Arquivo

Based on the book “The Canterbury Tales” by English writer Geoffrey Chaucer (app. 1343-1400), this film by Pasolini is the second of that which he himself defined as the “Trilogy of Life”, consisting also of The Decameron (1971) and Flower of the Arabian Nights (1974). “ ‘The Canterbury Tales ’ were written forty years after ‘The Decameron’; however the relationship between realism and a fantastic dimension are the same. Chaucer was not refined as was Boccaccio, but was more modern, for in England there was already a bourgeoisie. This made for a contradiction: on the one hand, the epic aspect of the medieval heroes, and on the other, irony and auto-irony, characteristics that are essentially bourgeois”, said Pasolini. Just as in the case of The Decameron, the prevailing themes in the Tales are sex, love, and death, with a predominance of the latter, in that in all of the episodes there is invariably a funeral, a murder, one who is sentenced to die, or on a deathbed.