The Decameron · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A dying swindler lies to a priest, and the film is on his side.

Ser Ciappelletto has done every bad thing available to him, and now he is flat on his back in a strange city with a friar leaning over him. What he gives the friar is a performance. Franco Citti plays the confession with a relished, ironic sanctimony, the timing of a man who knows he owns the room, and the credulous end up burying him as a saint. Pasolini hands him the first half of the film to preside over, and never once suggests the town got a bad deal.

Deleuze has a name for this character. He calls him the forger, le faussaire; his usual examples are Welles and the swindlers of Mr. Arkadin and F for Fake. The forger isn't a liar waiting to be unmasked, he's a maker whose fabrication produces something that then exists. There is a saint in that town now. People pray to him. The devotion is real, and it was assembled on a deathbed by a criminal with good comic timing. Deleuze calls this capacity the powers of the false: certain films locate their creative charge in fabrication rather than in disclosing what was true all along.

That is a strange engine to install in this particular film, because everything around Ciappelletto is notarized. Bazin's case for neorealism was that the photographic image makes a claim on the world: this street was there, this light fell on this face. Pasolini keeps the machinery and takes it south, into unmodernized Neapolitan alleys, with faces recruited off the street for their teeth and their weathered skin, and dialect thick enough that Italians outside Campania needed help with it. La terra trema had proved a regional speech could be a film's primary sound material rather than local seasoning, Sicilian spoken by actual fishermen; Pasolini makes Neapolitan his ground and refuses to standardize it. The documentary weight is real, and it exists to underwrite tales in which a lie makes a saint and nobody is punished.

Then there are the faces. Pasolini's signature shot plants a face flat against the lens, centred, cut off at the shoulders, nothing behind it, and holds. Deleuze's term for a face like that is the qualisign: the close-up not as information but as a single quality held still, a feeling that never discharges into action. The device comes from Dreyer, who in The Passion of Joan of Arc first treated an untrained face as the whole compositional field, no eyeline reverse to soften it, only plaster behind. Pasolini puts Boccaccio's peasants in Joan's frame. A market woman gets the composition an altarpiece would give a martyr, and the joke, if it is one, cuts toward reverence.

He films crowds the same way. The community stays visible around every incident, people watching from doorways, children running through the shot; Deleuze's word for a collective taken as one affective unit is the dividual. The film makes it literal when a pupil of Giotto arrives in Naples to fresco a church wall, looks at a marketplace, and arranges the faces in it into a Last Judgment. The painter is Pasolini, playing himself inside his own picture. He had rehearsed the move in La ricotta, staging Pontormo as living tableaux and putting a director-figure into his own image-field; here the two devices fuse. He called this free indirect subjectivity, an author's vision saturating a character's point of view, and Deleuze thought well enough of the idea to take it into his own vocabulary. The Giotto pupil is that theory given a body and somewhere to stand.

The painter's dream is the film's one formal luxury. The demotic cutting slows into tableaux, Silvana Mangano appears as the Madonna, and images succeed one another with the deliberation of a fresco read wall by wall. Deleuze would call this an onirosign, a dream-image: a circuit anchored to nobody's memory, no flashback cue, a vision the film simply enters. It produces the trilogy's most quoted line, the painter wondering why a man should realize a work when it is so lovely merely to dream it.

Structurally, nothing here behaves like a plot, and that is the argument. Nino Baragli cuts the picture into an anthology: tales end when the reversal lands, connective passages are dropped, and the joins overlap so that one story is still resolving while the next one's protagonist wanders through the frame. Deleuze describes modern cinema reaching the dispersive situation, many characters and weak links and slackened causality, by breaking the action-plot from inside. Pasolini gets there by going around it. He took the shape from Rossellini's The Flowers of St. Francis, comic vignettes with no dramatic build, played by real friars cast for their faces, and found in a pre-novelistic form what modernism had to demolish a century of storytelling to reach. The old form also lets him keep Boccaccio's flatness of tone. Peronella hides her lover in a barrel; three brothers murder their sister's lover and she keeps his head in a pot of basil, played straight, with grief. Joke and atrocity on identical terms, no transition offered.

The bodies follow the same logic. Non-professionals directed for presence rather than interiority, nudity shot without eroticized lighting, bodies unshaped by any gymnasium: Deleuze's cinema of the body, where the everyday body carries the film's duration instead of executing a plot. And because Italian features were shot silent and dubbed afterward, the voices are not theirs. The film looks like ethnographic capture and sounds like an assemblage, an audiovisual disjunction Pasolini had systematized in The Gospel According to St. Matthew, where post-synced voices sit deliberately loose on the bodies. The apparatus came intact from Accattone: Delli Colli's hard frontal light, Baragli's refusal of establishing coverage, street casting, post-sync. In 1971 he walked it into Neapolitan alleys.

Then the fact that changes the film. Four years later Pasolini publicly disowned the trilogy, arguing that the innocent bodies he had filmed no longer existed, that the permissiveness of the intervening years had been a false tolerance sold by neocapitalism. Deleuze's phrase for the condition of modern political cinema is that the people are missing: the filmmaker can no longer address a people that exists and has to work through its absence. The Decameron looks like the exception, a film crowded with people. Its author converted it into the rule by decree, then made Salò, the same attention to bodies turned into an anatomy of consumption.

The immediate legacy was undignified: within months producers industrialized the surface into the decamerotici, dozens of cheap bawdy costume pictures. The serious inheritance is the dirt. Coarse cloth, bare plaster, unheated rooms, an unvarnished Middle Ages that displaced the heraldic studio picture, whether or not anyone can prove a line from here to Holy Grail. Inside Italy the descent is legible: Olmi's The Tree of Wooden Clogs, Garrone's Gomorrah and Tale of Tales, Rohrwacher's Happy as Lazzaro. The Tavianis returned to Boccaccio in 2015 and restored the frame story Pasolini threw away, which tells you what they thought he had removed.

Watch it for the joins. The moment one tale bleeds into the next is where nine stories stop being an anthology and become a town. And watch the painter's face while he watches the market: he is asking whether the picture is worth what it costs the thing he loves. Pasolini answered that question four years later, in public, against himself. The film has not agreed to the answer.