Pier Paolo Pasolini and His Myth: ‘The Trilogy of Life’ Half a Century Later

Abstract

The article attempts to analyze Pasolini’s great trilogy, which includes the films “Decameron”, “Canterbury Tales”, and “Flower of the Thousand and One Nights”, taking into account the distance of half a century. This article shows the multi-layered nature of a great work of art, which serves as the basis for different understandings and evaluations of these works that took place during the life of Pasolini and decades after his tragic and mysterious death. The article also draws attention to difference in the methods of artistic expression between the elements of the literary image (phonemes) and cinematic visuality (kinemas), with which Pasolini experimented. Not agreeing with the established point of view that compares the “Trilogy of Life” with Dante’s division of hell, purgatory, and paradise, the author believes that Pasolini’s films based on literary works are not correctly considered as analogies with the metaphysical, “vertical” journey of Dante to the postmortem worlds. On the contrary, the movements in Pasolini’s trilogy — South, North-West, East — are “horizontal”, terrestrial, and even chronologically almost identical. Pasolini’s “Trilogy of Life” is rather three life modules that a person meets, in which “Decameron” is everyday life in its relationship with art (we see a similar situation in “Andrey Rublev” by A. Tarkovsky). “Canterbury Tales” is an expression of the joy of life associated with the comical nature of human corporeality. “Flower of the Thousand and One Nights” is a dream or tale about conquering love, in the entourage of the charming East, seen through the eyes of a European. This is why these films can rightly be called the “Trilogy of Life”.