The Decameron

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini

1971 / 111min / 35mm

Pasolini’s so-called “Trilogy of Life" films, adapted from canonical, world-historical story collections, represented a break from his experimental works of the late 1960s like Porcile and Teorema—films which he came to judge as existing too much in the realm of pure alienation and detachment. Determined to create a new popular cinema, he produced this bawdy, blissy, sun-kissed adaptation of Boccaccio’s 14th-century classic, its various chapters linked together by a framing device featuring Pasolini himself as a Giottolike painter. One of Pasolini’s lightest and most lovable films.