Synopsis
The Canterbury Tales (I racconti di Canterbury, 1972) is an Italian-French film by Pier Paolo Pasolini — watch it online on iFILM. The cast includes Hugh Griffith, Ninetto Davoli, Franco Citti, and Pasolini himself as Chaucer. The film took home the Golden Bear at the 1972 Berlin International Film Festival.
Pasolini lifts eight stories from Geoffrey Chaucer's 14th-century verse collection and puts them on screen without a trace of reverence. Travelers gathered at a medieval English inn trade tales that are bawdy, cruel, farcical, and occasionally tender — sometimes all at once. The approach matches Chaucer's own register: bodies, money, lust, and death share the frame as equals, with no moral distance between the viewer and what's happening.
This is the second entry in Pasolini's Trilogy of Life — between Decameron (1971) and Arabian Nights (1974) — the cycle where he argued for the raw vitality of pre-industrial folk culture against what he saw as the deadening effect of modern consumer society. Shot on location in England, with Danilo Donati's deliberately painterly costumes, it looks more like a Bruegel canvas than a heritage production. Stream The Canterbury Tales (1972) online on iFILM.
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