173 - The Decameron, 1971, Italy. Dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Thursday, June 22, 2017

173 - The Decameron, 1971, Italy.  Dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Every frame a Giotto.

Can a film be a fresco?

The Decameron is an Italian Renaissance collection of stories similar to The Canterbury Tales in England.

And like The Canterbury Tales, it draws from the traditions of Dante's Comedia (The Divine Comedy), Petrarch, Ovid, and Virgil.

The Decameron was written some time around A.D. 1350, while The Canterbury Tales were written in the A.D. 1390s.

The Decameron contains a frame tale, a story that frames all the other stories and into which they fit. In The Canterbury Tales, it is a group of pilgrims going on a pilgrimage.  In The Decameron, it is a group of ten people (three men and seven women) going on a trip to flee the plague of the Black Death.

They agree each to tell a story a day for ten days.  Thus, The Decameron is a collection of one hundred stories.

Pier Paolo Pasolini removed Boccaccio's frame tale, added two others, and filmed about nine of the stories.  He used one of the stories to create the frame tale of the first half of the movie, and he created a new frame tale--Giotto's best student, played by Pasolini himself--to frame the second half of the movie.

Pasolini was a good fit as a filmmaker to direct this material.  He was a painter, poet, playwright, novelist, and actor as well as a director.  He had things to say about his view of class structure

And he seemed to be trying to showcase a kind of innocence about this period.  One that he fought to be able to show, but which he felt so quickly shifted into something else and about which he was disillusioned.

Like the time period portrayed, his film is bawdy, earthy, and celebratory.  But following his own contemporary belief system, it highlights disparities in human behavior.  Human behavior based on social and financial status rather than mere humanity.

As well as human behavior driven by carnal desires.