Pasolini and the Queer Lens: Il Decameron/The Decameron
2023; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 64; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/frm.2023.a914991
ISSN1559-7989
Autores Tópico(s)Italian Fascism and Post-war Society
ResumoPasolini and the Queer Lens:Il Decameron/The Decameron Angelita Graham (bio) It is sometimes said that the Queer community lost a generation. This is usually in reference to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, but there continue to be many reasons why an LGBTQ+ person might not live past 40: suicide, addiction-related diseases, and hate crimes. Though it is unlikely Pier Paolo Pasolini would have lived to 2022 and reached 100, the world lost one of its leading left-wing intellectuals when he was assassinated. The details surrounding his death are murky and littered with conspiracy theories, but it is known to have been a brutal end, and there is an undeniable factor of homophobia in the perpetrator's motivations. Because of Pasolini's known homosexuality, and his often openly outrageous lifestyle in a largely conservative, Roman Catholic nation, after attending the roundtable discussion on the poetry, politics, and provocations of Pasolini's cinema, I reached out to the chairperson, Jane Mills, as I found the discussion a little tame. (See the transcript in this dossier.) As a Queer person, I was expecting more on Pasolini's homosexuality. The outcome was an invitation to write for this dossier, as Jane was interested to include something written not only by a Queer/LGBTQ+ member of the audience but also by someone younger than the majority of contributors and someone, moreover, who had only recently discovered Pasolini's films. At the time, I had seen only the first three films in the Sydney retrospective, but I'd felt the protagonist in Accattone (played by Franco Citti) had some distinctly gay and genderqueer attributes. Jane didn't mention this in her introduction, but she has since told me that, now that I'd alerted her, she too could see something gay, perhaps queer, in the relationship [End Page 92] between Pasolini's lens and Citti, in the subculture of the marginalized characters, and in the scene where Accattone and his brother-in-law fight and, as they roll about in the dust, are "interlocked in the coils of a mortal embrace, unable to be separated, writhing together in the dust like a pair of savage copulating snakes" to the music of Bach's sublime St Matthew Passion oratorio.1 She suggested I might like to write about Il Decameron/The Decameron (IT/FR/FRG, 1971), as she explains in her introduction to the Trilogy of Life films. Il Decamerone: Prencipe Galeotto/The Decameron (1348–1353) is a collection of short stories written by Giovanni Boccaccio in the colloquial Tuscan dialect during the devastating bubonic plague, of which there were an estimated 100,000 mortalities in the first few months—over half of the Florentine population. Pasolini takes liberties with Boccaccio's text, losing the original frame of one hundred tales told by a group of seven young women and three young men as they isolate just outside Florence to escape the Black Death, reducing the original one hundred stories to nine, transferring the action from Florence to southern Italy, and changing the language to the Neapolitan dialect. In Pasolini's first story, Ninetto Davoli plays a wealthy young man named Andreuccio, visiting Naples to buy horses. The characterization of Andreuccio reminds me of two stock characters of commedia dell'arte, the miserly merchant Pantalone and the flirty inamorato Flavio, who are often father and son. Three of the main elements of commedia dell'arte—lovers, masters, and servants—are found in several of Pasolini's films, along with the physical comedy with which it revolutionized theatre, but none so clearly as in his "Trilogy of Life" films. Much like Pantalone, Andreuccio bears a phallic symbol in the money bag nestled in his crotch, into which he sticks his hands every so often to run his fingers through the coins. He is ultimately conned out of his money by a young woman pretending to be his long-lost sister, a trap that leaves him literally swimming in shit. This femme fatale gleefully claims his money bag upon confirming that Andreuccio is stuck in the latrine. Once he escapes, he comes across two men who are planning to rob the tomb of the recently deceased...
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