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Although all of the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini have been controversial in one way or another - either aesthetically, politically, or morally - his adaptation of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales has had a particularly troubled history. Initially shown at the 1972 Berlin Film Festival, it won first prize but was roundly jeered by the first night audience;1 when it opened for a commercial engagement in London, it was savagely attacked by the film reviewers who criticized its unevenness, its amateurish editing and acting, and its obsession with sexual intercourse, scatology. and male genitalia.2 To a large extent, such criticisms are valid; the film is for the casual film-goer a confusing assemblage of extracts from Chaucer's bawdy tales often clumsily linked together; for the film-goer steeped in Chaucer, the adaptation is often equally confused and confusing, and, more importantly, in its emphasis on the bawdy tales, a serious distortion of the complexity and grandeur of Chaucer's conception.
The film is not without redeeming qualities, however. Pasolini has always shown a talent for striking and original visualizations and his Canterbury Tales is memorable for several highly successful sequences and individual shots. Most notably, one comes away from the film remembering the translation of Chaucer's lengthy prologue into an economic succession of dynamic images; the presentation of the Wife of Bath's meeting her fifth husband at a spring festival, a presentation that brings out the pagan vitality underlying medieval Christian culture and folkways; the treatment of the fragmentary Cook's Tale as Chaplinesque comedy; and the sombre visualization of the Friar's Tale that lends to one of Chaucer's lesser-read tales a new depth and complexity. Among individual shots, one remembers the image of the two clerks of the Reeve's Tale dressed in red, riding double on a white horse across a green landscape; the stark image of the death of the three riotous young men in the Pardoner's Tale; and the imagery of the Bosch-like hell in the Summoner's Tale.
Of more interest to the student of film in general and of Pasolini's work in particular. The Canterbury Tales is an interesting example of the dialectical relationship that can exist between a film adaptation of a literary work and its source. Given the idiosyncratic and individualistic nature of Pasolini's...