Psaki, F. Regina

Medieval Feminist Newsletter

English

F. Regina Psaki

Crossref

Pasolini's Decameron and Teaching the Middle Ages

ScholarWorks at WMU

"'August Nitschke, "Brunhilde und Hiltgund: Beobachtungen zum Verhaltenswandel der Frauen im fruhen Milteialter,"Sprache und Recht im Mittellater: Beitrage zur Kulturgeschichte des Mittelai/ers: Festschrilt fur Ruth Schmidt-Wiegandzum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Karl Hauck (Berlin/New York: de Gruyler, 1980), 532-563."See Nitschke (note 32), 539-547; the charms are printed in Schiosser (note 29), 254."See Werner Schroder, "Kontlnuitiit oder Diskonlinuitiit in der Friihgeschichte der deutschen Literatur," Zeitschrilt fUrdeutschesAi/ertum 100 (1971),195-213."Miizene im Mittelai/er(Munchen: Beck, 1979), 135,231-243."James Westfall Thompson, The Literacy of the Laity in the Middle Ages, University of California, BerkeleyPublications in Education 9 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1939), rpt, Burt Franklin Research and Source Work Series 2(New York: Burt Franklin, 1960); Bumke (note 37) 56, 66f., 242f., 318, n. 83."See for example the contributions in Classen (note 1)."Elisabeth von Houts, "Women and the Writing of History in the Early Middle Ages: The Case of Abbess Matilda ofEssen and Aethelweard," Early Medieval Europe 1(1992), 53-68, here 54."See Stefan Sonderegger, Grundzuge deutscher Sprachgeschichte: Diachronie des Sprachsystems 1, EinfUhrung-Genealogie - Konstanten (Bertin & New York: de Gruytar, 1979), esp. 219-319.""Learned Women of Early Modem Italy: Humanists and University Scholars," Beyond their Sex: Learned Women ofthe European Past, ed. Patricia N. Labaime (New York: New York UP, 1980),91-116, here 91."See Duby (note 5), p. 89: 'a history of silences'; Christine Klapisch-Zuber, ed. Silence of the Middle Ages.PASOLINI'S DECAMERON AND TEACHING THE MIDDLE AGESMedievalism, in the classroom, is a two-edged sword. When teachers use laterart, literature and film to liven up the Middle Ages for our students, we have towonder, wincing, what misapprehensions we're planting, what cliches we'reinadvertently reinforcing. Despite these risks, my courses on medieval cultureusually do include film versions of works either medieval or medievalizing: TheReturn ofMartin Guerre, Sorceress, Excalibur, The Name of the Rose, the accidentallyhilarious First Knight and most often the Decameron. Looking critically at films asreadings of their sources helps students to understand the poetics of borrowing,adaptation, and appropriation which governed literary activity in the MiddleAges. Moreover, using films to teach medieval literature adds a metadisciplinarygloss: films dramatize how much modern medievalists shape our discipline byour critical practice.No longer seen solely as an independent entity requiring objective analysis, theMiddle Ages is also an object of study that we construct on the basis of unstatedcritical and ideological assumptions. Even our most positivist analyses are moretruly interpretations: we choose which texts to count and which to discount,which features to address and which to ignore, according to an interpretive andideological agenda of which we may be only vaguely aware. That the MiddleAges can be used to endorse an implicit agenda is perhaps most visible inavowedly creative works about the period. The medievalism of Romantic poets,pre-Raphaelite painters, modern science-fantasy writers, and directors of bothcommercial and "art" films, can tell us a great deal about our own. Whilestudents initially tend to judge films as more or less "accurate" or "faithful"representations of a fixed and objective original, in discussing and disagreeingwith each other they learn that there is no tangible "reality" to which a rewritingmay conform, either adequately or inadequately. The Middle Ages cannot existas an object, a thing-in-itself; every version of it, including history and literaryhistory, reflects the choices, experiences, and idiosyncrasies of the observer.For an example I will use one politically motivated filmmaker who in the early1970s adapted medieval literature to stage a social critique. To study Pasolini'sDecameron students must examine both the original literature, with its poetics ofborrowing and adaptation, as well as our own reading strategies with which weapproach medieval texts.Borrowing and adaptation: It always surprises me that students can findBoccaccioreprehensible and obscene, and yet take exception to Pasolini'smodifications to the Decameron. Students resent Pasolini's radical rewriting of theframe-story and his casual presentation of sex, among other things. Discussingtheir resistance, and locating its origin, brings out the central concept that whathas been "misrepresented" is not really Boccaccio's text, but their own idealvision of that text.The frame-story: Pasolini has dissolved the frame-story, transforming it into aloose connective context which on first viewing works more to disorient theviewer than to organize the narration. It is not always clear when a scene shiftmarks the end of an episode, and when the insertion is momentary (for example,the tableaux vivants of Brueghel paintings, inserted into the Ciappellettoepisode). The Neapolitan storyteller's oral narration of Dec. IX.2yields to a shotof a convent, suggesting a dramatization of that tale; but what follows is, in fact,a different convent-story, III.l. The Isabetta story ends not with her death, as inthe original, but with her gazing up at the pot of basil; so that when we then seea horse market, without any mediating commentary we cannot know that theshift marks the end of one episode and the beginning of another. It is tone alonethat tells the viewer that a new episode has begun: the sunny outdoor market,the noisy crowd, the absurd face of Don Gianni, Pietro's kisses distributedliberally over the horse's rump, break with the oblique visual world of Isabetta.Boccaccio's frame-story had created a stable and maximally coherent narrativecontext for the tales; Pasolini's isn't even discernible, let alone decipherable,mwithout repeated viewings. First-time viewers cannot know the link between themurderer in the film's opening scene, and the character who will lie his way intocanonization at the end of the first half. We do not know that the scattered scenesin which this character commits murder, steals, solicits sex from a boy, and soon, are dramatizations of the opening portrait of Ciappelletto in Dec. Ll; indeed,we may not even recognize the character as the same in them. This dissolution ofthe highly intelligible Decameron frame into an impressionistic collage whichrequires repeated exposure to be decoded is an artistic choice, not (as somestudents complain) an inept imitation. Discussing the initially incoherent, butultimately enriching, film frame leads students to conclude that an adaptation isnot really right or wrong. The director takes what is useful to his narrativeagenda and discards the rest; like any medieval author, he chooses whichfeatures of the source to emphasize and which to downplay.Pasolini's decision to suppress the story-telling frame of the original Decameronentails abandoning the sequential progression of the tales. The unifying factorhad been their overt presentation as consecutive narrations occurring in thehomogeneous social and temporal setting of the brigata. In transforming theframe, Pasolini replaces this social and temporal homogeneity with the spatialunity of a set of episodes all unfolding at the same time and in the same place.The film's second half, for example, is punctuated by the artist's visits to themarket, establishing that the episodes of Isabetta (Dec. N.5), Caterina (Dec. VA),of Don Gianni (Dec. IX.I0), and Tingoccio and Meuccio (Dec. VILlO), occursimultaneously with his painting of the fresco in Santa Chiara.Other juxtapositions of locale, characters, and musical score serve to unite thefilm into a tumbled simultaneity. The peasant who lends his rags to Giotto'sdisciple in one episode is later seen celebrating a wedding in another. TheNeapolitan dialect and gesticular language of the characters replace the loftyspeech of Boccaccio's aristocratic Tuscan narrators. The song we hear strummedand sung during the Andreuccio episode recurs in the Isabetta tale. The tuneplayed on a mandolin in one episode at the beginning of Part II returns in theepisode of Ricciardo and Caterina, and in a third when it is whistled by thepainter's assistants. The jaw-harp, the Miserere and Kyrie from the TournaiMass, the nuns' psalm, all work similarly as links within and among episodeswhich purport not to be narrated, but simply to occur.But the presence of an artist-figure recognizably played by the director makesthe film involuted and self-reflexive, calling attention to its status as an artifact(Lawton, 206).The painter is set up as the creative genius par excellence: Giotto's"best disciple," too absorbed in his work to eat, dreamer of glorious visions. Byinserting the tableaux vivants, Pasolini foregrounds his new form of narration asmwell: if paintings are staged in the film, the film is the director's painting. Overtlyartful techniques recur: the snatch of a still-life in the Andreuccio episode,Isabetta's Vermeer-like pose, and the grandiose stagings of major paintings byBruegheland Giotto, make the film thematize the process of its own creation,countering the narrative pretense that these episodes occur unmediated. Theoverlap of Pasolini's character's artistic creation, and the director's own inmaking the film, removes the problematic of appropriation and retelling to themetanarrative plane of the entire film, rather than in the single episodes.Overlapping elements of the film, then, both establish simultaneity andforeground the director's creation. Pasolini also uses meaningful juxtaposition tocreate interior commentary on the events: his choices of which tales to film, howto place them, and how to link them, make them gesture to and gloss each other.The episodes of Isabetta and of Caterina come to mind, since their inclusion,similarity, and proximity make them illuminate each other (Lawton,214).Moreover, by means of visual echoes, as it were, and repetition in the film score,Pasolini can link even apparently disparate episodes, and make the viewerrecognize a thematic link. The visual repetition of the nuns' hands pluckingdelightedly at Masetto, and the devout hands plucking at the shrouded corpse ofCiappelletto link the two false miracles as the director's implicit criticism of thechurch's exploitation of the poor (Lawton, 215).Another distinctive image thatlinks disparate tales is the white-shrouded corpse that appears in one tableauvivant, in the Ciappelletto episode, and in the Tingoccio episode. The two gasp-of-discovery reaction shots in the Caterina episode reprise that of the two nunson first seeing Masetto's manhood; perhaps the director retrieves the latter scenein the middle of the former to suggest that Caterina's parents, eager to snag arich son-in-law, are as exploitative as the two nuns (Lawton, 315).Sex: Pasolini's approach to sex seems, at first glance, cruder and morevoyeuristic than Boccaccio's, and many students respond ambivalently to a filmwhich is, after all, rated Xin the U.S. Where Boccacciouses euphemisms, such asDon Gianni's "tool for planting men," Pasolini shows sexual activityunvarnished: a modern director has to up the ante to produce the same effectthat Boccacciodid in his time. Discussion brings out the fact that what studentsare uncomfortable with is not sex per se, but sex unembellished by the filmconventions of physical beauty, glamorizing cinematography, sentimentalattachment, or gender-specific camera treatment. Exploring why they squirm atthe proposition that allhumans-dergy and lay, young and old, attractive andrepellent-are sexual beings, students realize that Pasolini has only rephrasedBoccaccio's human comedy in terms which can shock the modern.That Pasolini's strategy is deliberate and satirical is clear from his inversion ofstandard film cliches in portraying sex. Perhaps his most overt dig at glamorizedmbut ideologically questionable sexual exposure is the discovery of Ricciardo andCaterina by her parents. We note with amusement that the woman's body, inmost films the default object of the erotic gaze, is covered with a blanketthroughout, and it is the man's body that is completely exposed in full frontaltechnicolor nudity, "nightingale" and all. Similarly, in the Masetto episode, astwo nuns walk through the orchard singing a chant, they see Masetto working ina tree; they stop singing, with a gasp. With a low-angle point-of-view shot, thecamera places us in their position below him as they gaze fixedly at the bulge inhis breeches. As Masetto pretends to be oblivious, they conspire to exploit hissupposed muteness to experience sex with him. One sister pokes him on thethigh with a long stick, a deft and funny displacement of the part to which theyhave reduced him; and we recall that in film it is usually the woman who isreduced to her single sexual function. The old Abbess' varicose veins, the kiss theyoung Gemmata gives her very elderly husband, the laughably improbableinstantaneous climax of the nuns who first tryout sex with Masetto, andMasetto's equally improbable sexual potency, all call attention to the skewedtreatment of sex in the cinema outside the Decameron.Interpretative analysis: When students initially criticize Pasolini's Decameron,they cite several of his choices: the episodic discontinuity of the tales'juxtaposition and distribution; the choice of tales for inclusion,disproportionately lewd; the sex, ubiquitous and demystified, whichcorresponds to their cultural construct neither of the Middle Ages nor of sex. Onthe positive side, they praise Pasolini's larger-than-life portrayal of the MiddleAges, with caricatural color, sound, and gesture; this seems to answer a favoritebrightly-colored image of the period. When pushed, though, they recognize thatwhat they are responding to is not Pasolini's adherence to the "real" Decameron,but rather to how congruent Pasolini's vision is with their owninterpretation ofthe Decameron. The Decameron exists as a virtual entity, primarily within areader's conceptual grid, and only abstractly as a self-defining and self-containedobject of inquiry. And in this way Pasolini's interpretation of Boccacciopreciselyreenacts the medieval writer's interpretation of his sources.One step further back, however, studying Pasolini's reading (and appropriation)of Boccaccio and the Middle Ages helps them think analytically about criticalpractice. While students and critics easily acknowledge the role of perspective ininterpreting literary texts, we tend to accord greater autonomy to historicalwriting, hoping it might possess more objectivity. But implicit ideologicalagendas shape our methodological practice, determining what questions we willwant to ask of historical as well as literary texts-questions about gender, socialclass, circumstances of production, rhetorical strategies, linguistic codes,archetypes, reader response, conflicting forces in the text's articulation, and soon. Critical approaches are not ideologically neutral, in either the hard orhumanistic, analytical or esthetic, disciplines. Students learn a great deal aboutthe ethical and ideological freight of analytical practice by beginning torecognize this dynamic in interpretative practice.F. Regina PsakiUniversity ofOregonBen Lawton, "The Storyteller's Art: Pasolini's Decameron (1971)," in ModernEuropean Filmmakers andthe Art ofAdaptation, eds. Andrew Horton and JoanMagretta (New York: Ungar, 1981),203-221.Millicent Marcus, "The Decameron: Pasolini as a Reader of Boccaccio," ItalianQuarterly, 21 (1980),175-180.

Pasolini\u27s Decameron and Teaching the Middle Ages

Iowa Research Online

"'August Nitschke, "Brunhilde und Hiltgund: Beobachtungen zum Verhaltenswandel der Frauen im fruhen Milteialter,"
Sprache und Recht im Mittellater: Beitrage zur Kulturgeschichte des Mittelai/ers: Festschrilt fur Ruth Schmidt-Wiegand
zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Karl Hauck (Berlin/New York: de Gruyler, 1980), 532-563.
"See Nitschke (note 32), 539-547; the charms are printed in Schiosser (note 29), 254.
"See Werner Schroder, "Kontlnuitiit oder Diskonlinuitiit in der Friihgeschichte der deutschen Literatur," Zeitschrilt fUr
deutschesAi/ertum 100 (1971),195-213.
"Miizene im Mittelai/er(Munchen: Beck, 1979), 135,231-243.
"James Westfall Thompson, The Literacy of the Laity in the Middle Ages, University of California, Berkeley
Publications in Education 9 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1939), rpt, Burt Franklin Research and Source Work Series 2
(New York: Burt Franklin, 1960); Bumke (note 37) 56, 66f., 242f., 318, n. 83.
"See for example the contributions in Classen (note 1).
"Elisabeth von Houts, "Women and the Writing of History in the Early Middle Ages: The Case of Abbess Matilda of
Essen and Aethelweard," Early Medieval Europe 1(1992), 53-68, here 54.
"See Stefan Sonderegger, Grundzuge deutscher Sprachgeschichte: Diachronie des Sprachsystems 1, EinfUhrung-
Genealogie - Konstanten (Bertin & New York: de Gruytar, 1979), esp. 219-319.
""Learned Women of Early Modem Italy: Humanists and University Scholars," Beyond their Sex: Learned Women of
the European Past, ed. Patricia N. Labaime (New York: New York UP, 1980),91-116, here 91.
"See Duby (note 5), p. 89: 'a history of silences'; Christine Klapisch-Zuber, ed. Silence of the Middle Ages.
PASOLINI'S DECAMERON AND TEACHING THE MIDDLE AGES
Medievalism, in the classroom, is a two-edged sword. When teachers use later
art, literature and film to liven up the Middle Ages for our students, we have to
wonder, wincing, what misapprehensions we're planting, what cliches we're
inadvertently reinforcing. Despite these risks, my courses on medieval culture
usually do include film versions of works either medieval or medievalizing: The
Return ofMartin Guerre, Sorceress, Excalibur, The Name of the Rose, the accidentally
hilarious First Knight and most often the Decameron. Looking critically at films as
readings of their sources helps students to understand the poetics of borrowing,
adaptation, and appropriation which governed literary activity in the Middle
Ages. Moreover, using films to teach medieval literature adds a metadisciplinary
gloss: films dramatize how much modern medievalists shape our discipline by
our critical practice.
No longer seen solely as an independent entity requiring objective analysis, the
Middle Ages is also an object of study that we construct on the basis of unstated
critical and ideological assumptions. Even our most positivist analyses are more
truly interpretations: we choose which texts to count and which to discount,
which features to address and which to ignore, according to an interpretive and
ideological agenda of which we may be only vaguely aware. That the Middle
Ages can be used to endorse an implicit agenda is perhaps most visible in
avowedly creative works about the period. The medievalism of Romantic poets,
pre-Raphaelite painters, modern science-fantasy writers, and directors of both
commercial and "art" films, can tell us a great deal about our own. While
students initially tend to judge films as more or less "accurate" or "faithful"
representations of a fixed and objective original, in discussing and disagreeing
with each other they learn that there is no tangible "reality" to which a rewriting
may conform, either adequately or inadequately. The Middle Ages cannot exist
as an object, a thing-in-itself; every version of it, including history and literary
history, reflects the choices, experiences, and idiosyncrasies of the observer.
For an example I will use one politically motivated filmmaker who in the early
1970s adapted medieval literature to stage a social critique. To study Pasolini's
Decameron students must examine both the original literature, with its poetics of
borrowing and adaptation, as well as our own reading strategies with which we
approach medieval texts.
Borrowing and adaptation: It always surprises me that students can find
Boccaccioreprehensible and obscene, and yet take exception to Pasolini's
modifications to the Decameron. Students resent Pasolini's radical rewriting of the
frame-story and his casual presentation of sex, among other things. Discussing
their resistance, and locating its origin, brings out the central concept that what
has been "misrepresented" is not really Boccaccio's text, but their own ideal
vision of that text.
The frame-story: Pasolini has dissolved the frame-story, transforming it into a
loose connective context which on first viewing works more to disorient the
viewer than to organize the narration. It is not always clear when a scene shift
marks the end of an episode, and when the insertion is momentary (for example,
the tableaux vivants of Brueghel paintings, inserted into the Ciappelletto
episode). The Neapolitan storyteller's oral narration of Dec. IX.2yields to a shot
of a convent, suggesting a dramatization of that tale; but what follows is, in fact,
a different convent-story, III.l. The Isabetta story ends not with her death, as in
the original, but with her gazing up at the pot of basil; so that when we then see
a horse market, without any mediating commentary we cannot know that the
shift marks the end of one episode and the beginning of another. It is tone alone
that tells the viewer that a new episode has begun: the sunny outdoor market,
the noisy crowd, the absurd face of Don Gianni, Pietro's kisses distributed
liberally over the horse's rump, break with the oblique visual world of Isabetta.
Boccaccio's frame-story had created a stable and maximally coherent narrative
context for the tales; Pasolini's isn't even discernible, let alone decipherable,
m
without repeated viewings. First-time viewers cannot know the link between the
murderer in the film's opening scene, and the character who will lie his way into
canonization at the end of the first half. We do not know that the scattered scenes
in which this character commits murder, steals, solicits sex from a boy, and so
on, are dramatizations of the opening portrait of Ciappelletto in Dec. Ll; indeed,
we may not even recognize the character as the same in them. This dissolution of
the highly intelligible Decameron frame into an impressionistic collage which
requires repeated exposure to be decoded is an artistic choice, not (as some
students complain) an inept imitation. Discussing the initially incoherent, but
ultimately enriching, film frame leads students to conclude that an adaptation is
not really right or wrong. The director takes what is useful to his narrative
agenda and discards the rest; like any medieval author, he chooses which
features of the source to emphasize and which to downplay.
Pasolini's decision to suppress the story-telling frame of the original Decameron
entails abandoning the sequential progression of the tales. The unifying factor
had been their overt presentation as consecutive narrations occurring in the
homogeneous social and temporal setting of the brigata. In transforming the
frame, Pasolini replaces this social and temporal homogeneity with the spatial
unity of a set of episodes all unfolding at the same time and in the same place.
The film's second half, for example, is punctuated by the artist's visits to the
market, establishing that the episodes of Isabetta (Dec. N.5), Caterina (Dec. VA),
of Don Gianni (Dec. IX.I0), and Tingoccio and Meuccio (Dec. VILlO), occur
simultaneously with his painting of the fresco in Santa Chiara.
Other juxtapositions of locale, characters, and musical score serve to unite the
film into a tumbled simultaneity. The peasant who lends his rags to Giotto's
disciple in one episode is later seen celebrating a wedding in another. The
Neapolitan dialect and gesticular language of the characters replace the lofty
speech of Boccaccio's aristocratic Tuscan narrators. The song we hear strummed
and sung during the Andreuccio episode recurs in the Isabetta tale. The tune
played on a mandolin in one episode at the beginning of Part II returns in the
episode of Ricciardo and Caterina, and in a third when it is whistled by the
painter's assistants. The jaw-harp, the Miserere and Kyrie from the Tournai
Mass, the nuns' psalm, all work similarly as links within and among episodes
which purport not to be narrated, but simply to occur.
But the presence of an artist-figure recognizably played by the director makes
the film involuted and self-reflexive, calling attention to its status as an artifact
(Lawton, 206).The painter is set up as the creative genius par excellence: Giotto's
"best disciple," too absorbed in his work to eat, dreamer of glorious visions. By
inserting the tableaux vivants, Pasolini foregrounds his new form of narration as
m
well: if paintings are staged in the film, the film is the director's painting. Overtly
artful techniques recur: the snatch of a still-life in the Andreuccio episode,
Isabetta's Vermeer-like pose, and the grandiose stagings of major paintings by
Bruegheland Giotto, make the film thematize the process of its own creation,
countering the narrative pretense that these episodes occur unmediated. The
overlap of Pasolini's character's artistic creation, and the director's own in
making the film, removes the problematic of appropriation and retelling to the
metanarrative plane of the entire film, rather than in the single episodes.
Overlapping elements of the film, then, both establish simultaneity and
foreground the director's creation. Pasolini also uses meaningful juxtaposition to
create interior commentary on the events: his choices of which tales to film, how
to place them, and how to link them, make them gesture to and gloss each other.
The episodes of Isabetta and of Caterina come to mind, since their inclusion,
similarity, and proximity make them illuminate each other (Lawton,214).
Moreover, by means of visual echoes, as it were, and repetition in the film score,
Pasolini can link even apparently disparate episodes, and make the viewer
recognize a thematic link. The visual repetition of the nuns' hands plucking
delightedly at Masetto, and the devout hands plucking at the shrouded corpse of
Ciappelletto link the two false miracles as the director's implicit criticism of the
church's exploitation of the poor (Lawton, 215).Another distinctive image that
links disparate tales is the white-shrouded corpse that appears in one tableau
vivant, in the Ciappelletto episode, and in the Tingoccio episode. The two gasp-
of-discovery reaction shots in the Caterina episode reprise that of the two nuns
on first seeing Masetto's manhood; perhaps the director retrieves the latter scene
in the middle of the former to suggest that Caterina's parents, eager to snag a
rich son-in-law, are as exploitative as the two nuns (Lawton, 315).
Sex: Pasolini's approach to sex seems, at first glance, cruder and more
voyeuristic than Boccaccio's, and many students respond ambivalently to a film
which is, after all, rated Xin the U.S. Where Boccacciouses euphemisms, such as
Don Gianni's "tool for planting men," Pasolini shows sexual activity
unvarnished: a modern director has to up the ante to produce the same effect
that Boccacciodid in his time. Discussion brings out the fact that what students
are uncomfortable with is not sex per se, but sex unembellished by the film
conventions of physical beauty, glamorizing cinematography, sentimental
attachment, or gender-specific camera treatment. Exploring why they squirm at
the proposition that allhumans-dergy and lay, young and old, attractive and
repellent-are sexual beings, students realize that Pasolini has only rephrased
Boccaccio's human comedy in terms which can shock the modern.
That Pasolini's strategy is deliberate and satirical is clear from his inversion of
standard film cliches in portraying sex. Perhaps his most overt dig at glamorized
m
but ideologically questionable sexual exposure is the discovery of Ricciardo and
Caterina by her parents. We note with amusement that the woman's body, in
most films the default object of the erotic gaze, is covered with a blanket
throughout, and it is the man's body that is completely exposed in full frontal
technicolor nudity, "nightingale" and all. Similarly, in the Masetto episode, as
two nuns walk through the orchard singing a chant, they see Masetto working in
a tree; they stop singing, with a gasp. With a low-angle point-of-view shot, the
camera places us in their position below him as they gaze fixedly at the bulge in
his breeches. As Masetto pretends to be oblivious, they conspire to exploit his
supposed muteness to experience sex with him. One sister pokes him on the
thigh with a long stick, a deft and funny displacement of the part to which they
have reduced him; and we recall that in film it is usually the woman who is
reduced to her single sexual function. The old Abbess' varicose veins, the kiss the
young Gemmata gives her very elderly husband, the laughably improbable
instantaneous climax of the nuns who first tryout sex with Masetto, and
Masetto's equally improbable sexual potency, all call attention to the skewed
treatment of sex in the cinema outside the Decameron.
Interpretative analysis: When students initially criticize Pasolini's Decameron,
they cite several of his choices: the episodic discontinuity of the tales'
juxtaposition and distribution; the choice of tales for inclusion,
disproportionately lewd; the sex, ubiquitous and demystified, which
corresponds to their cultural construct neither of the Middle Ages nor of sex. On
the positive side, they praise Pasolini's larger-than-life portrayal of the Middle
Ages, with caricatural color, sound, and gesture; this seems to answer a favorite
brightly-colored image of the period. When pushed, though, they recognize that
what they are responding to is not Pasolini's adherence to the "real" Decameron,
but rather to how congruent Pasolini's vision is with their owninterpretation of
the Decameron. The Decameron exists as a virtual entity, primarily within a
reader's conceptual grid, and only abstractly as a self-defining and self-contained
object of inquiry. And in this way Pasolini's interpretation of Boccaccioprecisely
reenacts the medieval writer's interpretation of his sources.
One step further back, however, studying Pasolini's reading (and appropriation)
of Boccaccio and the Middle Ages helps them think analytically about critical
practice. While students and critics easily acknowledge the role of perspective in
interpreting literary texts, we tend to accord greater autonomy to historical
writing, hoping it might possess more objectivity. But implicit ideological
agendas shape our methodological practice, determining what questions we will
want to ask of historical as well as literary texts-questions about gender, social
class, circumstances of production, rhetorical strategies, linguistic codes,
archetypes, reader response, conflicting forces in the text's articulation, and so
on. Critical approaches are not ideologically neutral, in either the hard or
humanistic, analytical or esthetic, disciplines. Students learn a great deal about
the ethical and ideological freight of analytical practice by beginning to
recognize this dynamic in interpretative practice.
F. Regina Psaki
University ofOregon
Ben Lawton, "The Storyteller's Art: Pasolini's Decameron (1971)," in Modern
European Filmmakers andthe Art ofAdaptation, eds. Andrew Horton and Joan
Magretta (New York: Ungar, 1981),203-221.
Millicent Marcus, "The Decameron: Pasolini as a Reader of Boccaccio," Italian
Quarterly, 21 (1980),175-180.


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Pasolini\u27s Decameron and Teaching the Middle Ages

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