PEN@Prithvi: Kiran David presents Pasolini's 'The Canterbury Tales' (9 October)
Karishma Pais
OCTOBER SESSION OF PEN@PRITHVI
Continuing the series ‘Literature into Film’:
KIRAN DAVID will present and lead a discussion on PIER PAOLO PASOLINI’s film ‘The Canterbury Tales’
An adaptation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s collection of stories, this is part two of an attempt to look at Pasolini’s stylistic and linguistic strategies over four films.
As Sam Rohdie writes in The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini – “Pasolini’s cinema, which is overwhelmingly citational (of literature and painting), is a cinema which reproduces texts literally, but does not adapt them. This is especially true of his most openly literary-based works: Il Decameron (1971) (Boccaccio); I racconti di Canterbury (1972) (Chaucer); Il fiore delle Mille e una notta (from Alf Laylah wa-Laylah); Salò, o Le 120 giornate di Sodoma (de Sade). The films are places where the languages of these texts are cited and encountered, a place where cinema and literature meet, not where literature ends and from which it takes its leave.”
Date: 9 October 2010 (Saturday)
Time: 6.30 pm
Place: Prithvi House, 1st Floor
(Opp. Prithvi Theatre, Janki Kutir, Juhu)
ENTRY IS FREE, ALL ARE WELCOME
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Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) wrote The Canterbury Tales, the poetic collection of stories widely regarded as the beginning of English literature. The stories, by turns bawdy, comical and pious, are told by a group of travelers entertaining themselves while making a pilgrimage to Canterbury, England. Chaucer himself is among the pilgrims in the tales, which he wrote from around 1387 to 1400. He wrote The House of Fame (1375) and the romantic poem Trilus and Cirseyde (or Troilus and Cressida, 1383) before embarking on The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer was among the first to use English to create a great work of poetry, in an age when courtly languages like Latin and French were typically favored for poetry and stories. Chaucer was buried in Westminster Abbey, becoming the first to occupy what is now called the Poet’s Corner.
Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was one of the most controversial film-makers, poets and essayists of modern times, best known for his films narrating myths with a style veering from the grotesque to the sublime (Oedipus Rex, Medea and Theorem; The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron and A Thousand and One Arabian Nights; Salo). Pasolini made the primitive into something romantic animated by an intense lust for life, transforming realities into myth, that is, into poetry.
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