Arabian Nights: A Queer Film Classic
By Michael Moon
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About this ebook
A Queer Film Classic on 1974’s Arabian Nights by Pier Paolo Pasolini, the controversial Italian director who was murdered under mysterious circumstances in 1975.
Already internationally distinguished as a poet, novelist, and outspoken social critic of the postwar period, Pasolini turned to filmmaking around 1960. In little more than a decade, he produced one of the most remarkable bodies of work in cinema history, beginning with his early film-portraits of the struggles of underclass youths and extending through his adaptations of such sacred or mythic narratives as the stories of Oedipus and Medea and the Gospel of St. Matthew. In what turned out to be the last years of his career, Pasolini turned to several classic works of chain-narrativeThe Arabian Nights, The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodomas models for his own radical expansion of cinema’s capacities for telling, showing, and enacting embodiment, nudity, and sexual desires and behaviors.
This book explores the legacy and context of Arabian Nights, in many ways the most optimistic and appealing of Pasolini’s late films, not only in the final explosive phase of Pasolini’s career but also more broadly in the global history of film spectacle from Douglas Fairbanks to Maria Montez.
Michael Moon teaches at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
Michael Moon
Astrologer, Sound Healer, Musician, Artist
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Arabian Nights - Michael Moon
CHAPTER ONE: PASOLINI SCHEHERAZADE
There is an image of Pier Paolo Pasolini directing Arabian Nights that I haven’t been able to get out of my mind as I’ve been writing this book. A production still taken by Roberto Villa, it shows the director dashing off the set during the filming of one of the exterior scenes at the magnificent mosque of Isfahan in central Iran. Several lines of richly costumed performers—turbaned and silk-robed courtiers, scimitar-wielding guards, soldiers in exotic looking helmets and armor—stand ready for filming. To the left of center, three young men in modern dress (an assistant director? a costumer? a props man?) are applying last-minute touches. To the right of center, Pasolini can be seen running out of the frame, his arms pumping vigorously.
Pasolini is immediately recognizable as himself, first of all by the heavy-framed dark eyeglasses he sports—a visual signature of his. Looking at the photo, I’m struck once again by the physical slightness of this fifty-year-old: his head is that of a mature man, but the rest of his body looks like it could be a boy’s. There are about twenty other men visible or partly visible in the shot, and the only other one who appears to be in motion (the crew member approaching the group of guards) seems to be moving at a slow and deliberate pace. The image of Pasolini, in contrast, is captured in such energetic motion that it’s just beginning to blur. He looks to me like some of my favorite images of Tintin, the boy comics hero, dashing into or out of a frame and into the camera, I suspect, to take in the visual composition he is about to film and perhaps to order further last-minute tweaks. The high spirits he shows here would be captured again in a video shot a year or so later in which Pasolini makes some fine adjustments to a group of actors, then dashes back to check the camera’s view. In this case, the scene is one of the most harrowing he ever filmed, a torture and execution near the end of Salò, the controversial and disturbing film he made after Arabian Nights. I can’t remember if we actually see him smiling on video as he dashes around the set, but I remember feeling, as I watched, that his whole body seemed to smile, exuding a palpable joy in his work.
FIGURE 1 Pasolini dashing ...FIGURE 1 Pasolini dashing off the set during filming of Arabian Nights. Photo: Roberto Villa. Photo by permission of Roberto Villa.
The young cineaste Gideon Bachmann visited the set of Arabian Nights and reported that Pasolini appeared to wish that he could do all the jobs of the crew himself (1973–74, 26). This extended even to acting in The Decameron (1971), the first of what he called his Trilogy of Life films, based on various medieval chain-narratives (The Canterbury Tales [1972] is the second and Arabian Nights the third). In The Decameron, Pasolini cast himself in the role of a follower of the great early Renaissance painter Giotto, who as master-artist, presides over a team of assistants.
The great fresco narrative sequences that Giotto developed with the help and in the company of the young men in his studio provide an interesting analogy for Pasolini’s view of his own filmmaking career late in its unfolding, especially the serial-narrative films of the Trilogy of Life. These films often featured the kind of underclass young men to whom he was attracted and whom, in some cases, he loved and befriended; several had appeared in earlier films of Pasolini’s.
Why did Pasolini throw himself into every phase of production when he might have sat back and let his crew do most of the work? In the role of a follower of Giotto in The Decameron, Pasolini raises the question himself near the end of the film, when, after experiencing an ecstatic vision of the Virgin Mary and then completing work on a fresco narrative of her life, the painter turns to the audience and asks, Why complete a work of art when it is so beautiful simply to dream of it?
The intense pleasure of a beautiful dream, the play of anticipatory fantasy, the arduous labor of planning and executing a project as complex as making a feature film, the frequent anxiety and frustration of working with large, mostly nonprofessional casts, often on locations remote from film studios—all of these (as well as many other) emotional states are in play in the accounts about the making of Pasolini’s Arabian Nights. Like many of the episodes in the film itself, these affective states, and the actions and experiences to which they are responses, continually turn into each other—erotic dream into harsh reality; wrenching separation into blissful reunion; social lowliness into sovereignty and vice-versa: an enslaved young woman disguises herself as a man and becomes ruler of a desert city-state; but several of the princes in the film, after enduring searing experiences, trade their splendid robes for rags and take up the lives of wandering beggars. Young men mesmerized for a time by pleasure are recurrent focuses of the film, but some of the same young men are repeatedly shown struggling uncertainly down a dusty road or effortfully passing from one part of a strange city to another, often pursued by a mocking crowd of small boys. These young men are regularly shown experiencing intense pleasures, including erotic pleasures, but they are just as often shown engaged in the hard labor of living. The most admirable of these characters embrace erotic pleasure when it makes itself available, but in keeping with those recurrent images of Pasolini nearly dancing for joy on the sets of his films, their libidos overflow into other pursuits and projects that others might see as repellently and unenviably