Pasolini, Chaucer and Boccaccio:
Two Medieval Texts and their Translation to Film
From controversial filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Trilogy of Life has long been lambasted as an obscene distortion of three major Medieval and Ancient texts, The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and The Book of One Thousand and One Nights. However, in Pasolini, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Two Medieval Texts and their Translation to Film, Agnes Blandeau defends Pasolini and attempts to revive his films as an artistic interpretation as opposed to a strict adaptation of the beloved literary works. By focusing on the first two films in the trilogy, Il Decameron (1971) and I Racconti di Canterbury (1972), Blandeau hopes to provide a new understanding of the original texts through the “artistic filter” of Pasolini’s neorealist vision.
The book is split into two sections; the first is dedicated to expounding and explaining the films within the perspective of the trilogy, and the second, a defense of Pasolini’s work. Three appendices offer charts of the narrative structures to clarify the correlations between the films and the texts. Readers should not be misled at the outset about the subject matter of the book, for it has little to do with Chaucer and Boccaccio other than to use their works as a backdrop for Pasolini’s visualization. Both Pasolini and Blandeau seem to have a very patronizing perception of the culture of the Middle Ages. This belief in the “decadence” of the Middle Ages, combined with a cherry-picking of the texts, creates a perfect medium, not only for Pasolini’s irreverent films, but also for Blandeau’s defense of them. Since Pasolini was “not a medievalist with advanced knowledge of the text,” it would seem that this exploitation was unintentional; however Blandeau highlights Pasolini’s desire to show a “certain Middle Ages” by purposefully reverting to the most scatological and ribald of the Tales and Decameron and discarding all of the “noble” stories (as well as the frame stories).
To be fair, Blandeau does not attempt to equate the films with the original texts, but instead concentrates her examination on the aesthetics and semiotics of Pasolini’s work. Although viewed by many as pornographic when first released, Blandeau makes a case for the modality of the film genre in general and Pasolini’s vision in particular as being sufficient to change this perception to one of subversive intent. Blandeau hopes that through the “universal language of cinema,” The Canterbury Tales can be brought to a general audience as opposed to “a happy few specialists.” Inversely, the subjectivity of the cinema medium is more likely to alienate members of the audience who do not understand or who disagree with Pasolini’s artistic rendering of the texts. In fact, the general reception of Pasolini’s works was such that this revulsion was the more logical outcome, no matter what the intent of the director. Blandeau’s claim that critics have deliberately disregarded Pasolini’s intentions and that the “public and intellectuals interpreted the work in a biased, erroneous way” establishes the difficulty of gleaning this “alternate reading” from the films and the unreliability of semiotics to show intent.
The auteur theory which Blandeau propones, serves to justify the departure that Pasolini’s trilogy takes from the original texts. Even the order of the film credits (which are not atypical) are used to minimize the value attached to the texts but also signify the film as “a posteriori.” The films do provide an “alternate reading” of the medieval texts, however this reading is purely that of the auteur Pasolini, and, having previously viewed the films, one that certainly warrants explanation. Pasolini, Chaucer and Boccaccio sheds some much needed light on Pasolini’s “translation,” perhaps fulfilling the goal of renewing the films, if not the Tales themselves. Unfortunately, the book employs some very dense theoretical language and at times can be prolix to the point of confusion, further convoluting an already complicated philosophy.
Blandeau’s interpretations in Pasolini, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Two Medieval Texts and their Translation to Film will be of value to the fan or student of Pasolini or Italian neorealistic film, and certainly to one interested in modern interpretations of medieval culture. However, it is an extremely specialized study and should not be used as an entrée into the world of Chaucer and Boccaccio. Prior knowledge of film theory and semiotics is necessary for the appreciation of the book. Although Blandeau adequately proves her thesis, it is not one of much use for the average student of medieval history or literature.