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 For years, Milano sat on the board and tour coordinator of the Television Critics Association’s press tours. 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.

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. Chaucer and his tales are cited, rather than represented, which is equally the case in Pasolini’s films that cite myth: Edipo re (1967), Medea (1970), Porcile (1969), Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (1964), (which Pasolini noted was his film closest to Il Decameron [1970]). Il fiore delle mille e una notte (1974) set in a mythical Arabia is a series of mythical tales whose structure is similar to the other two films in the Trilogia di vita, and, as he himself said, to Il Vangelo. Scenes depicting all five of the Wife's husbands and the death of her most recent, much younger husband, with the line "May God save his soul from Hell. Now I await my sixth husband".The close up and the cutting out, the rejection of continuity by Pasolini, has a double yield or consequence.

The elderly merchant Sir January decides to marry May, a young woman who has little interest in him. 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, 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, 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 Persephone 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. 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. I racconti di Canterbury can be thought of as ethnogaphy and Pasolini as a social anthropologist recording the customs of a newly discovered outlandish people, obscure, unique, unknown, the Pasolini tribe. His film is crowded with persons, each different by social class, by appearance, gesture, speech, comportment and bizarre customs seldom ever seen before. And, though these ‘persons’ are ‘characters’, the reality of their person is never absorbed by the fictional roles that they play. The best of such ‘primitivism’ is its ritualised behaviour. It seems that all persons in the film are in disguise, in crazy costume, describing grotesque movements. It is disguise, however, that reveals what is beneath the mask.

Wells Cathedral, Wells, Somerset - Absolon attends a dance here, and the Wife of Bath marries the young student in the Lady Chapel. 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.

YouTube, a Google company. YouTube. Archived from the original on 22 October 2020 . Retrieved 17 January 2021. 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. 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.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. 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. Valerie works closely with the Human Rights Campaign as a distinguished Fed Club Council Member. She also works with GLSEN, GLAAD, Outfest, NCLR, LAMBDA Legal, and DAP Health, in addition to donating both time and finances to high-profile nonprofits. She has been a member of the Los Angeles Press Club for a couple of years and looks forward to the possibility of contributing to the future success of its endeavors. 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.

Mount Etna, Sicily - Hell in the Summoner's Tale and also where the deleted Tale of Sir Topas was filmed. In Rome, Pasolini found another Paradise among the sub-proletariat of the Roman slums. They became, as Friuli and Friulian had been, a social, poetic and linguistic model, but this time, it consisted of a different ‘other’, not the bucolic, but the reviled and the marginalised of the Roman slums: thieves, whores, pimps, slobs, cheats, criminals, those for whom work was, if not a curse to be avoided, a sign of belonging to a society they had rejected or had rejected them, a rejection romanticised by Pasolini as a purity of the refusal to conform, even thereby a sacredness. Pasolini and the Form of the City (1974), a documentary by Pasolini and Paolo Brunatto about the Italian cities Orte and Sabaudia Next is a 47-minute documentary from 2005 entitled Pasolini and the Secret Humiliation of Chaucer, which looks a little at the making of the film but eventually focuses on the many edits the film went through and all of the footage deleted (all now lost of course,) which included one entire sequence and then about 20 scenes from the other stories. It looks at the various cuts that were made before it finally premiered for the jury at the Berlin Film Festival, and then offers an edit of sorts for the removed sequence using photos and translations of the script. A little long yet not all that engaging when it looks at some of the production, it’s worth watching just for the material on the deleted sequences. 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.Roman and Friulian were, for Pasolini, ancient languages, a survival from the past. The Roman borgate was for Pasolini a Paradise, albeit shabby. More romantically still it was Paradise Lost, a remnant and, like its inhabitants, in rags, and like Roman and Friulian, threatened with extinction by modernisation. This set up a series of reversals for Pasolini whereby the ancient had more value than the modern and the despised was more sacred than the Sacred. All that society said was good, he rejected , and all it rejected Pasolini embraced.