Arabian Nights

The final film in Pier Paolo Pasolini's “Trilogy of Life,” (following The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales), the Arabian Nights adapts Scheherezade’s tales-within-tales—populated by slaves and kings, demons and lovers. By turns lusty, poetic and humorous, Pasolini's film is a ribald, liberating celebration of life in all its mystery. Shot on location in Iran, Yemen and Ethiopia, Arabian Nights offer a succession of sumptuously surreal surprises, from the pictorial to the sensual. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. “Pasolini’s most beautiful film and a triumphant vindication of the entire trilogy… [Conjures] an endlessly varied and cosmopolitan world: inconceivable palaces with jeweled and mirrored sanctums, bazaars, deserts, tortuously winding alleys, the high seas. But also, in keeping with the exoticism of his source, he has chosen this time to admit tales with a strong element of the fantastic: prophecies fulfilled mysterious kinesic languages, intuitions and premonitions, levitations, transmogrification... intellectual reasoning cannot account for the stories’ consuming delight, at once relaxed and euphoric, in the act of love, or the enthralled but irreverent appreciation of the human body… [Arabian Nights] has managed to show the broadest range of human passions, with sexuality rightfully prominent, in a form that expresses boundless affection but not a trace of prurience.”—Tony Rayns, Monthly Film Bulletin. 
Bing Theater | $10 general admission. $7 museum members, seniors (62+), students with valid ID | Tickets: 323 857-6010 or purchase online.