Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #43177 in DVD
• Released on: 2001-05-07
• Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
• Formats: PAL, Widescreen
• Original language: Italian
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 107 minutes

DVD Description
DVD Special Features
Italian language, English subtitles
1.66:1

Synopsis
Octet of ribald tales from Boccaccio's "Decameron" with Pasolini as Giotto providing the link between the tales. First in Pasolini's "Trilogy of Life," which also includes "The Arabian Nights" and "The Canterbury Tales." Originally rated X by the Motion Picture Association of America.

From the Back Cover
The first of Pasolini's colourful, entertaining and highly erotic Trilogy of Life films based on famous story cycles (to be followed by The Canterbury Tales and Arabian Nights), The Decameron contains ten stories based on the fourteenth century works of Giovanni Boccaccio.

Capturing the bawdy, earthy spirit of the original, the film romps through its tales of sex and death - of lusty nuns and priests, cuckolded husbands, murdered lovers and grave-robbers, with five of the stories linked by an artist, `Giotto's pupil', played by Pasolini himself.

Customer Reviews

Passolini explores the narrative tradition
'The Decameron' is one Pasolini's trilogy of films ('Arabian Nights' and 'Canterbury Tales' are the others) exploring the role of the storyteller and the translation of this timeless vocal tradition into a cinematic one. The cinema has typically taken on board the format of the novel - it presents one central story, with maybe a couple of subplots, seen from the point of view of one of the protagonists or of a neutral onlooker. The storytelling tradition, however, while it might include epics like the 'Iliad', generally follows shorter stories, and often relates these to a specific moral.

Pasolini provides a cavalcade of tales exploring life and death, lust and sex, the materialism of the peasant world, the carnality of life. If there is a moral it is that sex and lust are blessings. Here, sex is presented as a political act - we all have ultimate political control over our own bodies; and here Pasolini explores the nature of belief, contrasting the real, physical, material world of sex and abandonment with the censorship and authoritarianism of religion. Pasolini was fascinated by the interaction of the Marxist and Catholic traditions within Italy ... and with the world of the traditional peasant before they became anachronisms with the growth of cities and the development of an industrialised economy.

'The Decameron' is set in a medieval world which embodies the traditional values of rough peasant sex, duplicity, and conflict with the moral certainties of the Church. We have nuns forsaking their vows of chastity, cuckolded husbands, a celebration of bodily functions. We have comedy, drama, music. It's lewd, it's bawdy, and there are bodies aplenty.

Here we have life, bounded by rules, but rules which are often pure hypocrisy. Pasolini prefers the vulgarity of peasant life and its flexible violation of rules - rules of law, rules of religion, rules of social structure and hierarchy. Guilt is created by the Church ... but can be exorcised by the simple expedient of confession. Surely the peasants are more honest in their human breaking of rules ... particularly sexual ones? He rejoices in their superstition, their ignorance, their selfishness and materialism.

It's a slow paced but exuberant celebration of life in the raw. The visual style is sumptuous in places, aping the colours of medieval art. Pasolini offers characters in his photography - the beautiful and the ugly people, using amateur actors to emphasise the lack of sophistication of the peasant world. His exploration of the nature of storytelling produces overlapping tableau after tableau, short tales which cut straight into the next and challenge the conventional structure of cinema.

It's engaging, it's entertaining, and it will make you laugh.

Part 1 of the Trilogy of Life.
Nice to see The Decameron reissued, as well as parts two and three of the 'Trilogy of Life'- The Canterbury Tales and Arabian Knights. Though be warned, not everything that Pasolini made was genius- his novels a dilution of Camus and Genet and films like Hawks & Sparrows do nothing for me.

The Decameron is far from his best works- Mamma Roma, Accatone, La Ricotta, The Gospel According to St Matthew, Theorum and Salo- but is worth seeing for a myriad of reasons (not just for those studying Boccaccio). Pasolini was moving towards this kind of film with St Matthew and Medea, the meticulous recreation of the past being a prime factor which will leave you hurtling towards The Golden Bough or The Uses of Enchantment.

In this trilogy Pasolini fused his ever-mutating philosophy with three classic works- here we get excerpts from the vast text- in a similar way that Kieslowki's final work, Heaven, uses aspects of The Divine Comedy. Pasolini is making things more obvious with the 'storyteller' aspect prevalent in this work- this would be continued to the deranged courtesan of Salo; while Pasolini himself makes an appearance as Giotto- as he would appear as Chaucer in The Canterbury Tale. This further confounds the associations made between Pasolini's life and art (JG Ballard defined Pasolini as "sociopath disguised as Saint" in The User's Guide to the Millennium).

The Decameron is an impressive film, though some knowledge of the original text (which I didn't have) would be helpful- to see where Boccaccio ends and Pasolini begins. As ever the composition and design is wonderful- as the costumes- this is partly down to Dante Ferretti (now a Scorsese regular like Michael Ballhaus) and the late Danilo Donati (costume designer and sometime writer/director). Ennio Morricone also contributes some music, as Tonino del Colli offers up fantastic photography.

The Trilogy of Life is well worth watching, not as gruelling or Gramscian as films like Pigsty, Salo & Theorum; though ultimately Pasolini would reject this direction- as he had the early works (Mamma Roma, Accatone) and move to his last broadcast, Salo (another story...).

A fine package for a fine film
This is the second in a series of uncut versions of Pasolini's final films the BFI is releasing on DVD uncut. After the shocking impact of his last film, the formerly banned 'Salo', this playful (if sexually graphic) comedy seems almost insignificant. Subsequent viewings, however, reveal great depth beneath its bawdy exterior - and his extended cameo as a fresco painter reveals a lot about his view of himself as an artist (the final phrase being particularly memorable).
BFI's disc of Decameron is as good as can be expected. The print (slightly more severely letterboxed than the 1.66 indicated, but looks accurate) suffers from the problems one would expect from the type of film - cheaply made using mostly hand-helds and cheap filmstock, and natural lighting rendering many scenes overtly dark. The post-dubbed sound is harsh and/or distorted, but ok. Of more concern perhaps is the fact that the subtitles are burnt-in (not digital like on Salo - although even these were not removable for some reason) - and in some of the more troublesome dark scenes the picture becomes so smudgy that it is difficult to know what is going on. This is clearly a fault of the budget, but anamorphic enhancement would have helped.
extras - biography, a link to BFIs site - nothing remarkable (although the liner notes are better than usual, and the packaging is more sturdy than that used for Salo).

But most importantly perhaps - this release marks the first occasion Decameron is availible uncut for home viewing in this country - and so comes highly recommended for fans of Pasolini and off-beat Italian film.