In 1974, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975) directed the final part of his Trilogy of Life. The other two films – Il Decameron [The Decameron] (1971) and I Racconti di Canterbury [The Canterbury Tales] (1972) – had also been incursions into medieval territory, albeit, like the present one, filtered through the director’s own interests. The epigraph at the beginning of Arabian Nights (Il fiore delle mille e una notte, literally ‘The Flowers of the One Thousand and One Nights’) reads that ‘Truth lies not in one dream, but in many dreams’. Unlike the previous two films of the Trilogy, which had an episodic narrative in which each tale had a clear beginning and a clear ending (besides, his Canterbury Tales dispenses with the over-arching pilgrimage), the Arabian Nights has self-generating tales within tales. These include, for example, The Third Dervish’s Tale, The Tale of the Third Kalender and the Jeweller’s Son, as well as the framing story of Nuredin’s search for Zumurrud. The folk origins of the Nights must have appealed to the bourgeois-hating Pasolini, who often looked to the past – and to the exotic – in search of what he thought had been lost in the modern world. The film was shot in Ethiopia, Yemen, Iran, and Nepal. In these locations, the director searched for the ‘reality’ that he considered gone from modern capitalist society: he intended to create an analogy, ‘a “real” found in the present as a likeness to an ideal real in the past’. Pasolini once stated that ‘every tale in The Thousand and One Nights begins with an appearance of destiny which manifests itself through an anomaly’, adding that by the end of each tale ‘destiny’ disappears, sinking back into ‘the somnolence of everyday life’. The Marxist director, disenchanted with ‘History’ as he saw it, deeply believed that he had found this ‘everyday life’ in the alleyways and slums of Naples as well as in Africa and the Middle East – locations he also used in other films. Towards the end of Arabian Nights, we hear the epigraph of the film repeated (with minor changes), this time by one of the characters from one of the tales within tales (from a dream within dreams?). As with the other two films of the Trilogy, Ennio Morricone (b.1928) oversaw the soundtrack.

 

Part of the Medieval Film Club, for more information go to the website.

This screening is open to all and free to attend. No booking required.

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