GARAGE DISCUSSION GROUP #1 (MAY 2009)--- Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom

This film (take a deep breath) is the first point of discussion for the brand (spanking) new Garage Discussion Group. Every two to three weeks we take a film and put it under the electron microscope of critical analysis.

It grew out of this thread > http://www.theauteurs.com/topics/2103/comments

“…we’re up for a full autopsy here, and the debate should be challenging enough that we all feel at the end of it that nobody cruised through.”

Anyone can join, but I urge you to maintain as far as possible respect for the opinions of others and not let this descend into a chaos of subjective personal attacks.

The objective? To explore, thoroughly, at all levels, from cinematographic science through to critical philosophy, Pasolini’s controversial last film. Since its release in 1975, Salò has been equally heralded as a masterpiece and condemned as pretentiously vile vanity project. The goal is to find out why, and explore why opinion is so utterly divided.

We will be looking closely at excerpts from the film (stills and shot construction), breaking it down on an aesthetic/semiotic level, as well as arguing more obvious concerns to do with content and censorship.

“Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notorious final film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, has been called nauseating, shocking, depraved, pornographic . . . it’s also a masterpiece. The controversial poet, novelist, and filmmaker’s transposition of the Marquis de Sade’s 18th-century opus of torture and degradation to 1944 Fascist Italy remains one of the most passionately debated films of all time, a thought-provoking inquiry into the political, social, and sexual dynamics that define the world we live in.” —The Criterion Collection

Prelude—- A basic reading list.
For anyone unfamiliar with Pasolini the auteur_, please read this >
*"http://www.theauteurs.com/cast_members/2150":http://www.theauteurs.com/castmembers/2150*

For anyone unfamiliar with the original text from which Pasolini drew his work, please read this >
http://www.globusz.com/ebooks/120Days/00000010.htm
(I believe this to be the complete, unedited text)

http://www.theauteurs.com/films/532
http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/347
http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/267
http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/4/salo.html

…more advanced reading can be found in these texts ↓
Pasolini, Pier Paolo. “Heretical Empiricism,” Indiana University Press, ©1988.
Greene, Naomi. “Cinema As Heresy; The Films of Pasolini,” Pantheon, ©1991.
(although these texts are not required reading for the group discussion, you are encouraged to explore as many avenues of thought as possible, and challenge your preconceptions.)

And obviously, you need to WATCH THE FILM
(probably more than once— we will be closely examining certain shot sequences.)

A Mad Dream
(Pier Paolo Pasolini’s own notes on his film Salò, 1974+ )

Foreword
“This film is a cinematographic transposition of Sade’s novel The 120 Days of Sodom. I should like to say that I have been absolutely faithful to the psychology of the characters and their actions, and that I have added nothing of my own. Even the structure of the story line is identical, although obviously it is very synthetised. To make this synthesis I resorted to an idea Sade certainly had in mind – Dante’s Inferno. I was thus able to reduce in a Dantesque way certain deeds, certain speeches, certain days from the whole immense catalogue of Sade. There is a kind of ‘Anti-Inferno’ (the Antechamber of Hell) followed by three infernal ‘Circles’: ‘The Circle of Madness’; ‘The Circle of Shit’, and ‘The Circle of Blood’. Consequently, the Story-Tellers who, in Sade’s novel, are four, are three in my film, the fourth having become a virtuoso – she accompanies the tales of the three others on the piano.

Despite my absolute fidelity to Sade’s text, I have however introduced an absolutely new element: the action instead of taking place in eighteenth-century France, takes place practically in our own time, in Salò, around 1944, to be exact.

This means that the entire film with its unheard-of atrocities which are almost unmentionable, is presented as an immense sadistic metaphor of what was the Nazi-Fascist ‘dissociation’ from its ‘crimes against humanity’. Curval, Blangis, Durcet, the Bishop – Sade’s characters (who are clearly SS men in civilian dress) behave exactly with their victims as the Nazi-Fascists did with theirs. They considered them as objects and destroyed automatically all possibility of human relationship with them.

This does not mean that I make all that explicit in the film. No, I repeat again, I have not added a single word to what the characters in Sade have to say nor have I added a single detail to the acts they commit. The only points of reference to the 20th century are the way they dress, comport themselves, and the houses in which they live.

Naturally there is some disproportion between the four protagonists of Sade turned into Nazi-Fascists and actual Nazi-Fascists who are historically true. There are differences in psychology and ideology. Differences and also some incoherence. But this accentuates the visionary mood, the unreal nightmare quality of the film. This film is a mad dream, which does not explain what happened in the world during the 40s. A dream which is all the more logical in its whole when it’s the least in its details."

Salò and Sade
“Practical reason says that during the Republic of Salò it would have been particularly easy given the atmosphere to organise, as Sade’s protagonists did, a huge orgy in a villa guarded by SS men. Sade says explicitly in a phrase, less famous than so many others, that nothing is more profoundly anarchic than power – any power. To my knowledge there has never been in Europe any power as anarchic as that of the Republic of Salò: it was the most petty excess functioning as government. What applies to all power was especially clear in this one.

In addition to being anarchic what best characterises power – any power – is its natural capacity to turn human bodies into objects. Nazi-Fascist repression excelled in this.

Another link with Sade’s work is the acceptance/non-acceptance of the philosophy and culture of the period. Just as Sade’s protagonists accepted the method – at least mental or linguistic – of the philosophy of the Enlightened Age without accepting all the reality which produced it, so do those of the Fascist Republic accept Fascist ideology beyond all reality. Their language is in fact their comportment (exactly like the Sade protagonists) and the language of their comportment obeys rules which are much more complex and profound than those of an ideology. The vocabulary of torture has only a formal relation with the ideological reasons which drive men to torture. Nonetheless with the characters in my film, although what counts is their sub-verbal language, their words also have a great importance. Besides their verbiage is rather wordy. But such wordy verbiage is important in two senses: firstly it is part of the presentation, being a ‘text’ of Sade’s, that is being what the characters think of themselves and what they do; and, secondly, it is part of the ideology of the film, given that the characters who quote anachronistically Klossowsky and Blanchot are also called upon to give the message I have established and organised for this film: anarchy of power, inexistence of history, circularity (non-psychological not even in the psychoanalytic sense) between executioners and victims, an institution anterior to a reality which can only be economic (the rest, that is, the superstructure, being a dream or a nightmare)."

Ideology and the meaning of the Film
“We should not confuse ideology with message, nor message with meaning. The message belongs in part – that of logic – to ideology, and in the other part – that of irreason – to meaning. The logical message is almost always evil, lying, hypocritical even when very sincere. Who could doubt my sincerity when I say that the message of Salò is the denunciation of the anarchy of power and the inexistence of history? Nonetheless put this way such a message is evil, lying, hypocritical, that is logical in the sense of that same logic which finds that power is not at all anarchic and which believes that history does exist. The part of the message which belongs to the meaning of the film is immensely more real because it also includes all that the author does not know, that is, the boundlessness of his own social, historical restrictions. But such a message can’t be delivered. It can only be left to silence and to the text. What finally now is the meaning of a work? It is its form. The message therefore is formalistic; and precisely for that reason, loaded infinitely with all possible content provided it is coherent – in the structural sense.”

Stylistic elements in the film
“Accumulation of daily characteristics of wealthy bourgeois life, all very proper and correct (double-breasted suits, sequinned, deep cut gowns with dignified white fox furs, polished floors, sedately set tables, collections of paintings, in part those of ‘degenerate’ artists (some futuristic, some formalistic); ordinary speech, bureaucratic, precise to the point of self caricature.

‘Veiled’ reconstruction of Nazi ceremonial ways (its nudity, its military simplicity at the same time decadent, its ostentations and icy vitality, its discipline functioning like an artificial harmony between authority and obedience, etc.

Obsessive accumulation to the point of excess of sadistic ritualistic and organised deeds; sometimes also given a brutal, spontaneous character.

Ironic corrective to all this through a humour which may explode suddenly in details of a sinister and admitted comic nature. Thanks to which suddenly everything vacillates and is presented as not true and not crude, exactly because of the theatrical satanism of self-awareness itself. It is in this sense that the direction will be expressed in the editing. It is there that will be produced the mix between the serious and the impossibility of being serious, between a sinister, bloody Thanatos and curate Bauba (Bauba was a Greek divinity of liberating laughter or better: obscene and liberating laughter).

In every shot it can be said I set myself the problem of driving the spectator to feeling intolerant and immediately afterwards relieving him of that feeling."

Discussion officially begins May 1st.
Today is Apr 27th.
Get your Pasolini on

I have been doing alot of reading around this film recently and recived the Criterion edition today, so will definatly join in. Also be reading up on De Sade, a interesting if completly fucked up person.

http://www.bfi.org.uk/features/salo/

That contains the two articles mentioned ubove, and some more peices on the films controversy throughout the world. Also some excerts fomr Gary Indiana’s bfi film classics companion to the film, there are also some fantastic essays with the Criterion edition.

Thanks, Tom

yes, prior to this beginning May 1st, if you have links to articles or writings on Salò, Pasolini or De Sade that you think will be relevant to the discussion, drop them below so others can read and research.

If you have questions about the Garage Discussion Group, message this character

Try to keep opinion out of this thread until we begin.
—-Bite that tongue. Bite it hard.

If I may drop my own amateurish musings into the ring:

http://zombiedom.blogspot.com/2009/04/when-doing-filthngore-retrospective.html

I’m interested. I’ll have to watch it right quick.

Also possibly of interest:
http://www.southerncrossreview.org/35/sontag.htm

http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/30/whips_and_bodies.html

http://www.everypoet.com/archive/poetry/dante/dante_contents.htm

n.b.
If you have access to the Criterion edition of the film, disc two contains supplements and material that can help understand the movie. Three documentaries about the film are included and they range in length from 23 to 40 minutes. The most interesting of these is “Fade to Black” about the cultural impact of Salo. filmmakers such as Catherine Breillat (The Last Mistress ) and Bernardo Bertolucci (Last Tango in Paris ) share their thoughts on the film, as does Italian scholar David Forgacs. (Pasolini clearly influenced Breillat, whose sexually charged films are known for their explicitness—her film Romance contains non-simulated sex.) The two other documentaries—"Salo: Yesterday and Today" and "The End of Salo—contain interviews with Pasolini himself and focus on the film’s production. The 80-page booklet for Salo contains critical essays by Breillat and film historians such as Gary Indiana. Excerpts from an on-set diary by Gideon Bachmann (Salo’s friend) are also included and provide an intimate look at Pasolini—both the man and the filmmaker.

The political climate in which Pasolini was killed was special, in the Italy of “the years of lead,” as they were called. One week before he was murdered, Pasolini suggested that the entire Italian ruling class be put on trial for “unworthiness, contempt for their fellow citizens, misappropriation of public funds, price-fixing for oil companies, industries, banking cartels, collaboration with the CIA, illegal use of intelligence agencies, responsibility for [neofascist] terrorism in Milan, Brescia and Bologna (given a seeming inability to punish the perpetrators), destruction, anthropological degradation, the disgraceful condition of schools, hospitals and every other basic public institution, the neglect of the countryside, the wildcat explosion of popular culture and of mass media, and the criminal stupidity of television.” The continual, stinging criticism of those in power from Pasolini in his writings, poems, and films made him a bete noire.

The importance of Judge Salme’s declarations (FOLLOW LINK BELOW- T) is that, added to Pelosi’s recantation, they further refute the thesis of Pelosi’s original (now known to be fake) confession. That thesis — that the hustler killed Pasolini in an S&M adventure gone bad, in anger after Pasolini supposedly tried to sodomize him with a large piece of wood — has been used for three decades to discredit Pasolini and trivialize and dismiss his enormous body of written and cinematic work (as we noted in our second post on the Pasolini murder case). With even the supposed murderer’s judge now saying that the crime was committed by multiple persons, and that possible political motives for the killing were never explored, it is really becoming irrefutable that the version of PPP’s death that has reigned in the cultural and literary world for three decades is completely fabrication.

In a May 9 interview with Corriere della Serra, Guido Calvi, a lawyer for the Pasolini family called attention to the virulent homophobia that has characterized the Italian right and neo-fascist circles, particularly in the ‘70s, as homosexuality was more and more openly portrayed in cultural forms (with Paolini and his films, like Teorama, in the avant-garde of this sympathetic portrayal) and the first Italian gay liberation movement, Fuori! (inspired by the young writer Mario Mieli) made its appearance. (An aside: Mieli’s important early book, Homosexuality and Liberation: Elements of a Critique, which was published in Italy the year after Pasolini’s murder, was issued in an English translation by GayMen’s Press in 1980, and provides much important contextual information on the homophobic climate during the Pasolini years).

Here are extracts from the Corriere della Serra interview with lawyer Calvi:
Calvi: Reopening the investigation means, above all, viewing the incident in a cultural context.

Q: What are you referring to?

Calvi: To the typical intolerance of certain parts of the right against homosexuals. One must not forget those were also the years of the rape of Franca Rame [wife of playwright Dario Fo; she was involved in leftwing politics] by rightwing extremists. [She was dragged into a car in 1973-ish and gang-raped by 5 Mafia rightists. She didn’t tell her husband until much later. He then wrote a play about it.]

Q: What do the murders carried out by Angelo Izzo [neoFascist thug] have to do with the Pasolini killing?

Calvi: There is no direct connection but one of context. Basically, what was the Circeo? A slaying of two innocent people carried out by two psychopaths who were hiding their homosexuality, so the two girls weren’t raped. That was the climate at the time: total opposition to diversity.

Q: So for you, Pasolini was the victim of an ambush with political implications?

Calvi: You need to define what constitutes a political crime. Even a poet like Garcia Lorca was killed for political reasons. It was the same for Pasolini. They wanted to hit an “inconvenient” man. One of the leading voices of the Italian intellectual scene of the 20th century who wrote of massacres and politics. By killing him, they silenced a voice.

Q: You knew Pasolini. Were he alive today, what would he think about what is happening now?

Calvi: Pier Paolo was a man of infinite vitality. I am sure that even he would suggest that the responsibility for much that happened, in the wider view, should be seen in a cultural context.

Q: Are you optimistic that in the end the truth will come out?

Calvi: There is still a strong resistance, we will see. Certainly, I will fight because the murder of Pier Paolo is not going to be forgotten again in the darkness of memory.

http://direland.typepad.com/direland/2005/08/restoring_pasol.html

“And now, friend-reader, you must prepare your heart and your mind for the most impure tale that has ever been told since our world began…Fancy, now, that all pleasure-taking either sanctioned by good manners or enjoyed by that fool you speak of incessantly, of whom you know nothing and whom you call Nature; fancy, I say, that all these modes of taking pleasure will be expressly excluded from this anthology, or that whenever peradventure you do indeed encounter them here, they will always be accompanied by some crime or colored by some infamy…Many of the extravagances you are about to see illustrated will doubless displease you, yes, I am will aware of it, but there are amongst them a few that will warm you to the point of costing you some fuck, and that, reader is all we ask of you…Rather, it is up to you to take what you please and leave the rest alone…”
(“The One Hundred & Twenty Days of Sodom” – The Marquis de Sade. Arrow Books, 1990, p253-254)

We become willing if not active participants in the atrocities that are about to be enacted within the walls of the Château de Silling. We have been warned both of their nature and that they may awaken something dark within us, yet, we continue to read. It is my opinion that Pasolini does the same in Salo. Everyone watching the film knows what is lurking around the corner (this is made all the more clear after the Duke reads the statutes from the balcony) yet we continue to watch. I believe Pasolini was critiquing the viewer/consumer – sex and art in cinema have become a throw-away commodity, something to merely pass the time. We are unthinking, dumbed down by modern culture. If we were truly aware what was happening around us we would have left the theatre, we wouldn’t even have been there in the first place!

I know this is a very black and white, or easy theory about the film, I am almost washing Pasolini’s hands of any moral trangressions on his part; if he was criticising us for watching why are we not criticising him for making? I believe it is a film that HAD to have been made, an essential film and asks so many questions and answers so little. I cannot say I fully understand Pasolini’s intentions behind making Salo but I’m glad he did, I think it’s beautifully shot – the grand interiors of the chateau and the wide shots make the film all the more carnivorous and claustophobic. Most of the sex within the film we don’t actually see, our imaginations run riot. It is a movie that hold a mirror up to its audience and I think it is this fact scares people.

“We are unthinking, dumbed down by modern culture. If we were truly aware what was happening around us we would have left the theatre, we wouldn’t even have been there in the first place!”

Indeed. If we were fully engaged with this world, as it is right now, what would we do? We should revolt, yet we choose to consume. We should never have accepted this world in the first place. We are made dumb by modern culture. It requires an heroic effort to resist it.

De Sade went to the very edge of what negation is. How can that be the source of a film? The sexual acts in Salo are no more of a turn-on than any similar act in De Sade’s writings. Neither is stroke material. Also, Pasolini uses every distancing device available to him to make the proceedings less real. Neither is there the impulse to make evil appear romantic or sexy. Sure, it’s all very much aestheticized, but I think that is done as a political gesture: To choose art over the real. Sam Rhodie, writing about “Salo”, observed, “The bourgeoisie seem unreal in Pasolini’s work. He could not speak them or represent them. They were literally unspeakable for him. When he thought of them he suffered a bulimia of language, a physical revulsion. He wanted to vomit out the bourgeoisie, expel them from his system. It was a way to cleanse himself of their corruption.”

We could use more of that kind of cleansing. Much more.

One important sidelight. During the shooting of the film the lab in which the rushes were store was broken into and numerous reels of the film were stolen — thus necessitating re-shoots. Numerous reels of Fellini’s “Casanova” were stolen at the same time — the thieves having taken them in the belief that they were reels of “Salo.” This in turn necessitated Fellini re-shoots and the abandonment of an entire episode of the film, which would have featured Barbara Steele.

There is no question whatsoever that the fascists who went on to murder Pasolini were responisble for this theft. They were clearly afraid a direct connection was being made by pasolini between Sade’s characters and their then-current activities.

Salo is the only film I know that comes with a bibliography of recommended, even required reading. This is because Salo is very much part of an intellectual tradition whose great theme is revolt — not so much political revolt but revolt the way Albert Camus defines it in The Rebel when he writes that all revolt is revolt “against God.” This intellectual tradition is European and twentieth century in location, although it casts its roots back to the Marquis de Sade in the 18th century, and Rimbaud and Lautreamont in the 19th century. It is superficially nihilistic, in that it seems to want to tear down all social institutions and rend the very fabric of society, but buried deep within it is the idea of clearing away what is stale and repressive in society in order to make room for desires that have been not been given their due. The idea is to go too far to the extreme in order to come back to a place where there is actually more life in the world.

As a film, Salo is a work of literary criticism, mainly on de Sade’s novels and his philosophy that the strong have the existential duty to prey on the weak in acts of terror, torture, degradation, rape and murder. A deplorable idea, and one which is viewed almost exclusively with horror in Salo. It’s the “almost” that is troubling, for there are ways in which a certain fascination with this idea is allowed to seep in. However, there is no mistake that Pasolini aligns himself against power and its abuses: like certain opera directors such as Peter Sellars, Pasolini performs a radical act of transposition on Sade’s texts by setting them in 1944-1945, the final years of Fascist Italy, and by re-casting the aristocratic libertines as Nazi-Fascist bureaucrats.

We can see what Pasolini takes from his reading list. For example, Roland Barthes has a very profound, structuralist analysis of Sadeian methods of classification in his book, Sade/Fourier/Loyola. Barthes’ ideas about the Sadeian community have influenced Pasolini. The fortress where the libertines sequester their victims is an enclosure — an architectural metaphor for the circular, obsessive thinking of the libertines. These circles are even given names in Salo: Circle of Manias, Circle of Shit, Circle of Blood. Just as there is no way out of the obsession, there is no way out of the castle fortress. Moreover, the libertines recreate a complete social structure, with guards, cooks and servants, and on the bottom the sex slaves whom they have captured and carefully chosen. This society, like a commune, is entirely self-sufficient: nothing from the outside world is needed. In perhaps the biggest taboo of the film, but also the sequence which demonstrates the extreme efficiency of the libertines’ self-sufficient world, the human waste products of the fortress’ inhabitants are recycled in the form of a “gourmet feast.”

The problem that many people have had with Salo is that, when you take words on a page, even very incendiary and radical words, and act them out in dramatic form, the meaning becomes so blatant and inescapable that it is often regarded as obscene. Sade’s books were banned for a long time, and many of the literary critics who analyze his work struggle with this very issue of whether or not (as Pierre Klossowski wrote) he “must be burned.” Barthes is an exception; he did not trouble himself with moral content, but simply analyzed Sade’s repetitive themes from a cool, deconstructionist vantage point. Pasolini operates much like Barthes. And yet, though Salo is emphatically not a pornographic film (to get off on it would not only be sick but nearly impossible), it might as well be for the fact that the naked bodies, the imitation blood, the imitation feces, the scenes of torture and cruelty, almost completely obliterate the ideas behind the film for many viewers. Indeed, movie “tricks” are far from one’s mind when watching Salo, and it is a tribute to its power and how well-made it is that even if one consciously knows that the turds lavishly served on silver platters are really just some form of chocolate fudge, one can’t keep that knowledge comfortably in mind while watching them being consumed. Again, much like Salo is the only film to have its own bibliography, it’s also the only film I can think of where it’s nearly impossible to imagine what it must have been like on the set, between takes; the actors, none of whom are well-known and many of whom are most likely non-professionals, do not seem to be acting, even when they are acting brilliantly to convey the realism of the strange, offensive, unpalatable situations in the film.

Salo and desire

Although I do believe that Salo is primarily a statement against fascism, and that Pasolini was in fact murdered for making this statement, I think there is also more going on in this complicated film. I am going to begin by trying to defend Salo at its most indefensible point: the way in which desire, in particular gay male desire, is encoded both positively and negatively in the actions of the libertines. Let me say that in the perverse world depicted by Salo, homosexual desire is not normal homosexual desire; like all the other sex in the film it is aberrant, fetishistic, inhuman. And yet, Pasolini does not exempt his own sexuality from the harsh analyses of Salo — by which I mean that in some ways Salo can be read as an excessive act of “liberation,” which is also, from a human standpoint, ashamed and horrified by its own excessiveness.

The four male libertines are polymorphous-perverse, in that they get off on non-sexual things as well as sexual, and also on both genders. However, though they begin with an equal ratio of female and male playthings, it becomes clear that they have a special enjoyment of homosexual acts, ostensibly because these are more of an affront to nature. “Any man having (vaginal) sex with a woman will be put to death” is one of the laws which the libertines enforce. Time and again in Salo, we see young straight men forced to bend to the homoerotic desires of the libertines. Penises are literally removed from female orifices to be placed in male ones: in the first dinner scene, one of the guards (the guards are all well-endowed, and sadistic, willing participants in the abuse of the captive playthings) kicks a naked female servant to the floor and rapes her anally; she screams in pain; one of the libertines crouches on all fours beside the woman, and the guard goes from penetrating her to penetrating him; the libertine does not scream but instead enjoys the act. In another scene, one of the most attractive girls is “married” to one of the most attractive boys, but right after being ordered to consummate the marriage under the voyeuristic eyes of the libertines, they are interrupted by the libertines who shout, “The flower is reserved for us!” Heterosexuality is cut off, defeated, mocked, scorned again and again.

Gay males are among the most powerless members of society, specifically in regard to desire. One may be attracted to other men whom one can rarely approach successfully. This can lead, studies have shown, to depression, self-hatred and suicide. In abusing their power to enact gay fantasies of being able “to have anyone they want,” the libertines (and Pasolini) are pushing certain buttons, which are exhilarating in a guilt-stricken way. This is the most mind-bending aspect of the film: it implicates many of its viewers in desires that are nonetheless abhorrent — not because gay sex is abhorrent, but because the libertines must go so far beyond the boundaries of right and wrong, good and evil, in order to justify pleasure to themselves.

The use of the old standard “These Foolish Things Remind Me Of You” is Pasolini’s first ironic, insider nod to the gay community: Bryan Ferry had made this a kind of gay theme song a few years earlier by recording it on his campy first solo album alongside Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party,” the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” Smokey Robinson’s “The Tracks of My Tears,” and a hilarious glam-rock version of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” The opening scenes of the film depict the libertines recruiting their guards and then kidnapping and “auditioning” their playthings. Audition is an accurate word: one scene is set up very much like an actors’ casting call, where the prospective playthings (unclothed and held, of course, against their will) sit around in a waiting room to be called in one by one to a private room where they are inspected by the libertines. They are judged solely on their looks; although they get extra marks for being particularly unhappy to be there (one girl, crying because her mother died trying to save her from being kidnapped, arouses a very special admiration in the libertines; it is almost as if they are appraising her “acting” of the emotion, grief). Pasolini often cast small roles in his films by cruising the streets of Rome looking for good-looking young hustlers — so in some ways Pasolini is critiquing his own methods and possible abuse of power. He is sensitive to his own use of money and prestige to get what he wants from young men.

At the most extreme level, the preparation of the libertines is similar to the production of a film. Again, this overlaps with gay desire — think of Warhol’s films, The Ten Most Beautiful Boys and The Ten Most Beautiful Girls, in which people who hung around the NYC Factory were given their fifteen minutes in the spotlight simply for being sexually desirable. I’m not saying Warhol is like Sade, or like the libertines, or even like Pasolini; it was part of Warhol’s, and Pasolini’s, confrontational genius, however, to be upfront about their gay desires and appreciation of male beauty/sex appeal. We rarely bat an eyelash thinking about how Bergman or Godard surrounded themselves with beautiful actresses whom they cast in their films (and many of whom they slept with); but an identical gay scenario is often looked at askance, and even the seriousness of the art is called into question. In some ways, these opening “audition” scenes address that unfairness.

Participating in the sexual revolution, fighting against the sexual revolution

The 1970s were a time of sexual hedonism and excess for just about everyone, gays and straights. For gays in the pre-AIDS world, the 70s were a time in which a ton of creative thought went into the maximizing of sexual pleasure. We know from historical record that the bath houses (which existed in most major cities) were specially designed, much like the world of the libertines in Salo, to exclude no taste or act. There were specific rooms set aside for specific fetishes; one could have intercourse with a nearly infinite array of body parts sticking through holes in the wall, and never even see the faces of one’s lovers. Or one could meet face to face. The bath houses were factories of desire. They represented the full intelligence that men could bring to bear on fulfilling their erotic aspirations.

Gay artists such as Pasolini, Fassbinder, Derek Jarman, threw themselves into this world. And yet, because they were sensitive, deep-thinking individuals, part of them was alienated from being able to turn off their minds and simply become bodies. I am convinced of this. Deep within the heart of the sexual revolution, all of them made films that question — in an elegiac, alarmed way — the potential down side of so much total freedom and abandon. Fassbinder’s In a Year with Thirteen Moons (1978) is the disturbing, tragic account of a man so malleable, so cut off from himself, that he undergoes a crude sex change to please a man who doesn’t care about him at all; a victim of his own desire, he eventually dies in broken-hearted isolation. In the epilogue to Fassbinder’s epic Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), there is a scene where he looks on impassively at acts of bondage and “nipple torture” in a leather bar that looks exactly like a slaughterhouse. In Jarman’s Jubilee (1978), we see a future world in which sex has become so boring and old-hat that it’s been replaced by routine public orgies and acts of random murder. These films look critically at the sexual revolution, even as their makers were participating in it.

And Salo is Pasolini’s cri de coeur on this subject. “Too much is too much,” the film seems to be saying, and “Where can one possibly go from here?” Indeed, after two hours of watching the acts in the castle fortress, we learn that we have not even reached Salo itself yet. One of the libertines tells the obedient survivors that they can now “come with us to Salo”; he might as well say that they can now “go with us to hell.”

Why watch?

It’s a legitimate question, and you’d be well within your rights not to. I don’t totally agree with the line of thinking that says Pasolini is implicating the viewer by making him watch the horrendous crimes against humanity depicted in Salo, although I can see why people make that argument. I think, quite the opposite, he is summoning us to witness. Many Germans and Italians claimed not to know what their fascist governments were doing, with concentration camps and such; Pasolini is saying, There is no excuse for claiming ignorance. The film demands that a moral judgment be made — Pasolini wants us to witness and testify to the suicide of the girl in the altar, the girl who echoes Christ’s lament, “Why have you forsaken us?” at the end of the film, the mysterious accidental death or suicide of the piano player, and also the numbed, almost tender slow-dancing of two of the youngest guards in the very last scene. As well as all the moments of brutality. Salo is a film that I have to see every now and then just to make sure it still does something to me inside, because if it didn’t, I would start to worry.

Great insight Justin!

Thank you.

Do be honest, I enjoyed “Salo” but I did not get much out of it thematically it was too…all over the place with its ideas. The one thing I now get when I reflect upon it is the ironic humanity of the film.

- THERE IS NO TRUE EVIL –
Throughout the film you see people beaten, raped and tortured, finally, executed. You see almost all of this upfront, right in your face!

The most evidence of this “there is no true evil” thesis is towards the end. Reminiscent of Teshigahara’s use of bars in his blatant masterpiece “Woman in the Dunes,” Paosolini bars us off as seen in the screenshots above. This brilliant use of directional photography is coupled with pretty much only the victims face, or at least was intended that way (Paosolini has a very choppy and in-precise film here.) This visual design conveys the isolation between evil and the actions, the absolute evil, murdering for pleasure can be on no man. But, clearly people do murder, so how? The erotic design of the scene, an act of pure lust and emotion, which further isolates a true human from absolute evil. Then the final indication is when the guards dance after speaking. They talk about girls and such. This is Paosolini’s – these people ARE people notion – trying to dismiss the “this man is no human” idea.

Also one might note the affair between one of the guards and the african- american slaves. These people love, they enjoy and they can do good, although they may be ruled by their raw emotion of sexuality and violence.

That was fun but not nearly as practical or insightful as you guys.

Do be honest, I enjoyed “Salo” but I did not get much out of it thematically it was too…all over the place with its ideas. The one thing I now get when I reflect upon it is the ironic humanity of the film.

- THERE IS NO TRUE EVIL –
Throughout the film you see people beaten, raped and tortured, finally, executed. You see almost all of this upfront, right in your face!

The most evidence of this “there is no true evil” thesis is towards the end. Reminiscent of Teshigahara’s use of bars in his blatant masterpiece “Woman in the Dunes,” Paosolini bars us off as seen in the screenshots above. This brilliant use of directional photography is coupled with pretty much only the victims face, or at least was intended that way (Paosolini has a very choppy and in-precise film here.) This visual design conveys the isolation between evil and the actions, the absolute evil, murdering for pleasure can be on no man. But, clearly people do murder, so how? The erotic design of the scene, an act of pure lust and emotion, which further isolates a true human from absolute evil. Then the final indication is when the guards dance after speaking. They talk about girls and such. This is Paosolini’s – these people ARE people notion – trying to dismiss the “this man is no human” idea.

Also one might note the affair between one of the guards and the african- american slaves. These people love, they enjoy and they can do good, although they may be ruled by their raw emotion of sexuality and violence.

That was fun but not nearly as practical or insightful as you guys.

You bring up great points, Chopin. Truly. What’s sad about the fate of the guard who loves the servant is how he accepts his death sentence with a fascist salute. Love is totally dead in this world. And even the people who feel it are convinced that it’s wrong. There may be other interpretations…

Visually, most of the scenes involve some kind of blocking or sense of confinement. Even with the use of wide-angles and long shots, it’s a very claustrophobic milieu, as highlighted by the scene where one boy tries to run from the libertines and can only run a few steps before being very quickly whipped unconscious.

Actually, Justin, the tune is not “These Foolish Things Remind Me of You” — though it sunds a bit like it. Gary Indiana in his BFI book on “Salo” makes the smae mistake.

Barhtes, famously, didn’t like “Salo.” His objectionwas by making the text “real” — actually showing how these impossible actis might be done, and placing them in a specific hisotrical context — Pasolini was betraying Sade.

What he was actually doing was hijacking Sade away from academe, and Barthes’ ever-so-tender mercies. Yes, Pasolini cuts against the grain. But it’s a cut more than worth making.

So far this discussion has been everything I hoped it might be and more. Thank you all. I am working today on final elements for the official Garage launch, so I haven’t had time to fully digest or respond to this thread. But I will be contributing this weekend, in ink made of chocolate cake and cookies. Remember— it’s not the stink of the feces that counts, but how well it sticks to the wall. Peace, friends. Well done for elevating this forum to a new level.

Thanks for reading my post, David. It’s not an instrumental version of These Foolish Things? It has the same melody and chord changes… I don’t know. I like to think of it as These Foolish Things, lol.

I wasn’t aware of Barthes’ negative reaction. Or reactionism, lol. Thanks for sharing that. I would’ve thought Barthes would “get it” if anyone would. Poor Pasolini.

Sometimes I think Pasolini was aware his end might be coming and just decided to put everything he had into making a film that would challenge expectations and pose disturbing, unanswerable questions till hell froze over, so to speak.

They had a bizarre interview on the Teorema dvd with an Italian claiming to be a great friend of Pasolini’s, who kept insisting very passionately that Pier Paolo committed suicide by proxy, by essentially goading a hustler into attacking him. I don’t buy that at all — it’s a very iffy way to plan/stage a suicide. So it’s still something that’s heatedly debated and covered up.

I am mostly agreed with Justin: excellent readings.

I actually don’t find it very helpful to read Salo as a challenge to our (the audience’s) morals and sensibilities. I don’t think it is addressed immediately to us as blank-slate viewers. I think the crucial fact about this film is its very specific historical setting: it must be read in the context in which it is given, (a difficult task for people with no living memory of World War 2, particularly difficult for Americans) and the film may even be more a narrative or descriptive achievement than an inherently cinematic one. In other words, I have come to consider this a film made not actually for our eyes, but for the eyes of history.

The situation is essential to understand: It is late in the war, and the upper-echelon fascists who run the chateau know the Axis is losing, and that it will all be over for them soon. They know they are doomed, so they are consciously setting up for themselves a funhouse of horrors, an amoral wonderland where they will be able to indulge every depravity before they are either killed like Mussolini or reduced to abject circumstances of disgrace.

Why are they doing this? Where is their elemental sense of decency, of mercy, of basic respect for human dignity? Pasolini’s (unoriginal, but important) point is that they had already made their choice when they became fascists. Fascism was never just a political movement reacting to the global Depression of the 30s, it was always more than that; it was always a movement with distinctly religious overtones. There was endless talk of the creation of The New Man. Hitler proclaimed a 1000-year Reich (a religious period of time). Fascism had pretentions to be a modern, secular-technological Apocalypse. Pasolini exposes those pretentions as nothing more than a rather gruesome, cowardly restoration of ancient Roman decadence, going not far beyond anything that had happened in the Imperial residences of Nero or Caligula. Try and imagine yourself into the cultural memory of Italy and Germany in the 30s and 40s: fascism promised a renewal of Roman power: a classic Faustian bargain. The constraints of decency and morality that characterized the Judeo-Christian tradition were to be thrown down and despised as weak and drained of vitality: the fascists were neo-pagans, they worshipped youth and blood-purity, and more than anything, they worshipped power. That is the connection with the Marquis de Sade, the belief that it is the existential duty of the strong to have their way with the weak, and to take pleasure in conquering and exploiting them.

When I saw this film several years ago, I actually was rather unmoved: I always take an icy attitude towards anything I perceive to be guilty of deliberate, obvious button-pushing (examples: say, Solondz’s “Happiness” or Gavin Hood’s ludicrous “Rendition”). I saw Salo initially as a deliberate attempt to shock, and a failure because it was delivered with such stiffness and lack of passion. I only found it interesting in the depiction of the rather pitiful overlords, who take their mincing delight in being naughty and fulfilled every depraved childhood whim they were never able to realize in their youth.

Over time, however, I’ve become much more impressed with it, and will eventually watch it again. I now see it as I’ve outlined above: a cautionary tale in service of Western Civilization. As such, I think it depends very much on European cultural memory, which tends to make it an especially foreign film for Americans. Its intended audience, I believe, were Europeans who had been alive during the war, particularly Italians who were alive, or even in the government, under Mussolini. It is quite interesting to try and imagine the reaction of that segment of the audience. Indeed, the murder of Pasolini tells us quite a bit about when many thought.

His portrayal of the mediocrity of the masters in Salo is deliberate: it is indeed the point for them to come off as immature, failed little weasels throwing themselves the ultimate party. The Italian Right survived the end of the fascists, of course, and continued the Communist-vs-Fascist fear and loathing for decades. I think of SALO as Pasolini’s attempt to drive a stake through the heart of the Right, to forbid them to excuse themselves for their connection with the fascists, to drive them out of their concealment behind the Vatican, and to expose them for what they are: worshippers of power who believe that the upper classes deserve to rule however they please, and deserve further to get drunk on their power, and the little people just have to accept their lot.

Bravo, Orpheus M. You bring much clarity to the film and to its historical-political context.

Norman Mailer once said that fascism was much more deeply rooted in the human brain-pan than democracy, because as children we are essentially indoctrinated by forms of authority, or taught to fear and obey forms of authority. So there’s something familiar and even “comforting” about encountering such authority in adulthood. I’m paraphrasing. But this also seems to be something that Pasolini is warning us about in Salo: there are regressive, childish tendencies all throughout the film on the part of the fascist officials, and in the scenes where the younger guards and captives are indulging these tendencies, it’s almost as if the officials become younger and younger before our eyes. More and more baby-ish. But deadly babies.

Thanks for clarifying that aspect of the film for me.

I don’t what I can add other than personal notes. Justin basically summed the entire film up. Very good job, friend. Orpheus, too, said much more than I can.

I do disagree, however, that Pasolini was saying these are people just like this. Almost every element in the film is a highlight into the corruptible, and devious nature of power (if this is the only clear metaphor in the film it is an extremely strong one). There are human moments in the film, but the vast majority screams, to me, “look how fucking crazy these people are!” I don’t think this is my interpretation, I think this is intentional.

I felt almost contempt from the filmmaker. He’s treating us like idiots. He’s doing the most vile, disgusting, disturbing, and in some sense interesting (to discuss (as proved by the six or so threads on the film), not to watch; I should make that perfectly clear) things one can do to generate analysis. To force people to accept his vision. That’s what I took away from the film (feel free to correct my misunderstandings as I’m sure they’re many).

There are some beautifully written analyses of Salo here. While I’ve not yet watched the film, I have begun the enormous amount of research required to make an accurate assessment of both the film and its author. It seems clear that Salo must be considered within its political and social backdrop, and then reassessed to discover its pertinence to the political and social climes of today. In this sense, it is a non-linear work of art, and thus rightfully considered by many to be a masterpiece.

The relevance of Salo’s film to fascism and nazism seems quite obvious. When the body is treated as slave and exploited for gratification , whether for sexual purposes or in political contexts such as the massacres that occurred during World War II, our primal memories become erased in favor of a drive toward annihilation.

It is within this context that discussions of hetero. v. homosexuality find their relevance. The tragedy of Pasolini’s life can be rightfully viewed as a call for both personal and social liberation. This theme can be applied to not only Salo and Pasolini, but most (all?) modern art if viewed in the correct context. His quote found here on The Auteurs: “The mark which has dominated all my work is this longing for life, this sense of exclusion, which doesn’t lessen but augments this love of life,” attests to this fact. He is speaking of both human desire and the struggle to understand human desire on a profound level, which set him so drastically apart not only in his time, but even now.

Which is why it is so crucial to discuss Salo as a work of art. In the human struggle for liberation, angst, sometimes overwhelming, is a current running throughout. To condemn Pasolini because of one’s own sense of morality being brought into question when watching his film is to deny his profound, profound humanity. To condemn his sexuality is to do the same. It is through his enormous suffering that his struggles both with and for humanity become incredibly obvious, and incredibly brave.

These are only some beginning points. Next on my list: research further and watch both Salo and some of Catherine Breillat’s work. Thank you so much to those who have taken the time to analyze and post. I would like to respond further to your individual analyses soon, too.

I have read the many well-considered posts here, and believe Justin has clearly defined the importance, context, and problems with this work in a brilliant and concise way. Consider all this as a very long personal reaction to the film and as an extended footnote to Justin’s analysis and the examinations of other posters here.

Before I get into my personal problems with the work – which I have put on another thread – I would like to try to put this film in context, relative to other Italian works of a similar period. Italian films took a great and courageous shift in the late 1960’s to mid 1970’s. Fellini set some of the groundwork for this shift by his own Satyricon (1969) and Roma (1972). In both these films, Fellini uses the decadence of late Roman life to explore some of the same themes of aberrant behaviour and sexual gratification that Pasolini took several steps forward in Salo. Petri’s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) gave a very critical view of the bizarre code of conduct of the state police. This film – about an amoral police inspector who murders his own girlfriend as an act of contempt for the authorities, and his own inevitable downfall – was Petri’s own critique of the existing Italian power structure and a quite radical reflection on power and its abuse for the time. De Sica’s Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970) dealt with the horror of Fascism and its terrifying effect on an upper class Jewish family. It was a return by de Sica to a serious topic after years of betraying his own neo-realist aspirations for popular filmmaking. It is a faithful recreation of Bassani’s own autobiographical novel of the same name. Bertolucci adapted Moravia’s own stunning critique of Fascist mentality when he filmed The Conformist (1970). This film deals with the theme of sex used as a means of control and how his own sexual guilt turns Marcello into the perfect Fascist foil. Lina Wertmuller’s Swept Away (1974) and Seven Beauties (1975) were both attempts to deal with the whole issue of power and sexuality in a way that hadn’t been done as graphically in film before – before Salo. Seven Beauties – from the same year as Salo – is also an scathing indictment of Fascism and its reprehensible reduction of human value. This is the tale of Pasqualino – an army deserter thrown into a Fascist concentration camp – who uses every vile trick in the book to escape with his own life in the hellish world of the camp. Wertmuller spares us nothing in telling the story of how Pasqualino must submit to the female commandant’s sexual appetites to save his own neck. Wertmuller’s film closely mirrors Pasolini’s own theme of sex, power, depravity, and survival in Salo. Pasolini’s own Trilogy of Life series of films: Bocaccio’s Decameron (1971), Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, (1972), and Arabian Nights (1974) demonstrated his fascination with bizarre sexual exploits and eroticism. Basically, as a group, these films were all attempts to push the boat out further on what was ‘acceptable’ subject matter for films. These are not films done for ‘entertainment’, but made to break social taboos and, in some cases, raise serious questions about Italian society and Fascism. In most of these films, sexuality is dealt with in the context of power. These films prepared the ground for Pasolini’s Salo.

Pasolini was obviously trying to raise the bar higher – to shock us, the now unshockable film viewer. If everything had already been done in these earlier films – including Pasolini’s own – where was he to go to shock an audience that had already been prepared for almost any subject matter or depictions of sexuality? Surely, his own literary interests led him to de Sade as the perfect vehicle. Here he found the text that gave him the ability to take things just that much further. His setting of the novel in late Fascist Italy – where power is absolute and so is the lack of any moral authority – provided him a framework to also give a critique of Fascism and Italian complicity in Nazi atrocities. The way he developed his critique has been well described by Justin and others. What if we now deconstruct Pasolini’s own film images, to see whether they are appropriate to his thesis. Did his attempt to portray sexual desire at its most basic and sadistic – with the final torture and brutalization of the victims – have a necessary basis in explicating his film theorem? That is, were all the acts depicted in the film necessary to be shown, and shown as graphically as Pasolini did in the film? Were these very acts – which debase any type of sexuality and eroticism – presented in a truthful manner? Did the pain and suffering of the victims – their humiliation and degradation – come across in every scene the viewer is subjected to in this two hour film? In short, was all this imagery of sexual degradation and real violence necessary for Pasolini’s critique?

I would argue, and some of Justin’s own detailed critique suggests, that Pasolini did succumb to his own need to expiate his own sexual tastes. It is clear that this movie is not meant to be a turn-on, except with those that identify with the perpetrators. It certainly uses every Sadean trick in the book to exemplify a variety of sado-masochistic practices. To make his scenes authentic for his own purposes, Pasolini humiliates his own actors – male and female – so that each becomes either a grotesque caricature if a perpetrator or an agonized victim, By trying to show us every conceivable sexual act, every conceivable act of humiliation, every conceivable act of torture and degradation – he makes a film where all his actors must repeat these very acts – we assume simulated. Nudity is used to heighten the mood of sexual tension, but also as a way of thumbing his nose at the pretense of his audience, by now used to nudity in film. His young actors often have little or no clothes and are stared at by the gaze not only of the libertines and guards and their cronies, but by us – the film viewer. The actors have no shame. The actors, as the victims, are seen to literally eat shit. Yes, we know this isn’t real, but the implied humiliation to the actors, and the desired effect of revulsion in the viewer, are a way that Pasolini gives us – the film viewer – the finger. By then showing us – in close-up because viewed from afar – the various tortures of his actors/victims, we again become unwilling voyeurs.

Pasolini seems to relish pushing our noses into the very excrement his actor/victims are forced to eat. He shows his contempt of his film viewers by repeatedly portraying scenes of graphic sexual humiliation and pain. He says to us: “Here you are – beautiful, naked young men and women. Let’s see what we can do to show how they would be brutalized and humiliated if we can set them into this make-believe world. Let’s see if any of you can get any kind of erotic kick out of this.” He dares the viewer to associate nudity and sexuality with anything gratifying – except at the basest level. Everything is taken several notches below what would be considered acceptable. All his older actors – male and female – are shown as disgusting characters, their faces distorted into evil grins, like grotesque clowns.

To me, I can’t take this type of humiliation of us – the film viewer. We are subjected to two hours of this visual assault non-stop, with each scene getting progressively worse and worse. I just refuse to indulge Pasolini or give him cudos for doing this. I think he is showing us his own contempt of film making conventions, even erotic conventions at the time. He is saying to his audience: “Fuck you, you bourgeois swine who are coming to the theatre to be ‘entertained’. I will show you something you haven’t ever seen before – I will rub your smug noses in it and make you eat shit. It is all you deserve.”

I think the film a fitting climax for a filmmaker and artist who always tried to go one beyond anyone else, even his contemporary Lina Wertmuller. It is a journey others can take, each with their own perspective and reason. It is a journey I never intend to take again, because I don’t like having my sensibilities trifled with or my own tolerances toyed with by this or any filmmaker. In short, for me, his excesses were much more about shock value than any attempt at a dialogue about sexuality and power. It was way, way too over the top, and borders on the very type of exploitation it is supposedly a critique of in the first place. Carry on analyzing this any way you want, but I don’t intend to re-visit this film or topic any time soon. If we make our own analysis overly academic – and not go at this from our individual gut level – we are missing the whole point of this exercise. I am not saying any of this is futile or unnecessary as we must all face our own filmic demons sooner or later – what we personally can or cannot take – but I think we have had enough threads on this one film. Otherwise, this might be seen as an exercise in fascination with the morbid and obscene. Of course, I would deny no one their own analysis or perspective, but I am moving on.

I think it’s a reasonable critique, Bob, and I like how you place the film in the context of other Italian films from the early 70s — I’m not sure if Wertmuller and others were persecuted, I know Bertolucci was imprisoned for several years for one of his films, I’m thinking maybe Last Tango in Paris, and had his citizenship rights revoked by the Italian government. So it was definitely a defiant climate between the government and the filmmakers. I would just say that I think you are close to saying, when you say “the actors have no shame,” that the things taking place in this movie are real. And this is not true, but it’s so difficult to keep in mind when watching. It’s almost like we lose our sophisticated detachment, watching Salo, and we respond to it in such a way that it might as well be real. These are actors acting in a film. I think it is, as you say, an attempt to shock the bourgeoisie, and as such, the descendants of Pasolini are legion now — Haneke, Noe, Seidl, Breillat, Dumont, Solondz, etc. A dark, nihilistic cinema, a transgressive cinema — but largely without the context of communism versus fascism which Salo has, or the more torturous personal context of homosexuality versus heterosexuality. Which is to say, I don’t think Pasolini was a nihilist. I think that he had reasons for showing, for exposing, the things in this film. We are free to say, the reasons weren’t good enough, it wasn’t worth it, it was too much — but even there we are, in a way, congratulating Pasolini, since his intention was to go too far. He did the same thing with his last novel, Petrolio, about the sexual hang-ups of a petroleum conglomerate CEO, which, like Salo, he rushed to complete before his death and which appeared posthumously.

I have nothing of substance to add to this excellent discussion. I just want to communicate my initial response (reaction?) to seeing the film on a Criterion laserdisc in the 1990’s. With the exception of Petri’s film, I had seen the films mentioned in BOB STUTSMAN’s entry. However, in those films I was able to objectify emotionally the acts committed by the proponents of fascism as though I were reading a historical novel. I was disgusted by the acts, but had little understanding of the personal dynamics that drove individuals to behave in such a manner. ORPHEUS M. clearly articulates for me the understandings that evolved within my emotions and my brain after seeing Saló. Understandings that I never have been able to express to my friends about the film; and understandings that helped me in the 1990’s place in context (but not justify) the horror of the Catholic priest abuse situation and the hierarchy’s response to it. Thank you for these insights.

Justin: I meant that the actors have no shame ironically, but perhaps it would have been better to say ‘they are allowed no shame’. When you say: “It’s almost like we lose our sophisticated detachment, watching Salo, and we respond to it in such a way that it might as well be real.” I think that captures the sense perfectly, for me. Also, when you say: “So it was definitely a defiant climate between the government and the filmmakers." that is the crux of my own review of the films that preceded or co-incided with Salo.

The filmmakers were taking on the government, society, and all established conventions in Italy. Wertmuller was singled out for attack from all camps, including leftist and feminist, for her own cynical view of sexuality as a product of power. No one would have expected for Pasolini to take the analysis of how ultimate power leads to ultimate sexual depravity and torture to the extent that he did in Salo. None of his earlier films – which were risque and teasing but never blatantly politicized – really more than hinted at this. I still stick by my own initial comments that Pasolini was trying to shock more than he was trying to make any kind of political statement about Fascism. It is a complex subject, because many of Pasolini’s own motives for making the film can never really be known because of his murder.

What I would like to look at now is why this film bothers us – or at least, viewers such as myself. Perhaps it all comes down to personal tolerance and our own take on the subject. I wasn’t bothered by any of the sexual behaviour, except that which inflicted pain – which was a sizeable portion of the sexual activity. I didn’t really get the connection between the hetero- and homo- sexual acts until Justin so carefully analyzed them. Yet, when these were done for pleasure – which was seldom – and not pain, I had no problem with them. Of course, de Sade’s own sexual take is one that equates sexual pleasure with pain. Pasolini shows the de Sadean context, but also brings in the element of total political power – a subject de Sade was not interested in exploring. We must see the acts of sexual degradation not only as a means of perverse pleasure – ala de Sade – but as acts of those who have no moral restrictions because of their political power. No court or guards will shut these libertines down because the guards and powers that be are on their side – their power is limitless.

OK, I can see this thesis in action, but, ultimately, I personally need to draw the line. Sex acts, of all types and varieties, are the staple of de Sade’s universe, and Pasolini presents them unembellished. By adding the element of sadistic (from de Sade himself) joy to the sex acts of the libertines makes them unaccountable to anyone but the viewer – in this case, ourselves as viewers of a film. Then, it becomes not a didactic exercize in sexual politics – however jaded and disgusting – but an exercize in personal tolerance. What can we, should we, must we be forced to watch? Surely, for adults, sexual activity in itself – as it is simulated – should not be a problem. When we see women and men screaming in pain – not pleasure – it becomes a problem. How far should our own sensibilites allow us to go? Should we just accept everything we see as valid somehow, as this is ‘only a film’? I don’t think so. If we are revulsed, as I was on several occasions, by the vulgarity of the actions depicted – irregardless of the motives of the director – should I just sit back and say: “Well, it’s just a film”?

I got about as far as the shit eating before I really had to turn away. That was too disgustingly real, and made me question why I would be watching a film where this was depicted – why, why, why? I had turned my head away or made sure the volume was low, when victims were screaming in agony, but I carried on. The ultimate outrage for me was the scene of the grotesque torture of victims at the end. We see all this close-up – as mentioned in my initial post – because those who ordered this done are watching gleefully with telescopes and binoculars to see it better. We are forced to endure a long scene of victims being tortured and see the smirking faces of the libertines who enjoy this. How can we, the viewing audience, knowing this is all simulated, but looking very real, sit and watch this on screen? Are we to objectify all this or intellectualize the context? Are we to say: Pasolini has shown us more than anyone else has dared? Or are we to say to ourseleves: Why am I watching this? Unfortunately, the last was a question I could not anwer for myself with anything like a clear conscience. Was I watching because it is supposedly important, or because it is a critique of Fascism? Am I watching it because I want to test my own tolerance? Whatever the reason, if it isn’t valid for me, from my own personal perspective as a lover of film – as a person who will go to any lenghts and depths to view a film as objectively as possible – then it isn’t worthwhile. That is really why I am not impressed or a fan of this film. It just doesn’t match my own standards of what I am prepared to watch in the name of cinema. I did watch it once to see what it was about, but I didn’t find it uplifting, informative, insightful, or challenging on any level. It was a pain I tolerated, like a sore tooth, until it was over.