Arabian Nights was released a year before Pier Paolo Pasolini died. It was the last of his Trilogy of Life, following The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales. Of all his work, this was the first to embrace queerness completely. Pasolini was a homosexual who experienced an odd ambivalence with the Catholicism that raised him. Often his works would look back to the past in order to explain some elements regarding future events. Instead of focusing on peasants’ sufferings, Pasolini chose to display happiness felt by those neglected by affluent urbanities. The perfect ground for such a seedling should have been these classical stories that contributed so much in shaping people’s way of thinking.
The author is absent from Arabian Nights unlike the first two films in this trilogy. In Decameron, Pasolini takes up the role of a painting artist whose productions mirrors what happens in these movies. This film has Chaucer as its director where he even portrays himself and recreates one familiar image of an author at work.
In Arabian Nights, the author’s absence is quite understandable since we do not really know who wrote the first text. Pasolini made his farthest journey to the past as he intends to reveal a history which can shape this world for him and allow people like him to live without having to conceal their sexual status.
Scheherazade is a framing device Pasolini dispenses with in which the slave girl delays being executed by telling the bloodthirsty king stories that go on for nights upon end. Instead, he takes the tales that struck him most as a boy and breaks them up into episodes so that they can be spread out through the whole length of the film. The starting point of this movie is when Zumurrud and Nur-ed-Din first meet while its ending is when we see their final scene.
Zumurrud is an enslaved girl to be sold at auction. Man after man offers huge amounts of money to buy her, but her current owner has said she will have the last word on whether or not she goes. Zu refuses these old, haggard men. She settles on Nur-ed-Din, a penniless young man. Throughout the movie, they cope with attempts by society to separate them apart. They are at one instance forced apart from each other; thus during such separations there are sometimes interludes featuring minor characters who temporarily assume some narrative focus.
Other incarnations are usually exoticized but in an “Arabia” Pasolini presents it as something else. He filmed in Yemen, Iran and Nepal using real locations where most of the production design involved eradicating those objects that could have been identified as 20th century mid-late relics. The cities and buildings he films are reconstructed as closely to his image of their originals so we can experience a world without that massive consumption and capitalism haunting us. On the other hand, this is also a world of total sexual fluidity, where Pasolini for the first time introduces overtly homosexual characters into his movies.
Part of Zurmurrd’s story involves her posing as a male ruler behind an ornate mask. This king does not like women; such observations abound among the people of her country while she tries to reunite with her lost partner. Sexuality means something very different to these people than it does to you it’s a question of taste, not identity (taste). I believe Pasolini did not see sexuality as predestined straight or gay orientation but more like everyone has fluid sexuality.
The king’s subjects occasionally think that he prefers women and others for men, with none of them being bothered by this thought.
Some part of Pasolini’s real life is embedded in one of the stories. Ninetto Davoli was an actor whom Pasolini saw as his muse and also fell in love with him. While filming The Canterbury Tales, Davoli told Pasolini that he was about to get married to a woman and that their sexual or romantic affair would come to an end. It apparently shocked Pasolini deeply. In Arabian Nights, Aziz (Davoli) deserts his bride at the altar for another woman. After dumping him, she instructs him on how to make up with said other woman before dying from heartbreak caused by his departure alone. This scene in the movie show shows how much pain Davoli had been going through because it marks ten years since he has lived with Pasionini until when they parted ways
Love and sexuality are the major concepts in Arabian Nights. Pasolini’s movies are most characterized by nudity and sexual scenes, which is what he thought was the meaning of life. Life in the artist’s view is defined by the links created between people. Those connections that are formed without relying on formal language are more forceful. The embodiment of physical connection through sexual intercourse with one’s partner surpasses anything else, it being impossible to control these feelings inside, as they should become material to relieve those who possess them. As long as it is consensual, then according to Pasolini, there is no such thing as sinful sex because sex is the purest form of love.
The trilogy of death started with Salo or 120 Days of Sodom. This marked the beginning of his Trilogy of Death series. But when he responded to a ransom for stolen reels from his movie, his dead battered & burnt body was found on a beach somewhere in Italy. He was only 53 years old. It makes you so furious because there could have been so much more that Pasolini wanted and could produce here
His career had not come to an end but he was taken away by a hateful and cruel act. The ones who killed him were fascist militants, the same people who are taking over power in the West today. Works like this should be considered as acts of resistance against those with ideas that humanity should simply just fit into someone’s warped view of our sexualities and ourselves.
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