Very interesting! Where did you get that?
…Its from notes in a book about Pasolini that someone mailed me a while back after I got into a heavy debate about the film. The book was in two languages (Italian and English): I don’t know who did the translation or who published it. I will find out.
I realize that I slated PPP somewhere else on this forum and it interests me just how much this film creates tensions and arguments between people. Experience has taught me that I’m going to cross swords with any number of people if I open a debate about Salò without giving voice to Pasolini first. So there it is: I’ve got some more to post under this topic and I’d really like to hear anyone’s opinion or theory about the film.
But to open a debate, here’s the first question, and it’s a quote direct from Pasolini’s pen-
“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.”
Is this really true?
Does someone read the Marquis de sade novel? I read some parts and I can say that sade is a very good writer. He describe the scenes with a wonderful poetic “tone” even if this is very disturbing for us. I really don’t think this book was made to shock people(only).
Yeah, I’ve read it. And other things by De Sade. No, it wasn’t his intention purely to shock: he had a very clear political agenda with all his writing, and I read it mainly as an assault on a certain dominant (pseudo-moral) ideology that held power over all contemporary thought in his day. De Sade is a complex writer, with many levels of subtlety and irony to his assertions. He wrote to precipitate a change in society, to end the power of those he saw as both corrupt and hypocritical: and he foreshadowed a secular world in which “god” would be replaced by an understanding/raw investigation into human consciousness and base animal nature.
You see this is my problem with Pasolini. I don’t get any of that from Salo at all. PPP was educated, literate and intelligent, but his thinking suffered from the double-edged sword of intellectual (armchair) romanticism and unrepentant misogyny (and De Sade’s doesn’t: it’s far more incisive than that, although he has heavy misogynist tendencies to say the least). My impression of Salo is that it fulfills a more personal vision than Pasolini wants to lay claim to, and this is why I dislike the film. It’s not the film (although it’s a graphic, unpleasant representation of something that probably works best as poetic literature, in the head alone) – it’s the bullshit that goes around it as a justification, this distance he creates between himself as auteur and the work itself.
But I don’t claim that to be a conclusive judgment, and I’m open to any argument.
“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.”
This just strikes me as pure academic dysentry. Bad translation aside….diarrhea.
Olivier, is French your first language? write in French if you want. You said you had a theory about Salo.
Ok i’ll write in french. Anyway there is just me and you on this topic…
Je crois que Pasolini se devait de faire se film pour les mêmes raisons que tu as exprimé pour le roman sauf que PPP (étant un des seuls réalisateur qui selon moi pouvait se permettre de faire se film) devait être très tourmenté et il a dut manqué son coup. J’avoue que le film est un peu manqué et peu fidèle au ton du roman mais je crois que se film se devait d’être fait. Je crois aussi que se qu’il l’a fait manqué son coup pour le film est qu’il ait voulu actualiser et “politiser” l’histoire. Peut-être aussi que le choix des 120 jours de sodome n’était pas un bon choix d’adaptation. Il aurait surement été plus facile de faire une adaptation de “Histoire de Juliette, ou les Prospérités du vice” avec un ton narratif… Toutefois pour avoir fait un effort pour réaliser se film et pour avoir osé faire une adaptation d’un roman de Sade je lève mon chapeau à Pasolini.
Je suis desolée que je n’avais pas repondu: j’ai été tres occupé, mais j’aimerais bien le discuter avec toi bientot.
Ok
I think I’ll have to watch it again…
Bravo pour ton Français. Ça parait que se n’est pas ta langue native mais tu est très bon compte tenu de la complexité de cette langue…
I find myself further in Pasolini’s camp by the word.
“such a message can’t be delivered. It can only be left to silence and to the text.”
because Pasolini assaults power as reason as order; and to use reason as a weapon to combat the principle of reason is impossible. (this tendency is visible in much of his other work as well…)
“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.”
YES. [I’ll have more to say on this later]
I think Pasolini’s self-justifications make perfect sense given his iconoclastic political engagement. remember that he took the side of the police in May 1968 because they were workers rather than children of privilege. He’s skeptical of universality and even solidarity as potential loci of power, because power is the problem (especially when it asserts its own rightness). He’s a perpetual dissenter, even against his own ideals. This is a most admirable form of anti-fascism – one that recognizes fascism not as a force but as a tendency…
“Moralists have no place in the art gallery.” When I finished Salo I couldn’t help but feel a bit like Adam the everyman in Neil Labute’s The Shape of Things. For the sake of analogy, Pasolini is Evelyn, the sociopath, the intellectual, the anti-moralist-moralist. Pasolini sets up the movie with his stylized rhetoric and then protects himself with a sturdy political agenda so that suddenly I’m very interested in his work and now have to take it seriously. Pasolini led me to believe this was a political picture: some kind of maverick attack on power, message, meaning, logic, and torture. Maybe it’s the time I’ve grown up in, where kids drink this kind of content up like soda pop, but I didn’t appreciate his argument; I only sensed his detached sarcasm and stylized brutality. He can spout all the magician’s lingo he wants but in the end the movie is nothing more than high art hanky panky. I can’t believe I bought into his pretense at first, it’s really something.
“detached sarcasm and stylized brutality”
That, MAO was always my point about Salo. His argument is one thing: his film is another. The space between is empty, void of coherence. My brain screams insult: insult to my intelligence, manipulation into being tricked into giving my academic attention to the film, and general annoyance that I didn’t immediately switch off when I realised PPP’s extreme misogyny. It’s all masks.
Dave, please tell me how you see this “The message therefore is formalistic; and precisely for that reason, loaded infinitely with all possible content provided it is coherent – in the structural sense” works. I’m completely open to an exposition. Because it’s shot past me at an oblique.
And also: to support the police in 68 on the grounds that the rioters were bourgeois seems just like another stance, which distances himself from the world and creates the aura of controversial auteur. It’s also a complete failure to understand means of production: students CAN riot because they are semi-free of worker slave/alienation prisons. I get your point about the recognition and rejection of fascism as tendency, and agree to an extent. Pasolini’s involvement with Marxism was complex, this I understand, and he went through many phases in his relationship to it. So maybe we should be talking about Marxist aesthetics here, because in terms of the old Salo, that’s the shit, and that’s where I sense his great failure: to see himself as product of his education, impulse, class and social alienation.
Open letter to Pasolini:
“Bourgeois, vous n’avez rien compris.” (stencilled on a wall by L’Atelier Populaire, 1968)
Fin.
I’ve never seen Salo – so I cannot add to much to this discussion in terms of specifics, but I would like to offer something that I think we too often forget in analysis.
One’s experience watching a film, the director’s intent, how we read the meaning of a film after the fact and “success”(?) in general in no way need to agree with each other and in fact I find it most interesting when they don’t. On a basic level I think Pasolini is saying that during the time of a work’s creation the author is unable to consider “the boundlessness of his own social, historical restrictions.”
Looking at fascism and how filmmakers of the 1970’s revival were specifically influenced by fascism’s connection to cinema and spectacle and in turn how specific countries dealt with fascism and their cinema differently (think excess and perverse sexuality in Italy and family and patriarchy in Germany) no doubt adds to the meaning of the film and the continued definition of it’s meaning. Therefore in regards to message, which in this case Pasolini is arguing as his own, it must be left to construction and form.
We can sit here today and debate success and how time/history/our own education, evolution and understanding will no doubt continue to shape our opinions, but as the author of the film I find Pasolini’s statements completely justified.
That being said, I am always in state of growth and perspective is never based on certainty, only on the moment.
And now I am off to Wall-E – which based on this thread, I assume I will enjoy much more than Salo…
good point.
“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.”
All statements contain their own contradictions. {this statement as much as any other} {hence: Slavoj Zizek}
“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.”
Unlike language (rationality, logic, order, power), form speaks a more unitary language. Language contradicts itself even when it appears not to; statements contain their own antitheses as necessary preconditions for existence. Ideology hides in language as pure dialectical potential. Form remains in the absence of language and message and contains meaning by way of being irreversible because it is nondirectional.
Since that sounds a bit too Zizekian as it is (to say nothing of still being oblique at best), allow me to channel SZ further and address Pasolini’s May 1968 sympathies {feel free to imagine this is a Slovenian accent, with lots of awkwardly timed pauses and sniffling}:
“poliziotti figli di proletari meridionali picchiati da figli di papà in vena di bravate”
“policemen, sons of proletarian southerners, beaten up by arrogant daddy’s boys”
By supporting the working-class police against radical students, Pasolini’s actual sympathies come to the fore. The students are children of the bourgeoisie, they have privilege, but deferred privilege. The students are temporarily aligned with the working class, but only until they pass their exams or whatever, when they can get a nice job, maybe a civil service job or something. So the students, in their violence – limited violence, but violence nonetheless – begin their agitations as bourgeois agitations, for simple bourgeois pleasures – freer sexual relations, et cetera. Even when the students become radical it is the radicality of bourgeois revolution, which asks for more for itself as a class rather than understanding revolution as a structural position. Their alignment with the workers across France is because they have solidarity with factory workers in a limited sense, because the students are in a sense factory workers creating the future ruling class of France. But they are also their own product. Unlike the workers, who produce things outside themselves, they are able to sell this product later – so they are also their own capitalists. So the surplus value of this process is maintained entirely by the students themselves once they become captains of industry, government officials, what have you. By supporting the police Pasolini is supporting a revolution on a structural level that doesn’t depend of the extension of bourgeois values to the society as a whole; he is maintaining his solidarity on a class basis with structural change. He also recognized that class oppression is the most pernicious of capitalism’s oppressions. Economic oppression continues to be a more serious violence than restrictions on personal liberty, but the bourgeois sees only those restrictions as signals of barbarism, because they are the benefactor of class oppression and not its victim. [/Zizekism]
Which I may not entirely agree with, but it’s a position to be considered. Note that the Pasolini statement I quoted seems to be a response to the Battle of Valle Giulia, not May ‘68. That’s a fairly different situation, insofar as France had a large bloc of worker solidarity with the students that never materialized during Italy’s student radicalism of that time. It’s also worth noting that in spite of these sympathies he was peripherally involved with Lotta Continua.
To really discuss Pasolini’s formal approach to power/language/order/class violence, we’ll definitely have to start discussing Porcile as well…
OK let’s do Porcile. I’m kind of currently more concerned about Garage than this, so forgive me if I don’t dive straight in with a seriously thought out argument. In fact, as this thread is all the committee from Garage, can I just take a moment to ask: are we happy with the direction it’s taking so far? I feel the theme/thread of collective is getting lost.
Anyway, back to PPP. Dave, I tend to play reactionary with his work for reasons I find hard to explain rationally. I feel something viscerally in watching these films. I guess this is why I keep pushing at an answer: because, unlike the work of any other auteur, PPP winds me up badly. This may of course be evidence of a massive success, in so far as he has challenged me to the point that I am willing to abandon any argument that normally might interest me (language, Marixism, revolution, symbolism) – his work makes me ANGRY Now this may or may not be because I position myself ultimately in an anti-patriarchal/anarchist framework, and to this extent I am unable finally to step out of an ideological prison to identify the weight of Pasolini’s argument/aesthetic/work. Or it might be because I sat in film school listening to academic bullshit for too many years. Or it might be because the visual imagery he employs, his cuts, images, characters and edits, make me actually sick. As far as Zizek goes, I find his Lacaniansms a deeply interesting point of departure, because I take a lot of stock by Lacan. But here we leave the world of political ideology and step into a mirror of unconscious symbolisms and linguistic analysis.
I feel that my ultimate rejection of Salo is because it plays with both academic insecurity (aka language/meaning) and bad adaption of De Sade (in my opinion) simultaneously.
But like I said, I’m riffing off the top of my head, and I’m not explaining myself well. More later.
I want to add that none of the images in the movie really made me sick. So it kind of failed in that sense too, kids today are real degenerates so this does little to shock. That’s the idea behind the movie right? The movie is supposed to repulse you enough to either hate the film or love it for it’s powerful portrait of fascism. I grew up in the late nineties when kids would go to tubgirl.com or see 2 girls 1 cup or receive photos of half-naked fat girls puking; we saw jackass and skate videos and gruesome horror movies. Basically, if I hadn’t listened to or read any of Pasolini’s excuses for making this movie I would’ve just thought this was another Clockwork Orange. Which it really is. There’s nothing particularly profound about it. Perhaps then this stuff was super revolutionary but I’m going to apply the needless handbag label I’ve applied to Japon and a few other films. It’s pop art cinema that’s made for a very select audience that are willing to wrap their heads around it’s supposed meaning. Meh.
Zizek: I’m not high on Lacan, whose work is valuable but not in my main interests; I think the psychoanalytic is an artistic dead end (for me – i see psychology and psychological realism as profoundly antimaterialist) (and I prefer Kristeva’s post-Lacanism to Zizek’s, anyway).
Politically, I think he’s perniciously nihilist but makes some interesting critiques of the left’s separation from action (by way, invariably, of supporting Stalin or some other nonsense that hurts the left more than the problems he’s critiquing). In sum, he’s a shill for capitalism but a deep thinker by virtue of a strange shallowness (a ‘shallowness’ rooted in Lacan?).
Pasolini, theory: I can see how this would be obnoxious (though I’m far more sick of Lacan’s legacy than of critical theory). I agree with Gina that we can/must separate the issue of success in a project from understanding the project from the artist’s POV. But I am interested in attempts to unlock a work, even when they come from the artists in question.
Pasolini, disgust: MAO, I’ve (intentionally) never seen any of those things [the Kubrick excepted]; I have retained the ability to be shocked.
Pasolini, Sade: if what you’re looking for is a ‘good’ adaptation of Sade, then perhaps you’re asking a) too much, or b) not enough?
Pasolini, ideology, anger: doesn’t your reaction to his work prove his assertion that form is the true locus of meaning?
It also reminds me of the way in which the ‘left’ finds it easier to bicker with close allies over orthodoxy and correctness than to compromise in pursuit of shared grand ideals (revisioniste! revisioniste!). Perhaps he’s addressing the right issues in the wrong way (for you). Or vice versa?
Whenever I hate a film passionately, not the second-order hate of despising mediocrity but with visceral intensity, I harbor a secret suspicion that it’s a masterpiece.
A quick note on being shocked… I find that often it is not content that shocks but context.
Also – thanks for a great debate – I’ve enjoyed reading it very much.
Dave, I’m actually not quite sure why this didn’t shock me. I have a feeling it has something to do with its stylized kind of surreal imagery. To be honest the movie was a little funny and it came off as a sermi-serious and fiercely obscene version of Jodorowsky. I got a big kick out of the guy who plays the president. I get Pasolini’s points and I think they’re valid; I just don’t need his movie to realize the gravity of such depravity. Not when he uses such sarcastic and stylish form. Another film that uses a violent content to support its context is Gibson’s Passion of Christ. This movie has some images that really did shock me but not because the man was Jesus; it was Mel’s serious use of form. In his movie I saw an actual human being, not a series of caricatures, get tortured and maimed and murdered. Religious or not people debated if such a brutal portrayal of Jesus was really what the man was all about. Whatever. Whether the movie serves the context correctly or not is the same dilemma Salo runs into. I think Salo feeds lust as much as it critiques it. It looked like the filmmakers had a blast making it. I bet the actress who’s being scalped towards the end took a picture in full make up for her mama. I’d imagine she stuck her tongue out.
You take the context away from Salo or the Passion and it’s just people being tortured. The filmmakers can grimace and lecture and whatnot but when the movie rolls that’s all they’ve captured. They’re both as dumb in thinking making these kind of films can say anything. As dumb as Spielberg thinks making Saving Private Ryan will show us the horrors of war. These movies turn misery into thrill rides.
The fact that “it’s just people being tortured” is precisely why Salo might succeed even without context. It creates its own context: the brutality of human beings and power – an eternal truth.
For the same reason, I think the opening 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan is one of America’s most eloquent anti-war films. Its only context is the slaughter of life by the machinery of war.
The brutality of human beings and power with quirky dialogue and silly sex stories and Dante Ferretti sets and ridiculously silly looking men and such? While on the other hand we have the eloquent fun ride of war which was then produced into a series of video games by Spielberg? I see what you’re saying man… they just don’t do it for me. I know I said I grew up watching really filthy stuff but that’s not to say I liked it. I don’t really go to movies for this kind of stuff… the movie seriously felt like it was made with glee and joy and not in an ironic way. Is that the point or is that just an excuse to make this kind of movie? I’m not sure.
1) I would argue that the images that Spielberg frames the main story of Saving Private Ryan with (flags, family visiting grave) take away any potential anti-war message. The flag and the graveyard do change how one reads the 20 minutes of slaughter. Alone, the opening scene does stand as brutal anti-war poem – but not in Spielberg’s film.
2) I think context isn’t always important when it comes to general success, but is often essential to one’s personal ability to be shocked by something. This could also mean that lack of context itself would be the reason something was affective or not affective when considering the individual. I also find that there is a difference between something seen on film and something on video (in regards to internet filth/jackass) – the way we read 24fps (slower, less “real”) no doubt changes how one regards what they are seeing (although this is changing as technology develops). Also, television and internet in general are more prone to distraction.
Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote an interesting little blog post on torture in films a while ago.
http://blogs.chicagoreader.com/film/2006/12/14/avoiding-movies-about-torture/
He brings up some interesting points regarding American’s acceptance/enjoyment of torture in the cinema and our attitudes towards war, specifically the torture in our current war.
Also of note, given this discussion, is his review of No Country for Old Men : http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=7912
I wouldn’t say the difference in frame rate has loads to do with how I’m affected by content, at least not nowadays (with the line being blurred constantly), but I do think that our ability to be shocked by cinema depends on the individual. I think it’s harder to accept violent images for some when it’s easier for others. That’s an argument I haven’t really talked a lot about with people. Like, I know a friend who can read a book like American Psycho or Naked Lunch but couldn’t possibly sit through something like Salo. In a book you can easily not imagine the passages or tone them down whereas in a movie it’s there in front of you and it’s hard to accept violence when it’s not of your own creation. At least that’s the way I reason. In my case, it’s very hard for me to ever take violence seriously in movies (though I sometimes do depending on the director’s ability) because I can’t help but see it’s all fake. Violence does for me what breaking the fourth wall does for others; it takes me out of the movie since someone obviously really can’t be killed or maimed or tortured or raped in a movie. Unless it’s a snuff film or something. I don’t know, didn’t Truffaut say film lovers are sick people? I’d think so.
By the way, I’ve learned a lot from reading all the responses you people post… it’s really cool. You fellas really know your film theory, so if I sound like the little chicken hawk that goes yapping around the forums please bear with me I’m still learning a lot of this stuff. In all seriousness I’ve learned more treading around these posts than in a classroom.
Actually MAO, I really like your approach to all the debates you’ve taken part in. You elucidate clear thinking, but you always keep your intelligence rooted in the human/real, and your responses have a raw honesty about them that is deeply refreshing and often has helped me to shift a perspective (for example, Sophia Coppola).
“I know a friend who can read a book like American Psycho or Naked Lunch but couldn’t possibly sit through something like Salo.”
um, yeah, that’s me. I literally covered my eyes for huge sections of Argento’s Mother of Tears.
The frame rate difference is a subliminal one that changes the way our optical-reception neurons process reality and the image; it’s more than just a psychological space. So, it’s one you may not even be able to perceive in your own perception.
Gina, I think you’re somewhat right about the flag/graveyard material in SPR. I think Spielberg is working in the same ideological mode as classical Hollywood, where many films spend all of their energy creating/exploring a conflict with potentially dangerous/radical ideas and then undercut themselves at the end with a coda that asserts the power and wholesomeness of order. I once wrote a piece on Minority Report entitled “All Happy Endings Are Counterrevolutionary” (it’s a bit too theory-laden for me to link to here, but the basic idea is that this final assertion of order does more damage to the critique embedded in a film’s body than the critique can possibly wield against order; it doesn’t just undercut the critique, but actually negates the critique as a possible locus of truth). That said, for me the flag/graveyard material is too abstract an undercutting to compete with the corporeality of the violence in that brutal battle scene.
Can I read your article on Minority Report please? That movie was destined to be the next Blade Runner in my eyes up until those atrocious last five minutes.
If only there were three cuts to choose from for Report too.
T
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."