Hello, everyone. I hope there are some Italian film buffs out there.

One of the UK satellite film channels recently featured Pasolini's Decameron
and Canterbury Tales which I'd seen years ago and remembered as being funny
and irreverent - with maybe more sex in Canterbury Tales. Then the other
night Salo, which was banned here until very recently was featured, so I
watched it. My God! What a film! Was their ever a more pessimistic portrayal
of the human condition?

Was Pasolini's hate filled allegory a comment on life under fascism of the
1930s and '40s; the society and politics of Italy after the post WW2
settlement up to his death; or what?

Ciao, Rod
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From:Ben Lawton

Greetings.

My good friend Richard Annotico forwarded your message.  I am taking the
liberty of sending you a synopsis of an article of mine on Pasolini's
Decameron. It appears in Brown University's superb Decameron site.

Canterbury Tales is a more pessimistic film and Salo, as you correctly
perceive, is both "a comment on life under fascism of the 1930s and '40s. . . 
[and on] the society and politics of Italy after the post WW2 settlement 
up to his death."
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Pasolini's View of the Decameron

The adaptation of Boccaccio's Decameron by Pier Paolo Pasolini has been
debated regarding its faithfulness to the original text. His restructuring
of Boccaccio's original frame and change in focus of the ten stories chosen
and adapted for the film have engendered disapproval among literary and
cinema critics, despite their acknowledgment that no work of literature can
be perfectly replicated on screen.

Pasolini's intention was not to recreate the medieval world of Boccaccio's
characters but instead to comment on contemporary Italian society through
the metaphorical use of the original novellas of the Decameron. Pasolini
dismantles the bourgeois frame of the brigata and replaces it with two
subframes composed of modified novellas from the Decameron. By effecting
this change, at least in his Ciappelletto subframe, Pasolini alters his
characters' socio-economic point of view to support the Marxist dialectic
which appears in all of his films. For example, Ciappelletto is not the
uncultured degenerate of Boccaccio's elite narrator, but instead, from the
point of view of the lower class, he appears as a victim of the bourgeois
class's manipulation, much like the figure of Pasolini's Accattone who, not
coincidentally, is portrayed by Franco Citti in both films. Pasolini's
Ciappelletto is "sacrificed" and manipulated by the bourgeoisie, allowing
the usurers to continue with their capitalist pursuits and the Church to
appropriate his "good" reputation in order further to mislead the poorer
classes through their naive and trusting religious devotion.

Pasolini chose particular stories from the Decameron to reverse Boccaccio's
original intention and comment on the class conflict. For example, the
juxtaposition of Ricciardo and Caterina's story and the novella of
Elisabetta and Lorenzo underscores two distinct treatments of "punishment"
for sexual transgression based on class considerations: Caterina's father
forces the wealthy Ricciardo to marry her, while Lorenzo is killed for
violating the honor of Elisabetta's (wealthier) family, for daring to rise
above his class. Caterina's father, in a departure from Boccaccio's text, is
no longer a knight but a member of a lower class, possibly a merchant, who
takes economic advantage of his compromised honor, while Lorenzo is a
Sicilian, not a Pisan as in the original, allowing Pasolini to state his
position regarding the abuse of and disregard for southern Italy's poor by
the northern bourgeois society. To further reinforce the idea of southern
Italian poverty, Pasolini endowed his lower class and peasant characters
with Neapolitan accents.

Boccaccio relied upon various sources for the Decameron, such as the French
fabliaux tradition, contemporary chronicles, medieval romances, Italian
folklore, exempla and others, in the same way that Pasolini's filmic text
incorporates the original work with Marxist overtones and references to his
past cinematic works. Boccaccio's Decameron was "popular" literature in the
14th century, although it may be difficult to imagine women, even in the
privacy of their own homes, reading the risque stories of Alatiel,
Peronella, and Compare Pietro and his wife. The popularity of Pasolini's
film inspired several equally bawdy spin-offs which, while taking similar
advantage of Boccaccio's suggestive stories, completely omit the
class-conscious messages intended by Pasolini in his work. Nonetheless,
Pasolini's version of the Decameron, despite the controversy it generated,
possibly did the most justice to Boccaccio's work simply by increasing the
readership of the original text and encouraging rereadings of it.
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(C. H.) Lawton, Ben, "Boccaccio and Pasolini: A Contemporary Interpretation
of the Decameron." The Decameron: A New Translation, trans. and ed. by Mark
Musa and Peter Bondanella (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977). pp. 306-322.
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Chair, Interdisciplinary Italian Studies
Chair, Interdisciplinary Film Studies
Co-Chair Purdue University Conference on Romance Languages and Literatures
Co-Chair Italian Cultural Studies Association
Co-Editor, Romance Language Annual
Department of Foreign Languages
Purdue University
West Lafayette IN. 47907