The Canterbury Tales (DVD)

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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. YouTube, a Google company. YouTube. Archived from the original on 22 October 2020 . Retrieved 17 January 2021.

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".

The form of the Chaucer is duplicated in Pasolini’s film where Pasolini ‘plays’ Chaucer, pretends, like Chaucer pretends, to speak and inhabit other voices and other characters. Pasolini’s film goes further since Pasolini assumes the role of Chaucer and the roles of the various pilgrims. In both cases, in language, in dress and in gesture, the works are masquerades, everything and everyone disguised, including the authors who are not what they pretend to be.

The Canterbury Tales ( Italian: I racconti di Canterbury) is a 1972 Italian film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini based on the medieval narrative poem by Geoffrey Chaucer. The second film in Pasolini's "Trilogy of Life", preceded by The Decameron and followed by Arabian Nights, it won the Golden Bear at the 22nd Berlin International Film Festival. [1] During his career amajor source of Pasolini’s notoriety was his open homosexuality, athen-rare position that he actually had little choice in establishing. In 1949, while living and teaching as aregional poet in northeast Italy, Pasolini was outed and promptly charged with corrupting aminor, resulting in the loss of both his teaching post and his membership in the Italian Communist Party. The subsequent scandal prompted Pasolini to flee to Rome and, in retrospect, may have inadvertently hastened his rise to prominence in Italian literature. Today Pasolini’s grisly and still unsolved murder, perhaps at the hands of ateenaged hustler, has permanently linked his homosexuality to his public profile.

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Pasolini ascribed this darkness of tone both to his own personal unhappiness while he was shooting the film and to Chaucer’s text itself. For Pasolini, Chaucer had a darker view of life because of the grayness of the Northern European climate, while sunlit Tuscany allowed Boccaccio his brighter outlook. Certainly, the gray and overcast skies of England are an essential part of the film. However, it must also be said that this is a much more faithful adaptation than its predecessor in Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life, and that the fusion between the past world of Boccaccio’s Florence and the contemporary shantytowns of Naples has no such powerful parallel here. 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