The Canterbury Tales (DVD)

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Chaplin’s films, their essence and the essence of his character Charlie, are constructed around the double, where whatever is, is seldom what it appears to be or could be (for example, a cake as a hat, a hat as a cake, infinite translation and unending, riotous metamorphosis), as if the only acceptable attitude is founded on opposition, refusal as a precondition for any change. Reality is a state of mind that can be refashioned, thought differently, not immutable, and therefore easily reimagined and transformed. The delight of Chaplin’s work depends on this possibility of difference, no matter what.

Canby, Vincent (30 May 1980). "Film: 'Canterbury Tales': Chaucer a la Pasolini". The New York Times. Nowhere is the contemporary aspect of these medieval tales more evident than in the treatment of the human body. Pasolini uses male genitals and female pubic hair with a freedom that had never been seen in legal cinema. This led to numerous court battles that were part of a general movement that saw much greater license given to the cinema than it had ever before enjoyed. Part of Pasolini’s ultimate disillusionment with his trilogy was that the films immediately inspired a slew of soft-porn imitations, as commercial filmmakers cashed in on his bravery. It is important to remember today, when there is very little censorship of explicit sex and pornography is widely available, that nudity and the depiction of sex were an integral part of European art cinema in the fifties and sixties. The relaxation of sexual censorship in the midseventies was one of the major factors in the demise of a separate art cinema distribution circuit. TheCanterbury Tales is one of the last films to cross explicit sex with an explicit aesthetic vision.Via Pasolini (2005), a documentary featuring archival footage of Pasolini discussing his views on language, film, and modern society Roman and Friulian were, for Pasolini, ancient languages, a survival from the past. The Roman borgate was for Pasolini a Paradise, albeit shabby. More romantically still it was Paradise Lost, a remnant and, like its inhabitants, in rags, and like Roman and Friulian, threatened with extinction by modernisation. This set up a series of reversals for Pasolini whereby the ancient had more value than the modern and the despised was more sacred than the Sacred. All that society said was good, he rejected , and all it rejected Pasolini embraced.

The travelers at the Tabard Inn have all fallen asleep save for Chaucer. He begins to jot down more of their tales starting with the Cook's Tale. The presence of Chaplin in Pasolini’s films and especially perhaps in films like I racconti di Canterbury and the two other Pasolini films of La trilogia di vita, is not exceptional. Chaplin, I believe, was the only filmmaker to be cited and present in virtually every Pasolini film and to whom Pasolini paid homage, a citation indeed, a medal of distinction, of high art in low wrappings. Pasolini was born and educated in Bologna in Central Italy. During the war, he, with his mother, lived in Casarsa, in the Italian countryside of Friuli at the extreme North East of Italy where Pasolini taught school. What was spoken in Casarsa, besides Italian, was Friulian, the local language. Pasolini loved Friuli and its language. He studied it and adopted it and partly was responsible for reviving and preserving it. He adopted not only the language, but the place and also its people. It was as if the sophisticated, highly educated Italian, a student of the Fine Arts, was in masquerade in Friuli playing a rural figure, not what he was but what he would have liked to have been. And what he would have liked to have been, his fiction, is what he fundamentally became and at heart and by sympathy what he was, at once himself and other than himself, as if possessed by that ‘other’ as more real, his dream a reality.The elderly merchant Sir January decides to marry May, a young woman who has little interest in him. After they are married, the merchant suddenly becomes blind, and insists on constantly holding on to his wife' wrist as consolation for the fact that he cannot see her. Meanwhile, Damian, a young man whom May has interest in decides to take advantage of the situation. May has a key to January's personal garden made. While the two are walking in the private garden, May asks to eat mulberries from one of the trees. Taking advantage of her husband's blindness, she meets with Damian inside of the tree, but is thwarted when the god Pluto, who has been watching over the couple in the garden, suddenly restores January's sight. January briefly sees May and her lover together and is furious. Fortunately for May, the goddess Persephone who also happens to be in the same garden fills her head with decent excuses to calm her husband's wrath. May convinces January that he has hallucinated and the two walk off together merrily. The Lost Body of Alibech (2005), a documentary by Roberto Chiesi about a lost sequence from The Decameron Mount Etna, Sicily - Hell in the Summoner's Tale and also where the deleted Tale of Sir Topas was filmed.