- Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive
In another one of those fortuitous moviegoing coincidences, I recently saw The Canterbury Tales (1972) in the Siskel Center’s Pier Paolo Pasolini retrospective just after checking out Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive for a second time. I found the pairing instructive—each one provided insights into the other I might not have experienced had I seen the films separately. In hindsight, though, it wasn’t such an unusual pairing. Pasolini had achieved fame for his poetry before he started making movies, and he continued to publish poems for the rest of his life. Jarmusch aspired as a young man to become a poet, and one can feel the influence of poetry on all of his films. (Indeed I can’t think of another living U.S. narrative filmmaker as informed by poetry as Jarmusch.) I enjoy revisiting his movies for similar reasons as I enjoy rereading poems—on repeat viewings, motifs I’d considered only superficially become more resonant, and I also find deeper meaning in the overall structure. For instance, it took me a few viewings of Night on Earth and Broken Flowers to realize that the dramatic encounters grow more pessimistic over the course of each film.
- The Canterbury Tales
The Canterbury Tales, like the other two entries in Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life (The Decameron and Arabian Nights), invokes the Medieval world as a means of obliquely criticizing the present. As Colin McCabe explains in his valuable essays on the Trilogy, included in a recent Criterion Collection box set, Pasolini looked to pre-industrial society to imagine life untainted by capitalism or cultural standardization. (Tellingly he shot the first two films of Trilogy in antiquated regional dialects.) These films present human beings at one with nature, unashamed of their bodies, and always on the verge of spiritual epiphany. Everyday life is permeated by myths, both religious and secular. Poor characters are capable of outsmarting their social superiors. The Trilogy’s much-discussed sexual content might be better described as an extreme form of earthiness—Pasolini rejected pornography as the commodification of bodies and in fact repudiated the Trilogy when soft-core porn knockoffs started being made.
