He tries not to get the three confused.
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He tries not to get the three confused. |
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ELECTRONIC PIRATES, MEDIAEVAL CODPIECES AND PIER PAOLO PASOLINI |
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Home HIV and the Developing World Another World gay life on five continents God Would Be An Atheist Fiction Opinion Reviews martin@martinforeman.com Appeal to your wallet:  23 February 2004 World Copyright © Martin Foreman |
I have just finished watching The Decameron and should immediately confess a sin. I bought the DVD in Hanoi, where films and CDs that are pirated in China are sold at prices too low for weak Europeans to resist. And unlike Bangkok, where bootlegs are usually limited to the latest garish offerings from Hollywood, in the Vietnamese capital you can easily find forgotten masterpieces and serious European cinema. I could not resist. I knew what I was doing was immoral and, elsewhere if not in VN, illegal. Pasolini may be dead and his actors undoubtedly did not have royalties written into their contract, but the company that owns the copyright to his films received no money from me. I briefly told myself that I would not have bought the film in London at the £15 or more it would undoubtedly sell for, and so the copyright holders had not lost a sale, while I had gained 100 minutes of viewing pleasure. I knew the argument was false and can only plead a mitigation so weak that it argues that two blacks make white. A few years ago one of my books – The Butterfly’s Wing – was published in Chinese in a pirated edition and I never received a Taiwanese cent in royalties. In the end my ego decided that having one or two thousand extra readers in Chinese – who would not have had the privilege of reading my work if the publishing house had to pay royalties – was worth losing the money, which would have to amounted to less than a thousand pounds. If I can be so magnanimous, I thought, surely the multinational companies who are being ripped off by the producers of pirated DVDs, could sure follow my example. Let’s leave that argument on the table for someone who is better versed in logic to come along and take it apart. But, given the first item at the top of the right-hand column this week, I will take another sidestep and state my position on generic drugs – drugs that are cheap copies of expensive patented versions and which are essential to keep millions of people living with HIV/AIDS alive. Despite the pharmaceutical companies’ claims to the contrary, generic drugs are not necessarily pirated. The principle of generic copies of patented drugs is that for every generic sold a royalty should be paid to the company that owns the patent. The income may be less than for the patented version, but since these generally are far too expensive for the world’s poor to afford, sales of generic drugs should both help those who are all and increase income for the drugs’ patentholders. Back to The Decameron.. But before we take the record out of its sleeve, let’s look at the cover. A few surprises await. I can’t comment on the detail of the Chinese translation, but the title is at least partly accurate, since the first two characters refer to Ten Days. (For those without a background in Greek, deka is ten, and imera is day.) Let’s assume that the third character refers to something like stories, and move on to look at the picture. Surprisingly, the shaven-headed, bearded and earringed gentleman and his lady friend do not appear in The Decameron, nor does the moonlit castle on pillars standing in the sea. The images have obviously been borrowed from another film; while the kissing couple are, I suspect, from Arabian Nights, another of Pasolini’s films, I have my doubts about the castle. E-mail me any suggestions you might have. The back cover is equally anomalous. The Chinese text appears to refer to the film, since it includes in Roman letters “The Canterbwry Taces” and “Arabin Nights”, misprints for two of Pasolini’s other films, The Canterbury Tales and Arabian Nights. However, the English text has been drafted in from another film altogether. It reads:
Sounds like a Hong Kong kung fu film. And to confuse us further, under the three pictures – which actually are from The Decameron – is some text thats suggest that the film we are about to watch is a Disney production starring Bruce Willis. By the time I put the disc in the DVD player I was beginning to wonder what it was I would actually see. But the screen came up with titles in Italian and the background hubbub of an Italian market ca 1300 AD. Like the book on which it is based (written by Boccaccio in the fourteenth century), the film is episodic. No characters are on screen for more than quarter of an hour and the stories are unconnected. It begins with a murder and disposal of the body, then moves to a market scene where a gentlewoman and her nurse plot to separate a handsome young fool from his money. After an hour and a half of seductions and double-crosses and death, it ends with Pasolini himself, as a master painter contemplating the mural he and his assistants have completed on the wall of a church – a mural that is of course a metaphor for the film. Set in the Middle Ages and made in 1970, The Decameron is a film of both its times. It depicts a bucolic world where, apart from brief downpours, the sun always shines, where people are poor but never starving, where houses are plain but substantial, where youth is fleeting but lived to the full and age brings acceptance or wisdom. Above all, it is a world of sex and frequent humour. One night a pretty young couple make love for the first (and second) time; in the morning the father discovers them asleep, her daughter’s hand cupping her naked lover’s genitals, and rejoices with his wife that the young man is from a rich family and the pair will have to marry. A handsome young man pretends to be deaf-mute in order to work in a convent where is seduced one by one by the nuns; when their demands wear him out, he protests; the nuns rejoice at the miracle of his regaining his voice, and establish a rota allowing him to stay and satisfy them all. An arrogant fool cleans the inside of a large storage jar for the man who makes love to his wife as she directs her husband’s scouring. A woman preserves the head of her servant-lover, murdered by her brothers, and a man returns from the dead to tell his celibate friend that in the next world lovemaking is not considered a sin; the celibate celebrates appropriately. Few of the actors were professionals, and most came from a rural Italy where life in the mid-twentieth century had not changed much in the previous six hundred years. There are faces that in an earlier time were categorised as grotesque and draw rather then repel attention. The acting is at once naif and realistic, as the actors’ embarrassment and pleasure of appearing in front of the camera becomes the embarrasment and pleasure of the characters they depict. Our belief is at once both challenged and suspended. We know that the teenage couple forced to marry faces many years of misunderstandings, but we hope they will eventually become as contented, if as sexless, as the girl’s parents. We smile at the idea that a whole convent should welcome a young stud, but hope that it represents a reality. Pasolini was homosexual and uncomfortable with the fact. While all the explicit sex in the film is between men and women, many scenes are homoerotic in both senses of the word – same-sex erotic and male erotic. The young men are either handsome or have an appealing glint in their eye. Their clothing is rough and cotton and often skin-tight. Genitals and taut rumps are clearly outlined and from time to time there are lingering glances between men or between one man’s eyes and another’s body. In the sex scenes both women and men are naked, but there is more penis-time in this one film than in a year of Hollywood and even the glimpse of an erection. There is also a brief – and to this generation’s eyes curious – scene, where a man in his twenties touches the codpiece of an eleven-year-old boy. The boy glares back but smiles when he sees the coin in the man’s hand. Beside him, a seven- or eight-year-old boy watches knowingly. There is no follow-up and no evidence that Pasolini was interested in young boys; rough types in their late teens and early twenties were his taste and downfall (he was murdered by a pick-up in 1975). But the scene reflects the fact that sex between men and boys has been a constant in human life for thousands of years and only recently has become a universal taboo. In today’s global village, all intergenerational sex is seen through the perspective of kiddie-porn, some of which is truly horrendous. And so we rightly set up legal and social barriers to prevent and punish such abuse and hopefully save lives, both physical and mental. In the process, however, for those few precocious boys who would welcome and even seek out the caring attentions of older men, something has been lost. It is not only attitudes towards man-boy sex that have changed in the past thirty years. The innocence portrayed in the boy-girl relationships is also dated. This is a world of straightforward coupling, where a young man’s lust is channelled into a young woman’s love. There is no suggestion of such complications as oral sex or sexually transmitted disease, of alcohol or drugs. While the film is set in the Middle Ages, it was made at the end of the 1960s, when it seemed that, for the young at least, sex could only be uncomplicated, joyous and free, and when lust and love were synonymous and inevitable in the Mediterranean sun. Many other artists of the time shared this vision: Georges Moustaki, for example, became very popular for a repertoire of songs that celebrated men's love for women, vagabondage and sun. But there is no point in nostalgia, no reward in yearning for the past. Knowledge is as precious as innocence and we should celebrate the lives we have rather than the lives we once had or never knew. Besides, thirty-odd years from now some of us will look back and see how innocent we are compared to what will come. And that generation will be appear as ignorant as we do to the one which follows it. Plus ça change… |
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