Boccaccio’s Decameron and Pasolini’s transcreative look

Abstract

By moving literary text strategies into audiovisual discourse, Pier Paolo Pasolini reports to the mediation of popular culture, thus safeguarding the vitality of the latter as well as preserving the capacity depicted in Decameron to deal with the variety of sources from both literary and oral tradition. The organicity of Pasolini’s film owes a lot to the recreation of frame stories to produce two blocks full of meaning. This paper aims at examining the transcreation process and the creative vertigo of the episodes that entwine situations, points of view and types drawn from Boccacio’s oeuvre k into the film, which selects ten novellas and updates their line of references with the awareness of the present-day shooting process.