Medieval Film Club: Decameron

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Decameron (Italy, 1971; 112 minutes)

In 1971, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975) directed the first part of his Trilogy of Life. The other two films – I Racconti di Canterbury [The Canterbury Tales] (1972) and Il fiore delle mille e una notte [Arabian Nights] – had also been incursions into medieval territory, albeit, like the present one, filtered through the director’s own interests. He wanted to find ‘a world outside of all the commodifications of capitalism’, including ‘the bodily’. Pasolini grafted the marginal modern (Italian shantytowns and the ‘third world’) onto medieval texts, hoping to fashion an alternative to the present. This is reflected in his choice of tales and in the changes he made: no tale dealing with ‘kings and nobles’ is included in the film; Ciappelletto is now not an ‘uncultured degenerate’ but ‘a victim of the bourgeois class’s manipulation’.

Giovanni Boccaccio’s (1313–1375) Decameron (1351) includes a framing device, something which Pasolini completely abandons, placing the audience instead in ‘a fluid world’ in which one story runs into another. Nevertheless, the second part of the film presents a ‘set piece’. Pasolini himself plays a pupil of the painter Giotto (c.1267–1337) undertaking a commission at a monastery. The painting of the fresco becomes a commentary on the final stories. It has been argued that the technical challenges of the fresco and the team that the ‘pupil’ assembles produce a clear analogy with a movie set: the medievalism of the film is located at the level of form as well as content, owing to Pasolini’s identification with Giotto. Giotto painted before perspective was mathematised, and therefore ‘a’ perspective was always a matter of choice. Pasolini is attempting to use cinema, a ‘technology dominated by perspective’, to produce ‘a montage of different views and perspectives’. In other words, ‘the film we are watching is a fresco’. Ennio Morricone (b.1928) provided the soundtrack for the whole trilogy.

Part of the Medieval Film Club, for more information please visit the Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies website.

This screening is open to all and free to attend. No booking required.

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