News that a new film version of the Arabian Nights is in the works with a scheduled release date sometime early in 2014 has been exciting Hollywood watchers eager to see how this new film's young hero, apparently to be played by Australian heartthrob Liam Hemsworth, will join forces with Sinbad, Aladdin and the Genie of the Lamp to rescue Scheherazade from the dark powers of British actor Anthony Hopkins. While the film's bare-bones synopsis indicates that it is at best only loosely based on the Arab stories making up the original Thousand and One Nights from which the characters of Sinbad, Aladdin and Scheherazade are drawn, the announcement of a new film drawing on these tales has directed attention to their remarkable staying-power. While the new film will doubtless make use of the latest special effects in its efforts to seduce contemporary audiences, the latter will at least in part be attracted by the charm of the original tales. From the early days of silent film until the present day, cinema-goers worldwide have enjoyed film versions of the mediaeval Arab stories contained in the vast compendium of the Thousand and One Nights. While this has had the unfortunate effect of making the films sometimes more familiar to Western audiences than the stories on which they are based, these films have at least served to popularise many of the stories, making the Baghdad merchant Sinbad, the story-teller Scheherazade, the various genies or jinn that populate the tales and even the Abbasid caliph Haroun Al-Rachid himself who figures in some of the stories familiar figures to global audiences. Much the same could be said of many of the extraordinary happenings, motifs and objects figuring in the tales. Just as it is hard to imagine a British Christmas without the productions of traditional pantomimes that usually include at least Aladdin and possibly one or more genies, so it is also difficult to imagine the Arabian Nights without their flying carpets, genies imprisoned in lamps or rings, human beings turned into animals, poor merchants showered with lavish gifts, or mediaeval Baghdad's human cast of rich emirs and caliphs, handsome princes and beautiful princesses, wicked viziers, shopkeepers, beggars, porters, slaves and thieves. Yet, while there have been dozens, perhaps hundreds, of films based on the Arabian Nights, some of them dating back to the earliest days of Western cinema, such as Edison's 1902 version of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and pioneering French director Georges Méliès's 1905 film of Le Palais des mille et une nuits, few of them have been faithful to the original tales. According to the British scholar Robert Irwin writing in the Encyclopaedia of the Arabian Nights, a reference work, much “exotic trash” has been produced out of the Nights, with many film versions either serving as the pretext for special effects or presenting a sanitised version of the stories made safe for entertainment purposes and directed primarily at children. However, Irwin like other writers has been able to identify at least three masterpieces that European directors have produced out of material found in the Nights, together with a clutch of other films that at least have claims on the viewer's attention. The masterpieces are the German artist and animator Lotte Reiniger's 1926 silent film Die Abendeuer des prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Ahmed) made using Reiniger's trademark technique of silhouetted cut-outs, British director Alexandra Korda's 1940 film The Thief of Bagdad, very different from the 1924 silent film of the same name, and perhaps above all the Italian poet, novelist and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1974 film Il Fiore delle Mille e una Notte (The Flower of the Thousand and One Nights). This is described by Irwin as “the best and certainly the most intelligent of all the Nights films”. Pasolini is currently the subject of a retrospective at the Cinemathèque francaise in Paris, where an exhibition on his life and work is running until January. This is an opportunity for visitors to reacquaint themselves with the work of the late director, from the early exercises in neo-realism that linked Pasolini to other Italian film directors of the post-war period to the Trilogy of Life series, film versions of Boccaccio's Decameron, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and the Thousand and One Nights that Pasolini made in the final years of his career. THIEVES OF BAGHDAD: The original Thief of Bagdad, a silent film made in 1924 by US director Raoul Walsh and starring Douglas Fairbanks in the title role, takes elements from the Nights tale of Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Peri-Banu, in which the three sons of the sultan of India, each of them in love with the princess Nur Al-Nihar, are sent off to find a marvelous gift, the most marvelous of which will win her hand in marriage. In the 1924 film, Ahmed, now a Baghdad thief played by Fairbanks, competes with the prince of the Indies and the prince of the Mongols for Nur Al-Nihar's hand, outdoing their gifts of a magic crystal ball and a flying carpet with a cloak of invisibility and a chest of magic powder. Needless to say, it is Ahmed, the thief of Baghdad, who wins the princess, and his liaison with the fairy Peri-Banu, a kind of female jinn, that makes up much of the original tale is entirely elided. The Thief of Bagdad did much to establish the visual look of mediaeval Baghdad for Western filmmakers, and the film's emphasis on magic and swash-buckling adventure was taken over into subsequent versions. However, the film is also based on an original story that has an at best uncertain status. The story of Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Peru-Banu first appeared in the early 18th-century French translation of the Nights by Antoine Galland, the first of all the Western translations of the tales, but an Arabic source for it has never been found. According to Galland, he was told the story by a Syrian informant who also told him the stories of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, for Western audiences among the most famous of the stories. The story of Prince Ahmed is thus one of the so-called “orphan stories” that do not figure in any Arabic manuscript of the Nights. One searches for it in vain in the standard modern English translations. It is also the only story in the collection as a whole to include a flying carpet, which nevertheless features in nearly all Western film versions of the tales and has become a standard fixture in representations of oriental magic in the Western imagination. Since the story of Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Peri-Banu is the only story in the Nights to include such a carpet, the suspicion must be that this is a Western European, and not a mediaeval Arab, invention. In her 1926 silent film Die Abendeuer des prinzen Achmed, the German artist and animator Lotte Reiniger also used elements from the tale of Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Peri-Banu, possibly because they had been made popular by Walsh's film two years earlier. However, this time they were presented using animated cut-outs seen in silhouette against a lighted background, a technique that Reiniger had made her own, in order to produce what is often considered to be the world's first full-length animated feature. The storyline of the film is somewhat involved, including motifs taken from the Nights as a whole, among them flying horses, the mythical land of Wak-Wak and genies imprisoned in magical lamps, along with the story of prince Ahmed and Peri-Banu. Like many later film versions of the Nights, Reiniger seems to have chosen the material at least in part in order to show off her filmmaking skills and to orchestrate the action sequences that prince Ahmed's adventures inevitably involved. However, the result is a film that is both attractive and involving. Anyone, like the present writer, who stumbles on it in the major exhibition of Reiniger's work in the southern German city of Tubingen cannot fail to be struck by its remarkable freshness and charm. Better known than either of these two early versions of the Nights is British director Alexander Korda's 1940 version of the Thief of Bagdad. This is again set in mediaeval Baghdad, visually rather similar to Walsh's 1924 version, but this time round Ahmed is entirely overshadowed by the wicked grand vizier Jaffar and above all by Abu, the young thief of Baghdad, one of many departures from the storyline of the earlier film, played by the Anglo-Indian child actor Sabu. It is Sabu, in fact, who makes the film, lending it his extraordinary energy and charisma. One of the film's best-known sequences takes place on the shore of a deserted island, for example, where Abu has been shipwrecked in a storm conjured up by the evil grand vizier. He finds a bottle on the shore, which inevitably contains a genie. When released, the genie tells him that he is going to kill his rescuer, and is only prevented from doing so by being tricked back into the bottle. Though placed half-way through Korda's film, the episode is taken from the story of The Fisherman and the Demon, told by Scheherazade in night three of the collection. In the famous translation by the 19th-century British orientalist Sir Richard Burton, this story tells of how a poor fisherman, casting his nets one day, pulled up “a cucumber-shaped jar of yellow copper, evidently full of something, whose mouth was made fast with a leaden cap stamped with the seal ring of our Lord Solomon.” “Taking out a knife, he worked at the lead till he had loosened it from the jar. Then he laid the cup on the ground and shook the vase to pour out whatever might be inside. He found nothing in it, whereat he marvelled with an exceeding marvel. But presently there came forth from the jar a smoke which spired heavenward into ether (whereat he again marveled with mighty marvel), and which trailed along the earth's surface till presently, having reached its full height, the thick vapour condensed, and became an ifrit huge of bulk, whose crest touched the clouds while his feet were on the ground. His head was as a dome, his hands like pitchforks, his legs long as masts, and his mouth big as a cave. His teeth were like large stones, his nostrils ewers, his eyes two lamps, and his look was fierce and lowering.” Abu, like the fisherman in the tale, successfully tricks the genie back into its bottle. However, unlike the fisherman he then goes on to further adventures, eventually landing in Baghdad in triumph on a flying carpet, killing the evil grand vizier with a magic crossbow, and aiding prince Ahmed in marrying the princess, daughter of the neighbouring sultan of Basra. As Irwin justly says in his comments on the film, Korda's Thief of Bagdad makes intensive use of special effects and action sequences, its focus on its true hero, the young thief Abu, making it a work particularly directed at children. This emphasis, carried over into the well-known trilogy of Nights films featuring animated sequences produced by the pioneering American animator Ray Harryhausen — The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974) and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1978) — had the unfortunate result of relegating Nights material outside the adult repertoire (though as Irwin also comments, quoting the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, “all great literature becomes children's literature,” a remark that deserves to be pondered.) The three Harryhausen films, made by various directors, include the kind of action sequences familiar from the same animator's other films, among them the fighting skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts (1963), first tried out in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, and the dinosaur fights in One Million Years BC (1966). However, despite their “cheerful eclecticism” (“oriental props signal fantasyland” — Irwin), and some occasionally striking performances (British actor Tom Baker as the evil magician Koura in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, for example, just before his stint as the BBC science-fiction character Doctor Who), the films lack the infectious energy of Korda's Thief of Bagdad, much of it down to the marvelous performance given by Sabu as the title character. THE FLOWER OF THE NIGHTS: Unlike Korda's version of the tales, Pasolini's Il Fiore delle Mille e una Notte, in English The Arabian Nights, stays close not only to episodes found in the Nights but also to narratives from them. The film adapts a handful of stories from the hundreds found in the collection, slicing and reordering them to produce what some have argued may be the director's finest film. However, just as important as Pasolini's use of original stories from the Nights, eschewing the habit of previous directors simply to lift motifs or situations from them, is his fidelity to the narrative character of the collection as a whole. The Arabian Nights famously makes use of a frame tale, the story of Scheherazade and the sultan Shahriyar, in which Scheherazade, the sultan's new wife, begins telling him a story ever night in order to entertain him. These stories, told over a total of a thousand and one nights, sufficiently pique the sultan's curiosity that he postpones his decision to have each of his wives put to death after spending a single night with him and eventually altogether abandons it. Hundreds of stories proliferate within the frame story of the collection, with some continuing over many nights and others using the characteristic device of the tale-within-the-tale. Here, characters within the stories themselves launch upon inset forms of story-telling, such that Scheherazade is imagined as becoming not only a first-order narrator, but also a second or even a third-order one, recounting not only her own stories to the patiently listening sultan, but also the stories of the characters in her stories and the stories of the characters in the stories of the characters in her stories (and possibly even so on). In his film, Pasolini adopts the device of the frame tale as a way of containing this kind of recursive growth, though he does not use the story of Scheherazade and Shariyar for this purpose. Instead, he uses the story of Ali Shar and Zumurrud, told over nights 308 to 327 of the collection, in which a young man, Ali Shar, called Nour al-Din in Pasolini's film, buys the slave girl Zumurrud at the slavers' market. This apparently casual purchase, unplanned at least on Ali Shar's part, then involves him in all manner of curious adventures, perhaps indicating the serendipitous way in which fate can strike. Had Ali Shar not wandered into the market at just the moment that Zumurrud was being put up for sale, he would not have seen or bought her. Had Zumurrud's gaze not also landed on Ali Shar, and had she not had the money to organise her purchase — Ali Shar being penniless, having frittered away his inheritance — he would also not have ended up possessing her. In Burton's translation, the transaction runs as follows: “said the broker, ‘O my lady, look who pleaseth thee of these that are present, and point him out, that I may sell thee to him.' So she looked round the ring of merchants, examining one by one their physiognomies, till her glance fell on Ali Shar… and she said, ‘O broker, I will be sold to none but to this my lord, owner of the handsome face and slender form… For none shall own me but he, because his cheek is smooth and the water of his mouth sweet as Salsabil, and his spittle is a cure for the sick and his charms daze and dazzle poet and proser.” “When the broker heard the verses she repeated on the charms of Ali Shar, he marveled at her eloquence, no less than at the brightness of her beauty; but her owner said to him, ‘Marvel not at her splendour which shameth the noonday sun, nor that her memory is stored with the choicest verses of the poets; for besides this, she can repeat the glorious Koran, according to the seven readings, and the august Traditions, after ascription and authentic transmission; and she writeth the seven modes of handwriting and she knoweth more learning and knowledge than the most learned… Exclaimed the broker, ‘O happy the man who hath her in his house and maketh her of his choicest treasures!'” (Throughout his translation, Burton supplied footnotes on words or concepts that were possibly unfamiliar to Western readers. For Salsabil he gives “the fountain in Paradise.”) Unfortunately, others beside Ali Shar covet Zumurrud, and she is kidnapped by a mysterious stranger, her separation from Ali Shar being used as a device to engineer the two characters' eventual reunion. However, this does not happen before the interpolation of a set of other tales, among them episodes from lesser-known stories such as Abu Nuwas and the Three Boys (nights 381-3) and Haroun al-Rashid and the Lady Zubeida in the Pool (nights 385-6), and a long narrative sequence taken from the story of Aziz and Aziza, inset as nights 112-28 in the longer tale of King Umar ibn al-Nu'man and his Family (nights 45-145). Pasolini used locations for his version of the Nights in Ethiopia, Yemen and Nepal, and there is a marvelous final sequence in which Noureddin (Ali Shar) is reunited with Zumurrud, now disguised as the king of an unnamed country at the end of a series of extraordinary adventures. Zumurrud recognises Noureddin from the first, but Nour al-Din must be coaxed into recognising her. Having done so, the narrator says, in Burton's translation, “and when the morrow came, Zumurrud summoned all the troops and the lords of the realm and said to them, ‘I am minded to journey to this man's country; so choose you a viceroy, who shall rule over you till I return to you.' And they answered, ‘We hear and we obey.' Then she applied herself to making ready the wants of the way, to wit provaunt and provender, monies and rarities for presents, camels and mules and so forth; after which she set out from her city with Ali Shar [Noureddin], and they ceased not faring on, till they arrived at his native place, where he entered his house and gave many gifts to his friends and alms and largesse to the poor. And Allah vouchsafed him children by her, and they both lived the gladdest and happiest of lives, till there came to them the Destroyer of delights and the Severer of societies and the Garnerer of graves. And glorified be He the Eternal without cease, and praised be He in every case.” Audiences are encouraged to make what they will of the strange turns of fate that befall the characters of the Nights in Pasolini's film, which follows, however rearranged, the story-within-story logic of the original compilation. The director also supplied an epigraph to his work that many have seen as offering insights into its meaning: “the truth is to be found not in one dream, but in many dreams.” Pasolini Roma, an exhibition at the Cinémathèque française, Paris, until 24 January 2014.
