The Trilogia della vita (Trilogy of Life) is a chain of 3 motion pictures that Pier Paolo Pasolini accomplished sooner than his frightening assassination in 1975, and it continues to be one of the so much debatable of his cinematic works. In Allegories of Contamination Patrick Rumble offers an incisive serious and theoretical research of those motion pictures and the Marxist filmmaker's complicated, unique proposal of the cinematic medium.

With the 3 movies that make up the Trilogy of Life - The Decameron, Canterbury Tales, and The Arabian Nights - Pasolini makes an attempt to recapture the air of secrecy surrounding renowned, predominantly oral kinds of storytelling via a pro-modern imaginative and prescient of blameless, unalienated our bodies and pleasures. In those works Pasolini looks to desert the explicitly political engagement that marked his past works - movies that led him to be pointed out with different radical filmmakers resembling Bellocchio, Bertolucci, and Godard. although, Pasolini insisted that those have been his 'most ideological films,' and his political engagement interprets right into a mannerist, anti-classical sort or what he known as a 'cinema of poetry.' Rumble bargains a comparative research in keeping with the idea that of 'aesthetic contamination,' that's basic to the certainty of Pasolini's poetics. Aesthetic illness issues the mediation among various cultures and varied historic moments. via stylistic experimentation, the Trilogy of Life provides a family tree of visible codes, an interrogation of the subjectivity of narrative cinema. In those movies Pasolini celebrates existence, and maybe therein lies their basic heresy.