Vicars' Close, Wells, Wells, Somerset - May's original home before marrying Sir January and the street where January inspects the behinds of young women. 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.

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 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.Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ability to simultaneously embrace conflicting philosophies—he was both a Catholic and a Marxist; a modern-minded, openly gay man who looked to the distant past for inspiration and comfort; a staunch leftist who at one point in the late sixties infamously spoke out against left-wing student protests (sympathizing instead with the working-class police)—was matched by the multifariousness of his professional life, as a filmmaker, poet, journalist, novelist, playwright, painter, actor, and all-around intellectual public figure. What he is best known for, however, is undoubtedly his subversive body of film work. He was a student of the written word, and among his earliest movie jobs was writing additional dialogue for Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957). Soon he was directing his first film, Accattone (1961), a tale of street crime whose style and content greatly influenced the debut feature of his friend Bernardo Bertolucci, La commare secca (1962), for which Pasolini also supplied the original story. The outspoken and always political Pasolini’s films became increasingly scandalous—even, to some minds, blasphemous—from the gritty reimagining of the Christ story The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) to the bawdy medieval tales in his Trilogy of Life (1971–1974). Tragically, Pasolini was found brutally murdered weeks before the release of his final work, the grotesque, Marquis de Sade–derived Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), still one of the world’s most controversial films. Not only is there an abundance, an overflow, a teeming of person-actors in the Pasolini film, but the differences between them have less to do (indeed have little to do) with their acting, yet everything to do (or nearly so) with their persons. It is bodies that principally ‘act’ in I racconti. The actions privileged by Pasolini are ‘natural’, in the sense that rather than being dictated by social conventions, social control, they violate conventions, are out of control, not exactly improvisations, but a spontaneity: farting, burping, side-splitting laughter, smiling, sneering, sleeping, dreaming, being silent, erections, gesticulating, dancing, nudity, fighting, mutilation, pissing, shiting, massacring (the ‘sacred’ Il Vangelo secondo Matteo of “the massacre of the innocents” from the Gospels is eerily similar to the torture and slaughter of young people at the close of Salò), the one scene, the one film mirrored in the other. At the same time, however, there's no denying the singular spell that "Pasolini" weaves, by virtue of its stubborn determination to follow its own muse. The film was completed and premiered in 2014 and released to home video, but for various reasons hasn't been given a theatrical release until now. It feels like a movie that would have been a big deal 25 years ago but must be content to be a curiosity now. Ferrara is a director proudly out of step with the times. He always was—Ferrara was a grotty, impassioned '70s moviemaker at heart who found his groove in the early '90s—but it's even more true today. He's a onetime drug addict turned Buddhist, legendarily difficult, volatile, and wild. He's burned more bridges than General William Tecumseh Sherman. He doesn't make television, tentpole films, or "content." Even his work-for-hire (like " Body Snatchers" and the pilot of the old NBC series "Crime Story") are inscribed with his distinctive signature, which is more like spray-painted graffiti than calligraphy. He makes self-contained, down-and-dirty yet intellectualized and philosophical, sometimes expressionistic, often short features, in a 20th century mode, in the spirit of some of the Italian auteurs he grew up admiring. Mount Etna, Sicily - Hell in the Summoner's Tale and also where the deleted Tale of Sir Topas was filmed.

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. 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. 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

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.

The origin of such behaviour is the medieval Carnevale, where everything is reversed, turned upside down. It is Rabelais and later would become de Sade. Canby, Vincent (30 May 1980). "Film: 'Canterbury Tales': Chaucer a la Pasolini". The New York Times.

Chaucer reads a funny story from The Decameron. His wife scolds him for wasting time so he sits down to write his own story. This is the Miller's Tale. [1] The Tales are as diverse as the characters who recount them. The two crucial voices are that of the one who frames (Chaucer) and those who are framed (the pilgrims), a single voice governing multiple ones. Some voices are in verse, others in prose. The collection of tales is a collection then of differences held together in a unity of time, place and intention by the fiction of a pilgrimage.

The lengthier documentary did little for me, though I appreciated the look into the deleted material from the film, but the remaining features, if not very deep, were all informative and worth viewing. Closing 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 appearance of Chaucer's wife Philippa Roet in one of the interlude scenes is also anachronistic as she was already long dead by the time Chaucer began writing The Canterbury Tales.I racconti di Canterbury begins somewhat differently, most of the characters, are of the ‘people’ have bad teeth, poor complexions (blotchy, pimpled), are obese or scrawny, often ugly, decrepit, drooling, disgusting, dopey, lecherous, like the old man in The Merchant’s Tale (and like the libertines in Salò), have unpleasant grating voices. There are some few characters, however, such as the young bride whom the Merchant marries in a scene that mirrors the marriage scene in Salò, or who are perfect as in The Cook’s Tale: pretty young girls, heads covered like nuns, but otherwise completely naked, their bodies moving to music, seductive and charming, who sing and dance at a wedding celebration, joined by Ninetto Davoli. He imitates the movements of the young girls, parodies them and in so doing ‘brings out’ their movements, parody and outrage as instruments of emphasis, of highlights. She has written for Communications Daily, Discover Hollywood, Hollywood Today, Television International, and Video Age International, and contributed to countless other magazines and digests.