“I wonder... why to produce a work of art when it’s nice to just dream about it?”

This is Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, at the end of ‘Il Decameron’.

And this is what I have been doing all these days.

Just validating my lack of productivity.

The Decameron (Italian: Il Decameron), based on the 14th-century medieval allegory by Giovanni Boccaccio, made in 1971, and like all Pasolini’s later film is a pastiche, disjointed tales that makes fun of everything, and embraces life in a way that is most heartening. That’s what the French call ‘joie de vivre’. There’s everything, love, sex, wine, food and the church, and nothing in moderation.

In this scene, at the end of the film, Pasolini appears as a Michaelangelo-like figure finishing a fresco on the church wall. As his companions celebrate the end of the task, the artist Pasolini wonders whether it was worth it. It also mirrors the director Pasolini’s thoughts on completing the film.

It was the first film in Pasolini’s ‘Trilogy of Life’, the others being ‘The Canterbury Tales’ and ‘Arabian Nights’. The film was entered into the 21st Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Silver Bear Extraordinary Jury Prize.