful, edible fish. In movies, actors must be perfect, especially stars, especially female stars, and especially in the films of Hollywood. For Pasolini (and for the Marquis de Sade) the perfect is an opportunity not for celebration, but desecration, besmirching, the high brought low and violated.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. Throughout Pasolini’s work, a work of extraordinary poetic force and passion, what is socially valued is decried and what is not valued, honoured. The poetic yield for Pasolini is in part its social outrage, turning what is acceptable into what is not because not natural and accepting the unacceptable because it is subversive, asserting an opposition, even if loathsome, to whatever is and whatever is established. The real crime for him is conformism. Pasolini’s work is a slap in the face to the normal and the expected, and like classic comedy, anarchic and disruptive. Pasolini is less the heir to Karl Marx (despite Pasolini’s politics and social indignation) than to Groucho, Chico and Harpo Marx, indignation and scandal enacted and made concrete, outrage as outrageous.