Arabian Nights

A Queer Film Classic on 1974s 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 Sades The 120 Days of Sodomas models for his own radical expansion of cinemas 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 Pasolinis late films, not only in the final explosive phase of Pasolinis 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.