Gli Orienti di Pier Paolo Pasolini. Il fiore delle mille e una note. Viaggio fotografico di Roberto Villa nel cinema Pasoliniano (The Orients of Pier Paolo Pasolini. The Flower of the Thousand and One Nights. Roberto Villa's photographic journey through Pasolini's cinema) documents the shooting of the 1974 film written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, based on The Thousand and One Nights. This film wasthe third and final chapter of the so-called "Trilogy of Life", after The Decameron (1971) and The Canterbury Tales (1972). The film won the Grand Prix Speciale della Giuria at the 27th Cannes Film Festival.
The East, for Pasolini, was a place of the spirit where a desired, dreamed world could be found, which does not exist in this West and, in that Fairytale Film, "The Flower of the Thousand and One Nights", is brought to the screen with a fantastic narration and with the colors of the dream. Pasolini promised that "It will be my most colorful film, the richest in beautiful colors" and already the chosen locations and the Middle Eastern populations were evidence of this, aided by the costumes of Danilo Donati on hundreds of extras. Much, beyond all this, is contained in the over 300 unpublished images of the book which, built following the compositional philosophies of the history of art and the theory of communication, illustrate the set and the off-set of the film.
“I am convinced that Pasolini would have liked this book very much, both for the "colorful" images of the film, and very much for its uniqueness, it is the only book in the world that presents original, unique and unrepeatable images. In a meeting with Pasolini in Cinecittà, for the remaking of a scene, in the autumn of '73, I had brought an album with twenty pages of twenty slides and, while Pier Paolo looked at them fascinated he said "But what beautiful places, what beautiful colors" as if he were seeing them for the first time, then closing the album looking at me he said "You made a film where I was the actor and you were the director".
- Roberto Villa
