Pasolini decameron giotto biography

Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1970, 107 minutes.

As a celebrated artist (Pier Paolo Pasolini) arrives in Naples to undertake a commission for the church he is engulfed by a world of stories.

Tales of ghostly lovers, naughty nuns and inept grave robbers reflect his own meditations on art, life, death and love as he works on a great fresco of the final judgement.

Pasolini’s ‘Decameron’ forms the first part of his ‘Trilogy of Life’, a series of films that continues with adaptations of two other seminal story cycles: ‘The Canterbury Tales’ (1972) and the ‘Arabian Nights’ (1974).

In choosing to adapt these works Pasolini is returning to the foundations of popular culture and consolidating his reputation as a filmmaker of the radical left. Despite the patina of dusty academic respectability that these stories have accrued they are rooted in the story-telling traditions of pre-literate cultures.

For Pasolini they represent ‘the voice of the people’ in its purest form