PRESENTED BY THE ITALIAN CULTURAL INSTITUTE SYDNEY
In this retrospective celebrating the centenary of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s birth, we present three of his iconic film adaptions of literary works: The Canterbury Tales on its 50th anniversary, Arabian Nights and The Decameron.
Born on the 5th of March 1922 in Bologna, Pier Paolo Pasolini was a controversial Italian motion-picture director, actor, poet, novelist and intellectual, noted for his socially critical, stylistically unorthodox films.
After a childhood spent in northeastern Italy, he attended the University of Bologna, studying art history and literature and was a published poet at 19. In the 1950s, he worked with Federico Fellini on the screenplays for Nights of Cabiria (1957) and La dolce vita (1960) and was nearly forty when he directed his first feature, Accattone (1961), cowritten with Sergio Citti.
After making his best-known film The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (1964), Pasolini’s films alternated between scandalously erotic adaptations of classic literary texts, including Oedipus Rex (1967); The Decameron (1971); The Canterbury Tales (1972); Arabian Nights (1974), with his own more personal projects expressing his controversial views, notably Teorema (1968) and the notorious Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975).
He was murdered in mysterious circumstances on November 2, 1975, and his legacy remains contentious.
Full of lustrous sets, costumes and stunning location photography, this third instalment in Pasolini's ‘Trilogy of Life’ is a fierce and joyous exploration of human sexuality.
Celebrating its 50th anniversary, Pasolini's artistic, sometimes violent, but always vividly cinematic retelling of some of Chaucer's most erotic tales offers a remarkably earthy re-creation of medieval England.
The first film in Pasolini’s popular ‘Trilogy of Life’, The Decameron is a wildly entertaining erotic adaptation of nine stories from Giovanni Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century moral tales, transposed to Naples.