| Pier Paolo Pasolini produced theTrilogia della vita between 1971 and 1974. It is made up of three films adapted from three medieval novels: Boccaccio's Decameron, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and the Arabian Nights. These three texts were chosen by Pasolini for various reasons: because of their "anticipation" of a peculiarly bourgeois national-popular literature (in the case of Boccaccio and Chaucer), and thus for what they can reveal about hegemonic cultural practices but they were also chosen for the way, as "foundational" texts, they reveal how any "ideological" practice designed to demarcate boundaries--cultural, national, or subjective "identities"--more clearly foreground the will to power behind such demarcation. This awareness translates into an interrogation of mechanisms of narrative structuration in the "post-natural" Trilogia. In the Decameron the problem of the "frame-tale" of the novelle is central: Pasolini replaces Boccaccio's cornice with an ambivalent, ironic, and highly self-referential frame-tale, intended to draw attention to processes of "enframing," and to the relationship of frame to framed, so that ultimately his Decameron becomes a structural allegory of a "self-framing" society. This ironic attitude towards structure and identity gains full expression in Pasolini's style: one dominated by "contamination" or "pastiche." In these films, all of his images are "contaminated" by echoes of past images, and his style is revealed as beholden to historically superceded representational models. In the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales, the indebtedness is to medieval and renaissance figural traditions: Giotto, Bruegel, Bosch. In theArabian Nights, the visual sources are Persian miniatures, often presenting erotic topics and a non-cartesian organization of space. Paintings exist in the Trilogia as film's altro da se, as one of film's repressed origins. Pasolini's citational style thus presents a great deal of "excess" material: material present in the film but apparently lacking narrative motivation. The negotiation of this excess, the "political unconscious" of the narrative system, becomes a project of the spectator forced to conceive of a possible motivation for the mysterious presence of "foreign" traditions and styles. Thus Pasolini's Trilogia calls upon an activated spectator--forced to remember--to complete his films da farsi. |
