“ When I made Canterbury it was a very particular period. I was very, very, very unhappy, I was not right for a trilogy conceived in the style of lightness of heart, of the “middling” kind, of dream, and even of the comic, although abstract.”

The personal crisis suffered by Pier Paolo Pasolini during and after the shooting of I racconti di Canterbury (protacted from September to November 1971) was probably one of the causes of the film’s tormented post-production. The second chapter of his “Trilogy of Life”, this one inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer’s masterpiece, was presented on 2 July 1972 at the XXII Berlin International Film Festival, in a version that ran 2 hours 20 minutes – more than half an hour longer than the definitive version (110’). According to one of those responsible for the editing, Enzo Ocone, the film was cut by Pasolini and Ocone himself by around 20 minutes following the Berlin press show, to be projected the following day for the festival jury (who awarded it the Golden Bear). Three weeks later, Pasolini, dissatisfied with this version also, again returned to the cutting-room to work on the film, as we discover from a letter of 25 July 1972 to Guido Aristarco: “Just a few days ago I finished the killing work of sorting out Canterbury Tales (despite Berlin, where I had sent a first cut) and I have not had time for anything else.”

Unlike the choices made for Il Decameron and the succeeding Il Fiore delle Mille e una notte, Pasolini decided to modify the entire structure of the film, eliminating completely the format which linked the architecture of the eight tales: the travels of the pilgrims to Canterbury and their alternation as narrators during the journey. Between comic and bitter situations, the Host calls upon the Miller, the Bailiff, the Cook, Chaucer himself, the Wife of Bath, the Merchant, the Friar, the Witch-hunter and the Pardoner, each in turn to tell a story during the halts on the road to Canterbury Cathedral. Thus each story is introduced by the voice and the face of a different person. This structure was enclosed within another, subsequently cut down, dominated by the presence of Chaucer, enclosed in the solitude of his study and engrossed in recalling and writing the stories he had heard. Pasolini exclusively retained this last framework, though reducing it, and inserting it in the film only at the end of four stories.

“I directed scenes to show how the pilgrims began to tell their stories. But I have eliminated these intermezzi because they did not suit the film. In Chaucer we have effectively a book within a book, while in the film it becomes only an automatic, mechanical solution. It is one of the principal corrections I have made to the film. For me, as author, the principal problem presented by the film was its structure.”

At the moment, the full 30 minutes of cuts are not available: this dossier is a hypothesis of reconstruction, based on the texts of the screenplay and the original script with annotations by Beat- rice Banfi, the production secretary; on the still photographs (some unpublished) of Mimmo Cattarinich; and on the video and sound statements of Banfi herself, Laura Betti, Mimmo Cattarinich, and Enzo Ocone.

In the sequence of the journey, the appearance of Chaucer himself would have been particularly prominent, a pilgrim among the pilgrims, with his stories unfinished.
In the pages of The Canterbury Tales, the English writer had portrayed himself with amusing self-irony: so shy and awkward as to attract the scorn of the Host, and so boring and clumsy a storyteller as to suffer a rude interruption and the injunction to tell a different story. In reality, his original narration in verse (on the adventures of the Flemish nobleman Sir Thopas) is so flowery as to become a parody of the ballads of chivalry. Not without protest, Chaucer then narrates a lengthy tale of Melibeo and the Lady Prudence, which he manages to carry to the end.
In the sequence written and directed by Pasolini, the Host addresses Chaucer with a tone of more cutting derision than in the original text (while in the original the writer is called a “doll”, in the film he would have been compared to “a baby girl”). Pasolini, moreover, emphasizes the awkwardness of the writer, whose doubts are worsened by the lack of interest of the pil- grims, distracted by their lusts, irritations, and the tedium this story inspires in them.

Unexpectedly, Chaucer/Pasolini is definitively silenced. He is not offered the possibility of “redeeming himself” with a new story, but must be content to mumble sotto voce, while the Wife of Bath (played in the film by Laura Betti) delights her listeners with her tale and her lively coarse language.

Pasolini/Chaucer, then, would have elaborated the “double” of himself in a state of mortification inflicted precisely by those who will become his personages on paper. The decision to suppress these humiliating scenes (and the parody story of Sir Thopas, which Pasolini invests with the maximum sarcasm in respect to the Canterbury Tales) modifies the physiognomy of Chaucer as a character in his own right. His role, in the fabric of the commemoration of the journey, was thus circumscribed at the beginning by the remaining “framework”, to the space of a brief comic gag (bumping his nose against that of the Cook) and to a few other fleeting appearances. As distinct from the “disciple” of Giotto in Decameron, Chaucer is rele- gated by Pasolini to the margins of the reality evoked in the stories, or appears even alien and apart, in the silence of his own study. In the first version of the film, the solitude of Chaucer would have provided a revealing key: an artist pow- erless to conquer a popular audience and to lower his art in the matter of life.