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

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. This movie is second of Pasolini's so called 'Trilogy of Love' (Il Decameron, I Racconti di Canterbury, Il fiore di mille e una notte; 1970-1974). All these movies are quite specific, there are said not to be that provocative or intriguing. They are greatly influenced by the fact that while directing them Pasolini was contented because of his intimate relationship with the 'innocent barbarian', actor Ninetto Davoli. It is also said that in 'Trilogy of Love' Pasolini became resigned to the present time world by escaping to the past. The actors in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Canterbury Tales ( I racconti di Canterbury [1970]) are English and Italian. The film has an English and an Italian version, both dubbed. The speech of the characters in the two versions is ‘popular’, the speech of ordinary people. The ‘school’ of film attended by Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and others was the front row of the French Cinémathèque whose director and Nouvelle Vague hero was Henri Langlois, who had not only introduced them to the world of cinema, but sustained it and nurtured it. The Cahiers du cinéma was devoted to American ‘auteurs’, whom the journal interviewed, promoted and whose interviews it published over the years from the late 1950s. American films and filmmakers were central to the politique des auteurs of Cahiers du cinéma, its enthusiasm for the cinema and its idea of the cinema, that included a rejection of a literary, uncinematic French cinema, what it called, “a cinema of quality”. The importance of the American cinema was not only crucial to the French cinema, also to European film culture of the period and to film modernism. 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.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 ] 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] The film credits role 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. 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 delivers long-winded monologues to disinterested listeners about her weaving skills and sexual prowess. The Pardoner unsuccessfully attempts to sell what he claims are pieces of cloth from the sail of St. Peter's boat and the Virgin's veil. Some other travelers enter 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. 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. Pasolini learned his Roman with the help of Federico Fellini and which Pasolini adopted as he had learned and adopted Friulian. Roman dialect is present in Fellini’s 1957 film Le notti di Cabiria on which Pasolini was involved.

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). The film was shot in England, and all the dialogue was filmed in English, which Pasolini considered the primary language of the film. [6] No live sound was recorded, and so English and Italian dialogue were both dubbed over the film afterwards. For written scenes in the film, both Italian and English language shots were filmed. In the Italian version, the dubbing is done by actors from Lombardy. Pasolini made this choice because in Italy, the Lombard accent is considered prim and sophisticated making it a suitable stand-in for English accents. [7] Pasolini chose actors from the outskirts on the edge of Bergamo because he considered the pure Lombard accent tainted by writers such as Giovanni Testori. Most of the voice actors were illiterate so Pasolini would have to actually tell them what to say. [8] Neither version uses the original Chaucerian English. For this movie's script, Pasolini used a modern colloquial English adaptation of the original Middle English which was then translated into Italian. [9] This has been described by film commentator Sam Rohdie as "like Chaucerian English but not Chaucerian English". 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 ‘other’, Friuli and Friulian, was for Pasolini an idealised peasant society, mythical even, pure, innocent, as yet uncorrupted by modernity, belonging to the past but doomed by the modern to disappear. To adopt its language, its accents, was to identify with an ideal and its threatened loss.The subject is, of course, Pier Paolo Pasolini, the director of "The Gospel According to Matthew," "Teorama," "The Canterbury Tales," "Arabian Nights," and other art house classics. Pasolini, played by Willem Dafoe, was a public intellectual and artist, of a type that was more common in the mid-20th century than today. He was a novelist, an essayist and a philosopher as well as a writer and director of feature films. The Cook’s Tale in I racconti with Ninetto Davoli is filled by Chaplin’s presence. Chaplin is everywhere cited in the film: in the gag of the eggs, the slide into the river (twice), the soup kitchen scene, the dance sequence (as in Uccelllacci uccellini [1966]), the chase, the policemen like Keystone cops, and by the clothes Davoli wears (the hat, the cane, the trousers a bit dishevelled come from Chaplin’s wardrobe), and the doubling it contains of elegance and tattiness, respectability shredded, yet ridiculously, pathetically maintained. In the end, life in America for Chaplin became untenable. He was, for the Americans, dangerous, a subversive, a scandal in their midst, like Pasolini, better elsewhere. Film locations for The Canterbury Tales (1972), in the UK". The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations . Retrieved 19 April 2023.

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. 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. The linguistic shifts between languages made one language the likeness of another without each losing their otherness. Thus, modern colloquial English speech in the Pasolini film functions as a comparative to 14 th century Middle English, at once different and an equivalence. The same is true with the Italian in its relation to the English. In either case the linguistic analogies refer to an earlier time, to Renaissance England or to Italy before, according to Pasolini, language in Italy had been homogenised first under Fascism and then with post-war consumerism into a bureaucratic unified Italian from the late 1920s.The Friar’s Tale (Second Tale): A vendor witnesses a summoner who is spying on two different men committing sodomy. He catches both and turns them over to the authorities. While one man manages to escape persecution by bribing the authorities, the other is sentenced to burn on a “griddle”. During his execution, the vendor (Franco Citti) walks through the crowd selling griddle cakes. Afterwards, the vendor meets the summoner, who is unaware he was being followed. The two vow to be friends but the vendor reveals himself to be the Devil. The summoner does not care about this and says they will make great partners as they are both out for profit. The summoner then explains that he must collect money from a miserly old woman. When they meet the old woman, the summoner levies false charges against her and tells her that she must appear before the ecclesiastical court but says that if she pays him a bribe in the amount she owes, she will be excused. The old woman accuses him of lying, and curses him to be taken away by the Devil if he does not repent. She says the Devil can take him and the pitcher she owns which is her most valuable possession. The devil asks her if she truly means what she says and she assents. The summoner refuses to repent and the Devil proceeds to take him (and the pitcher) to hell as they are now his by divine right. Pasolini with his lover, actor Ninetto Davoli

The Merchant’s Tale (First Tale): The elderly merchant Sir January (Hugh Griffith) decides to marry May (Josephine Chaplin), a young woman who has little interest in him. Atypical of a Pasolini film, he chose some of the finest British actors such as Hugh Griffith and Josephine Chaplin. This has probably the most famous cast of a Pasolini film. After they are married, the merchant suddenly becomes blind, and insists on constantly holding on to his wife’ wrist as consolation for the fact that he cannot see her. Meanwhile, Damian (Oscar Fochetti), a young man whom May has interest in decides to take advantage of the situation. May has a key to January’s personal garden made. While the two are walking in the private garden, May asks to eat mulberries from one of the trees. Taking advantage of her husband’s blindness, she meets with Damian inside of the tree, but is thwarted when the god Pluto (Giuseppe Arrigio), who has been watching over the couple in the garden, suddenly restores January’s sight. January briefly sees May and her lover together and is furious. Fortunately for May, the goddess Persepone (Elisabetta Genovese), who also happens to be in the same garden fills her head with decent excuses to calm her husband’s wrath. May convinces January that he has hallucinated and the two walk off together merrily. Perkin (Ninetto Davoli) in bed with a prostitute and her client Pasolini’s The Canterbury Tales/I racconti de Canterbury is a pastiche of elements from Renaissance and Mannerist paintings, fourteenth century literature, dialect, languages, popular and classical music, some of it Italian, some English, some German, but not of films. The film is a film, but the cinema has no cinematic reference, no presence. The other yield that relates to the cutting out of images, is when images become like figures of speech, pure form, pure utterance, an object without continuity, without a narrative, only itself, elements that can be rhymed, associated, made into metaphors, made objects of adoration, figures of language, the material for making poetry. Vicars' Close, Wells, Wells, Somerset - May's original home before marrying Sir January and the street where January inspects the behinds of young women.The images of paintings Pasolini cites are citations of their forms. They are shot frontally, in close up, in counter point to other images, like rhymes, close-up to close-up, movement in one direction to movement in reverse, shots and sequences organised symmetrically. The shot isolates the image, each shot a register not so much of a reality than of an ideal reality cut out and marked, consecrated, at once sacred and mythical as in an altar piece … or a fetish. Salò is perhaps Pasolini’s most evident filmed fetishism, though the image as fetish and myth is the dominant feature even of his earliest films.