#17: PASOLINI, Pier Paolo: Salò, Or The 120 Days Of Sodom (1976)

PASOLINI, Pier Paolo (Italy)
Salò, Or The 120 Days Of Sodom [1976]
Spine #17
DVD

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 eighteenth-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.

116 minutes
Color

Monaural

in Italian

1:85:1 aspect ratio

Criterion Release 2008

Director/Writers

Written by Pier Paolo Pasolini with collaboration from Sergio Citti.

Pasolini was 54 when he directed Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom.

Other Pasolini films in the Collection:

#0000F1: Accattone (1961)
#0000F2/#236: Mamma Roma (1962)
#0000F3: Love Meetings (1964)
#0000F4: The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)
#0000F5: The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966)
#0000F6: Oedipus Rex (1967)
#0000F7/#1013: Teorema (1968)
#0000F8: Porcile (1969)
#0000F9: Medea (1969)
#632: The Decameron (1971)
#633: The Canterbury Tales (1972)
#634: Arabian Nights (1974)

The Film

Do not watch this film! If you are the least big squeamish about on-screen violence, graphic nudity, scenes of torture, do not watch this film! If you are unable to separate fictional frames of celluloid from the allegory from an artist’s point of view, do not watch this film! If you are a literal-minded person, and come away from a film without taking the time to dissect the deeper meaning of what you have just seen, definitely do not watch this film!

**

Do watch this film! If you are interested in the subject of fascism in society, and the fact that it existed — and still exists to this day — in the governance of human beings, do watch this film! If you are the kind of person that can watch the awful things you will see on screen, and come away with a deeper understanding behind the motives of the artist, then do watch this film! If you can see past the gross images, and realize that a recipe involving Swiss chocolate and marmalade is involved, and that no one was hurt or injured during the making of the film; and that Pasolini shot hundreds of thousands of feet of film, before editing it all down to 116 minutes of screen time, and you understand how every shot was pondered, considered, agonizingly fretted over, then do watch this film! If you are the kind of cineaste who has — at some point — come to realize that the really great films need to be watched a second or third time, do watch this film! At least twice.

**

It’s entirely up to you.

**

Pasolini was brutally murdered mere weeks after completing Salò … to this day, the crime remains unsolved. He may have been trying to pay a ransom for developed reels that were stolen from the production; he may have been engaging in rough, dangerous sex — or he might have been killed by the same type of fascists he was portraying on screen.

Source material:

Marquis de Sade: The 120 Days of Sodom (1785)

Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy (Inferno) (1320)

Cast:

Paolo Bonacelli (The duke) (dubbed by Giancarlo Vigorelli)

Giorgio Cataldi (The bishop) (dubbed by Giorgio Caproni)

Umberto P. Quintavalle (The magistrate) (dubbed by Aurelio Roncaglia)

Aldo Valletti (The president) (dubbed by Marco Bellocchio)

Caterina Boratto (Signora Castelli)

Elsa de Giorgi (Signora Maggi)

Hélène Surgére (Signora Vaccari) (dubbed by Laura Betti)

Sonia Saviange (Pianist)

Music

Other than the Chopin, etc. that the pianist plays while the ladies deliver their verbal pornography, there is no musical score, per se.

There is These Foolish Things, which opens the film.

Film Rating (0-60):

55

The Extras

The Booklet

Eighty-page booklet featuring essays by Neil Bartlett, Catherine Breillat, Naomi Greene, Sam Rohdie, Roberto Chiesi, Gary Indiana, and Gideon Bachmann.

Bartlett:

“Is the true measure of a film’s greatness its unforgettability? Conjured up in darkened rooms that mimic the intimate circumstances of our normally private dreams and fantasies, vast in scale and impact, the images of celluloid are of course notoriously memorable — but still, there are some films from which not just individual images but a whole way of seeing remains lodged in the mind. In this category, Pasolini’s infamous Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom has a very particular place.”

Breillat:

“It’s always the same when I tackle Pasolini — the first encounter escapes me. Pasolini doesn’t come at you head-on; it’s more like embroidery, which can seem simple, unrelentingly repetitive. So it went the first time I saw Salò. Of course, there’s that cold preamble; the roundup without pity or explanation is magnificent but that kind of magnificence is nothing more than a chilling jolt to our conscience.”

Greene:

“The year before he made Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom, Pasolini hinted at the scandalous contours his last film would assume. In the course of a 1974 debate, he declared that now, as never before, ‘artists must create, critics defend, and democratic people support … works so extreme that they become unacceptable even to the broadest minds of the new State.’ In large part, of course Pasolini’s demand for ‘extreme’ works was fueled by his conviction that only such ‘unacceptable’ art could resist being consumed by the hated world of neocapitalism that was fast destroying all he had known and loved. But it is also true that, long before he uttered these sentiments, he had written essays, made films, and taken stands that were deeply polemical if not always unacceptable. In short, decades before he became Italy’s most notorious public intellectual — famous for taking one unpopular or ‘heretical’ stand after another — he had displayed the ever constant desire, as he said, to ‘break the rules.’ There was never any doubt in his mind that, as he once declared, ‘the real Marxist must not be a good Marxist. His function is to put orthodoxy and codified certainties into crisis. His duty is to break the rules.’”

Rohdie:

“Salò contains at least four temporal layers: The time it was made (1975); the period of the last year of the Italian Fascist puppet government under Mussolini in Salò, on Lago di Garda, in Northern Italy (1944-45); the novel The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade, and the epic Divine Comedy of Dante … the film is ambiguous and paradoxical. It is beautifully formed and stylistically complicated, however repellent the scenes that it represents, as if its images of evil have been both highlighted and exorcised by the strength and sublimity of its style …”

Chiesi:

“Among the many cruel and brutal rituals we see in the film, there is one that’s repeated in obsessive variation right up until the end. It is the domestic scene of the three narrators, who, each in turn, tell stories and episodes from their own experiences to suggest new ideas with which to ‘entertain,’ and above all arouse, the masters. The orgy room, dominated by the presence of the long table ominously placed at its center and throned with spectators on both sides, is the space for a ritual that alludes to another. The audience there listening is the mass of corrupted and deformed TV viewers, the passive consumers of an indoctrination against which they cannot, or do not want to, rebel.”

Indiana:

“The title card that appears in the opening credits of Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom, Pasolini’s ‘Recommended Bibliography,’ seems to signal to the viewer that the filmmaker’s intentions can’t be fully understood without a familiarity with a written body of philosophical texts on the source author, Sade, by Pierre Klossowski, Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, and Maurice Blanchot … the spectacle of joyless lubricity and dehumanizing cruelty and carnage visualized by Pasolini could not be further from the dry, dense, sometimes obscurantist and circular arguments to be found in the printed pages of his bibliographic sources.”

Bachmann:

“Since coprophagy occurs at regular intervals, the special-effects department has had to produce a comestible product. Swiss chocolate, broken biscuits, condensed milk, and marmalade, which is then squeezed through plastic tubing to dress it in its habitual form. Since it is lunchtime, I try a piece on my sandwich. As usual, it’s the idea of it that disgusts. A perfect illustration of Kierkegaard: the event assumes its contents after the fact. History, seen backwards, creates its own significance. It is precisely what Pasolini is doing to Sade by resettling him in Fascism. I am subject to the same suggestiveness: I spit out the chocolaty mess. Laughter roars up around me — half the crew has gone through with the same experiment, with the same result.”

Commentary

None.

Salo: Yesterday and Today

A 33-minute documentary featuring interviews with director Pasolini, actor-filmmaker Jean-Claude Biette, and Pasolini friend Ninetto Davoli.

Pasolini:

“It’s what I generally always do, but taken to extremes. My obsessive use of shots/reverse shots, one close-up contrasted with another, the absence of over-the-shoulder shots, the complete absence of characters who leave and enter the shot, and most of all the absence of sequence shots — all this is typical of my films. I think in this film it’s all taken to its maximum clarity, its most absolute degree.”

Biette and Davoli don’t have much to add.

Fade to Black

A 23-minute documentary featuring directors Bernardo Bertolucci, Breillat, and John Maybury, as well as scholar David Forgacs.

Bertolucci:

“I saw it just a few days after Paolo was murdered, and my reaction was really … I could hardly bear the film. I couldn’t separate the photographs of Pasolini’s corpse covered with blood from the film I was seeing. It was very, very painful. I couldn’t stand the film. I hated it. Then little by little, it came back to me — that’s why I remember saying that the film was atrocious and sublime.”

Breillat:

“It’s one of the most important movies in the world. I think it’s the contrary of a movie of entitlement — it’s a movie of art. But to see it, you have to be very strong. It’s a very disturbing movie.”

Maybury:

“It seems to me that Pasolini is trying to make a comment about what actually is pornographic, and that comment seems to be a political statement — the nature of fascism, the corruption of power.”

Forgacs:

“It’s an anti-pornographic film.”

The End of Salo

A 40-minute documentary about the film’s production.

Excellent doc with lots of talking heads. Some stills, presumably from the stolen reels, including the electric chair scene. The best anecdotes:

Pupi Avati:

“I’ve never seen Salò, though once by mistake, I went into a movie theater and quickly discovered that Salò was on the screen. I left, because it was like running into something that I should have absolutely nothing to do with. This decision not to see it is linked to a very strong sense of responsibility that I feel about the making of this film. It’s very personal, and linked to a point in my life when I suggested to Pier Paolo that Salò should be among the films he should consider making, since we’d written it for Sergio Citti much earlier.

Fiorella Infascelli:

“I knew he was in preproduction on this film so I went to PEA, the production company in Rome, quite often. I’d go to see his long-time assistant, Umberto Angelucci, and ask if they could hire me as an assistant. They kept saying absolutely not, impossible, that it would be a very difficult film, and Pier Paolo definitely wouldn’t want a woman assistant.”

Dante Ferretti (production designer):

Deco-Fascist style: “The most important thing I wanted to bring in were censored paintings from that period.” [most of them were originals! — LS]

Interviews

With production designer Ferretti and director and film scholar Jean-Pierre Gordin.

Ferretti:

“The most important thing Pasolini taught me was to see cinema with a painter’s eyes.”

Gordin:

“Why should one see Salò? The question comes at the end of other questions, like how should we look at Salò? It’s an allegory, it’s not a realistic film.”

Theatrical trailer

Extras Rating (0-40):

36

55 + 36 =

91

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