Pasolini Again
Filmmakers in the past have tried to adapt big classic works. John Huston made a movie called The Bible which concentrates on some stories from that thick volume, giving an overview narrated by Huston himself, while he plays Noah and the voice of God--Huston talking to himself inside the frame of a multi-million dollar "sober" presentation of every politician's favorite book.
Cecil B. DeMille, though his epics are spectacular, focused on small parts of the Bible, as in his two versions, one silent, of The Ten Commandments, and his entertaining retelling of the Samson and Delilah story from The Book of Judges. Any movie with Hedy Lamarr is worth watching, but seeing her dominate the screen as Delilah is pure viewing pleasure.
In Italy, a different approach to adapting great literature came from the brilliant and incisive mind of Pier Paolo Pasolini. In his Trilogy of Life--The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and The Arabian Nights--he set aside the epic Hollywoodesque approach in favor of presenting his stories and characters on a human level, using existing buildings, ruins, churches, countryside; costumes and props made for the movie, perhaps not all entirely historical, but conveying, as they do in his film Medea, a sense of an alien culture remote from us in time.
The Decameron was written in the mid-fourteenth century by the Florentine, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375). It consists of 100 stories ranging in tone from comic to tragic. I read the book in the 1990s, found it to be a big fish to swallow, but I persevered. Now that I've seen Pasolini's film adaptation, I feel like I don't need to read the book again, because his vision of Boccaccio's work puts the medieval short story collection into vivid cinematic realism.
Due to the book's length, Pasolini adapted only nine of the 100 tales, presenting them in a flowing order to the point where they feel interconnected, even though there are often abrupt shifts between them. The Criterion Collection put together a DVD set of The Trilogy of Life that looks splendid on an HDTV screen. Many years ago I saw the third part of the Trilogy, The Arabian Nights, on a rented VHS videotape and I wasn't impressed, but based on how the first film looks I'm eager to see what I missed of the wonders of the third part.
Pasolini was one of the greatest filmmakers because he understood the relationship between reality and the artist's mind, with the camera in between like a bridge connecting them. Even in the midst of some of his most fantastic depictions of human behavior (like the goofiness of the nuns in The Decameron who want to have sex with the gardener), there's a realism there that's true to the human heart and soul, depicted somehow with his camera, which manages unfailingly to make the world real as art, even as it remains itself as nature and civilization, as humanity. Even within the surreal strangeness depicted in his films, there is realism. How he managed to do this, I have no idea, but it's an incalculable loss to world cinema that he's been gone since 1975.
Vic Neptune
Filmmakers in the past have tried to adapt big classic works. John Huston made a movie called The Bible which concentrates on some stories from that thick volume, giving an overview narrated by Huston himself, while he plays Noah and the voice of God--Huston talking to himself inside the frame of a multi-million dollar "sober" presentation of every politician's favorite book.
Cecil B. DeMille, though his epics are spectacular, focused on small parts of the Bible, as in his two versions, one silent, of The Ten Commandments, and his entertaining retelling of the Samson and Delilah story from The Book of Judges. Any movie with Hedy Lamarr is worth watching, but seeing her dominate the screen as Delilah is pure viewing pleasure.
In Italy, a different approach to adapting great literature came from the brilliant and incisive mind of Pier Paolo Pasolini. In his Trilogy of Life--The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and The Arabian Nights--he set aside the epic Hollywoodesque approach in favor of presenting his stories and characters on a human level, using existing buildings, ruins, churches, countryside; costumes and props made for the movie, perhaps not all entirely historical, but conveying, as they do in his film Medea, a sense of an alien culture remote from us in time.
The Decameron was written in the mid-fourteenth century by the Florentine, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375). It consists of 100 stories ranging in tone from comic to tragic. I read the book in the 1990s, found it to be a big fish to swallow, but I persevered. Now that I've seen Pasolini's film adaptation, I feel like I don't need to read the book again, because his vision of Boccaccio's work puts the medieval short story collection into vivid cinematic realism.
Due to the book's length, Pasolini adapted only nine of the 100 tales, presenting them in a flowing order to the point where they feel interconnected, even though there are often abrupt shifts between them. The Criterion Collection put together a DVD set of The Trilogy of Life that looks splendid on an HDTV screen. Many years ago I saw the third part of the Trilogy, The Arabian Nights, on a rented VHS videotape and I wasn't impressed, but based on how the first film looks I'm eager to see what I missed of the wonders of the third part.
Pasolini was one of the greatest filmmakers because he understood the relationship between reality and the artist's mind, with the camera in between like a bridge connecting them. Even in the midst of some of his most fantastic depictions of human behavior (like the goofiness of the nuns in The Decameron who want to have sex with the gardener), there's a realism there that's true to the human heart and soul, depicted somehow with his camera, which manages unfailingly to make the world real as art, even as it remains itself as nature and civilization, as humanity. Even within the surreal strangeness depicted in his films, there is realism. How he managed to do this, I have no idea, but it's an incalculable loss to world cinema that he's been gone since 1975.
Vic Neptune
Comments
Post a Comment