The Canterbury Tales (DVD)

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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 ]

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. 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 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.

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. The close up and the cutting out, the rejection of continuity by Pasolini, has a double yield or consequence.

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. The Canterbury Tales, the second feature in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life, is presented in its original aspect ratio of about 1.85:1 on the second dual-layer disc of Criterion’s new box set for the trilogy. The film is presented in a new 1080p/24hz high-definition digital transfer. Mount Etna, Sicily - Hell in the Summoner's Tale and also where the deleted Tale of Sir Topas was filmed.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. St. John's College, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire - where Alan and John are scholars and their manciple falls ill. In Pasolini’s first film, Accattone (1961, the title character is a pimp, a sneak, who betrays his friends and exploits his women. He does no work. The shots of him in the film, frontal as they are in I racconti is a framing derived from the Italian paintings of the Renaissance. In this case, Accattone, the sordid, is likened in images after paintings, to be saintly, and when he is at his worst, made sacred and revered. The mix and contrast of identities and of costume, rags and riches, duplicates the images of Charlie, dignity in rags, and also his character, a deceitful (and comic) honesty, mean and sentimental. Accattone as Chaplin? 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). Wells Cathedral, Wells, Somerset - Absolon attends a dance here, and the Wife of Bath marries the young student in the Lady Chapel.