Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Pier Paolo Pasolini's Il Decameron/The Decameron

2023; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 64; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/frm.2023.a914990

1559-7989

Trevor A. Graham,

Italian Literature and Culture

Pier Paolo Pasolini's Il Decameron/The Decameron Trevor Graham (bio) "Why create a work of art, when dreaming about it is so much sweeter?" —Giotto's pupil (played by Pier Paolo Pasolini), The Decameron Pasolini—poet, novelist, painter, playwright, polemicist, linguist, critic, Marxist, journalist, actor, activist, scriptwriter (he collaborated on Federico Fellini's film Le notti di Cabiria/ Nights of Cabiria [IT, FR, 1957] and on the screenplays for several other directors), and homosexual—was one of the twentieth century's great auteur film directors. He is widely considered the most important artist and intellectual in Italy after World War II. Allora (so), this Queer (I am going to use this contemporary word that includes homosexuality—perhaps Pasolini, if he were alive today, would embrace it, too?) and controversial artist is well-placed to question and reflect upon the struggles of the human condition and the creative processes involved in bringing a work of art, in whatever form, to life. Fittingly, Pasolini cast himself in a prominent role in The Decameron (IT/ FR/FRG, 1971) as an artist, the pupil of the pre-Renaissance Florentine painter Giotto di Bondone (1267–1337). While painting a commissioned fresco in the Basilica of Santa Chiara, Pasolini's face, as the artist, intensely fills the cinema frame.1 He gazes at passersby in the local medieval marketplace and draws visual inspiration by observing faces, people, and tableaux from "real life" for his fresco. In a later sequence, the artist wakes from a dream, having had a "perfect" vision of heaven and hell, which informs his painting's compositions. The [End Page 84] painter, with the aid of his troupe of handsome, young male assistants, completes the fresco. To celebrate, they drink a jug of wine. But the completion of the work unnerves the artist: "But I wonder," he says, "why create a work of art, when dreaming about it is so much sweeter?" Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Italian film poster. Before directing his first feature film in 1961, Pasolini was already a significant and well-known intellectual, writer, poet, and essayist. He had published two significant and acclaimed novels—Ragazzi di vita/ The Ragazzi (1955), literally "Boys of Life" or "Street Kids," and Una vita violenta/A Violent Life [End Page 85] (1959). Both depict Italian urban fringe life (Rome's subproletariat of the borgata) in all its beauty and harshness in the postwar era, as he does in his first two films, Accattone (IT, 1961) and Mamma Roma (IT, 1962), in which he depicts his characters struggling in the midst of booming industrialization, commercialization, and modernism. His first films draw on the Italian neorealist film tradition of Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, and other postwar directors who portrayed working-class life, directing largely non-professional actors. Pasolini's early works, however, merely borrow from Italian neorealism: he made the gritty genre his own, rejecting the cinematic language of neorealism and classical narrative cinema (which he called "the language of prose") and arguing for a film style that is "fundamentally a language of poetry."2 I first discovered the world of Pasolini in a rush, in my late teens. His black-and-white poetic images, along with his loveable rogue characters, appealed enormously to my own sensibility and aspirations as a budding black-and-white, "grainy," street photographer. But since then, I have employed a different term to describe my appreciation and understanding of Pasolini's cinema: "the poetry of the human face." His use of non-actors and the everyday human visage created a well of authenticity in his films. Broken teeth are abundant. Bent noses, large moles, deeply wrinkled brows, and crooked smiles all lend themselves to the realism of the world he creates and the characters he depicts. This is most evident, in my view, in perhaps his masterful cinematic achievement, Il vangelo secondo Matteo/The Gospel According to Matthew (IT, 1964), where Christ is played by a 19-year-old Catalan non-actor, Enrique Iraqi (then an economics student, later a professor of literature and computer chess expert). Who can forget the beautiful peasant face of Mary (Margherita Caruso) in the opening...