The Canterbury Tales (DVD)

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Rolvenden Windmill, Kent - Mill and home of Simkin the Miller and his family, and is also the location of the festival where the wife of Bath gives a handjob to Jenkin.

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. Chaplin’s films are parodies that depend on doublings of similarities as oppositions. Parody is based on comparatives. In the persons of Davoli and in Totò, Pasolini found his Charlie, a Chaplin who is critical in his being and in his gestures and in all his comedies of society and its hypocrisies, an assault against a single-minded, unified, established world without difference. What is established, what conforms, the respectable for Chaplin (and Pasolini) is not quite human or livable in. The attraction of Chaplin is that he lives differently as if out of the world. The Middle English of Chaucer is notable for its use of dialectal forms. There is a profusion of characters and tales, languages, linguistic differences that accumulate and spiral. These differences encourage comparisons: between works, languages, societies, past and present, customs, class, Italy and Medieval England, the body and the spirit. Every Pasolini film is based on a literary text, like I racconti di Canterbury is based on The Canterbury Tales. The shift—translation is always a shift—from one language to another, one medium to another, one practice to another, is not for Pasolini adaptation where one term disappears to become an other term, but rather a comparison between elements simultaneously like and not like, that move ‘between’, where what is crucial is not one thing nor the other, but a relation, like the copresence of Friulian and Italian, Neapolitan and Middle English, Roman slang and literary Italian, street kids and Renaissance art.

The appearance of Chaucer's wife Philippa Roet in one of the interlude scenes is also anachronistic as she was already long dead by the time Chaucer began writing The Canterbury Tales. For years, Milano sat on the board and tour coordinator of the Television Critics Association’s press tours. A vendor witnesses a summoner who is spying on two different men committing sodomy. He catches both and turns them over to the authorities. While one man manages to escape persecution by bribing the authorities, the other is sentenced to burn on a "griddle". During his execution, the vendor walks through the crowd selling griddle cakes. Afterwards, the vendor meets the summoner, who is unaware he was being followed. The two vow to be friends but the vendor reveals himself to be the devil. The summoner does not care about this and says they will make great partners as they are both out for profit. The summoner then explains that he must collect money from a miserly old woman. When they meet the old woman, the summoner levies false charges against her and tells her that she must appear before the ecclesiastical court but says that if she pays him a bribe in the amount she owes, she will be excused. The old woman accuses him of lying, and curses him to be taken away by the devil if he does not repent. She says the devil can take him and the pitcher she owns which is her most valuable possession. The devil asks her if she truly means what she says and she assents. The summoner refuses to repent and the devil proceeds to take him (and the pitcher) to hell as they are now his by divine right.

Chaucer bumps into both the Cook and the Merchant, injuring his nose. He delivers the line "Between a jest and a joke, many a truth is told" twice. Via Pasolini (2005), a documentary featuring archival footage of Pasolini discussing his views on language, film, and modern society The final tale of the film is The Summoner’s Tale. A summoner is one who gives notice to others to appear in court, literally a summoner presents a “summons”, more generally, a summoner, takes or sends someone from one place to another, a transporting, in the case of this film, to Hell. This film also uses Pasolini regulars such as Ninetto Davoli and Franco Citti. Franco Citti plays the Devil in this film which follows a theme in The Trilogy of Life of Citti playing demonic and immoral characters (he plays Ser Ciappelletto in The Decameron and is an ifrit in Arabian Nights).Newlyn Town - Alison farts in Absolon's face, and is also used in the brothel scene in The Pardoner's Tale. Next is a 47-minute documentary from 2005 entitled Pasolini and the Secret Humiliation of Chaucer, which looks a little at the making of the film but eventually focuses on the many edits the film went through and all of the footage deleted (all now lost of course,) which included one entire sequence and then about 20 scenes from the other stories. It looks at the various cuts that were made before it finally premiered for the jury at the Berlin Film Festival, and then offers an edit of sorts for the removed sequence using photos and translations of the script. A little long yet not all that engaging when it looks at some of the production, it’s worth watching just for the material on the deleted sequences. The sub-proletariat Roman slang was uttered not simply by their tongues, but by their bodies and gestures, their being. If, from an established social perspective those of the Roman borgate might be thought of as degenerate or vile or worse, from Pasolini’s perspective they had the virtue of being genuine and that virtue, their rejection and refusal of what conformed to social norms, made the vile something positive to him, even noble. The scene of selection is not unlike the casting for a film (it is in fact a parody of casting) as in Fellini’s Intervista (1987). It is like throwing out a net, to catch the right, appropriate, desired, suitable, beautiful, edible fish. In movies, actors must be perfect, especially stars, especially female stars, and especially in the films of Hollywood. For Pasolini (and for the Marquis de Sade) the perfect is an opportunity not for celebration, but desecration, besmirching, the high brought low and violated. The Friar’s Tale (Second Tale): A vendor witnesses a summoner who is spying on two different men committing sodomy. He catches both and turns them over to the authorities. While one man manages to escape persecution by bribing the authorities, the other is sentenced to burn on a “griddle”. During his execution, the vendor (Franco Citti) walks through the crowd selling griddle cakes. Afterwards, the vendor meets the summoner, who is unaware he was being followed. The two vow to be friends but the vendor reveals himself to be the Devil. The summoner does not care about this and says they will make great partners as they are both out for profit. The summoner then explains that he must collect money from a miserly old woman. When they meet the old woman, the summoner levies false charges against her and tells her that she must appear before the ecclesiastical court but says that if she pays him a bribe in the amount she owes, she will be excused. The old woman accuses him of lying, and curses him to be taken away by the Devil if he does not repent. She says the Devil can take him and the pitcher she owns which is her most valuable possession. The devil asks her if she truly means what she says and she assents. The summoner refuses to repent and the Devil proceeds to take him (and the pitcher) to hell as they are now his by divine right. Pasolini with his lover, actor Ninetto Davoli