Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma)

Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Screenplay: Pier Paolo Pasolini (with collaboration from Sergio Citti; inspired by The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade)
Stars: Paolo Bonacelli (The Duke), Giorgio Cataldi (The Bishop), Umberto Paolo Quintavalle (The Magistrate), Aldo Valletti (The President), Caterina Boratto (Signora Castelli), Elsa De Giorgi (Signora Maggi), Hélène Surgère (Signora Vaccari), Sonia Saviange (The pianist)
MPAA Rating: NR
Year of Release: 1975
Country: Italy / France
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom I have now seen Pier Paolo Pasolini’s infamous final film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma) a handful of times, the number of viewings limited largely by the fact that several years must pass before I can bring myself to watch it again. On any short list of “most disgusting” or “most disturbing” or “most controversial” films ever made, Salò is always included, usually topping the list even though, in the more than 30 years since it was completed in late 1975, there have been dozens of films that are more graphically violent, more sexually perverse, and more morally twisted. And yet, Salò continues to unnerve and disturb even the most jaded viewer, perhaps because no other film has managed to envision such a compelling intellectual fascination with and moral revulsion to the depths of human evil. There is no way to defend Salò’s extreme grotesquerie without noting that the film is loathsome because its subject is loathsome.

The film’s title derives from two sources: the northern Italian town of Salò, which from 1943 to 1945 was the seat of Mussolini’s Nazi-backed puppet regime, and the Marquis de Sade’s 1875 novel The 120 Days of Sodom, one of his most celebrated, if virtually unreadable, philosophical-pornographic treatises. Pasolini takes the basic scenario envisioned in Sade’s book--four libertines enslave teenage boys and girls and then debase and torture them in various ways while listening to a quartet of aged prostitutes spin tales from their sordid pasts--and restages it during World War II, thus equating Sade’s systematic recounting of sexual perversions with the fascist imperative to control and therefore dehumanize.

As a lifelong communist, albeit one on the outside of the official party lines due to his homosexuality, Pasolini loathed fascism and all it stood for, including consumerism, which he saw as a new kind of fascism that reduces everything to material goods for consumption, including the human body. As he angrily wrote in Lutheran Letters, “even the ‘reality’ of innocent bodies has been violated, manipulated, enslaved by consumerist power--indeed such violence to human bodies has become the most macroscopic fact of the new human epoch.” Thus, Salò operates on multiple allegorical levels, literalizing the depravity of historical fascism while suggesting that its lineage continues to debase both those who embrace it and are its willing subjects.

Pasolini’s style throughout Salò is rough and uneven; although the film is set in a decadent, deco-fascist villa and much of it is structured around tableaux that are meant to evoke classical paintings, Pasolini’s camera is often handheld and slightly shaky, with a minimum of movement that feels planned or somehow orchestrated. It is also crucial to note that the film is composed primarily of long and medium shots; only a few times does Pasolini bring us in for close-ups, instead relying on a cold, distanced aesthetic that forces us explicitly into the uneasy role of voyeur, watching the events unfold as if we were in the corner of the room, which makes them that much more unbearable. (Pasolini takes the voyeuristic angle to its apex during the final torture sequence, in which we witness the atrocities through the libertines’ leering binoculars.)

This sense of distance is key to understanding Salò’s disturbing nature. Unlike conventional narrative cinema, we are denied any point of identification. With rare exceptions, we are put in the role of witness, which means that we are able to see, but rarely understand. The film opens with the four conspirators--a duke (Paolo Bonacelli), a bishop (Giorgio Cataldi), a magistrate (Umberto Paolo Quintavalle), and a president (Aldo Valletti)--agreeing to a document that lays out their perverse plans, but we never really understand why. They are not characters so much as symbols of power, and as such they operate on an almost abstract level, their villainy bordering on the cartoonish, but without offering any emotional respite; they operate simply according to their principle that “all’s good if it’s excessive.” To understand them as people would make the film psychological, and Pasolini keeps them fervently symbolic, which extends to their dialogue in which they quote directly from philosophers and artists like Maurice Blanchot, Comte de Lautréamont, Pierre Klossowski, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

This extends to the victims as well, all of whom are teenagers and are rounded up in the film’s opening passages and hand-selected for their attractiveness. We want--no, we need--to feel for these kids, and Pasolini dangles the possibility of emotional investment as we see them captured and selected, creating a gnawing sense of the inevitable horrors to come. Yet, once they are secluded in the villa and the rituals begin, they become little more than interchangeable flesh, reduced beyond the status of victim to pure commodity. At two points Pasolini shows us two of the female victims talking to and comforting each other, and the shots stand out because they are so contrary to the rest of the film’s design. They remind us that these victims are ultimately human, and I think Pasolini inserted these shots as a way of jarring us a bit and reminding us of that fact, even though he noted in an interview in Sight & Sound in 1975, “I am in no way trying to arouse sympathy, the film would lose its sting if I did. In this I am also true to de Sade.”

One of the questions that always lingers around Salò is whether or not its allegorical implications can sustain the weight of its visceral nature. This is, after all, a film that explicitly depicts images of sexual violence, degradation, and torment in such a way that one’s immediate response is to cower and look away. Its immediate impact is purely visceral and physical, assaulting the viewer with perverse and repulsive imagery that is designed to challenge and assault. Borrowing from Dante Alighieri, Pasolini organized the films in terms of escalating circles of depravity, beginning with obsession, moving to coprophilia and coprophagia, and finally ending with murder. The result is a downward spiral, drawing us deeper into the vortex of human evil’s darkest capacities.

At the same time, though, the film frequently reminds us that its transgressions are fundamentally philosophical and theatrical; that is, the libertines are constantly ruminating on the nature of their activities, which both allows some respite from the orgy of violence and literally forces us to consider it beyond its mere physicality. As a poet, novelist, essayist, and filmmaker, Pasolini’s artistic credentials were impressive, thus it is fundamentally absurd to simply denounce Salò as pornographic or sadistic for the sake of sadism. Rather, it is quite the opposite: It confronts us with the unwatchable as a means of both challenging the limits of what art can withstand and also daring us to consider the true nature of freedom. One of Pasolini’s most daring conceits is to include a bibliography during the opening credits--which include Simone de Beauvoir’s 1955 essay “Must We Burn Sade?,” which defended The 120 Days of Sodom to the French authorities who wanted to destroy it--which establishes from the outset his seriousness of purpose, even if that has hardly been enough to deflect charges of exploitation.

Salò has been described as an angry, bitter film, and it is certainly that, especially in comparison to the celebration of earthy sexuality found in Pasolini’s three previous films (1971’s The Decameron, 1972’s Canterbury Tales, and 1974’s Arabian Nights). Pasolini seems to have lost all hope, and in documenting such depravity he gives lasting form to the far reaches of human power. It condemns the abuse of authority, but more importantly, it condemns unchecked freedom. After all, what are the libertines but men who are free to do anything they wish? While it is easy to think of Salò as simply depraved, it is ultimately a savage plea for humanity.

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom Criterion Collection Two-Disc DVD Set

Aspect Ratio1.85:1
AnamorphicYes
Audio
  • Italian Dolby Digital 1.0 Monaural
  • English Dolby Digital 1.0 Monaural
  • Subtitles English
    Supplements
  • Salò: Yesterday and Today” documentary
  • Salò: Fade to Black” documentary
  • “The End of Salò” documentary
  • Theatrical trailer
  • Insert booklet featuring new essays by Neil Bartlett, Catherine Breillat, Naomi Greene, Sam Rohdie, Roberto Chiesi, and Gary Indiana, and excerpts from Gideon Bachmann’s on-set diary
  • DistributorThe Criterion Collection
    SRP$39.95
    Release DateAugust 26, 2008

    VIDEO & AUDIO
    Rumors have swirled for quite some time that Criterion was going to re-release Salò, which had become one of the most sought-after out-of-print DVDs on the market, going for upwards of $900 on eBay a few years ago, which makes me wish I had sold the copy I bought back in 1998. Alas, losing out on a potential profit of $860 hurts, but it’s still worth it to have this important and challenging film readily available again in a much-improved transfer. Criterion’s original DVD used the same master that appeared on their laser disc edition, which was well below their standards even at the dawn of DVD: the nonanamorphic, slightly cropped image was soft, showed quite a bit of dirt and damage, and had a strange greenish hue to it. The new high-definition, digitally restored anamorphic transfer, which was made from a 35mm interpositive, is a significant improvement. The image is sharp, clear, and well-detailed, although it still has a somewhat soft appearance that is clearly the intended look of the film. It has a largely desaturated palette, with an abundance of grays, beiges, and blacks, which are well presented. The monaural soundtrack, which was transferred at 24-bit from a 35mm magnetic track, sounds very good, although viewers should be aware that the film’s sound was done entirely in postproduction, so every character is essentially dubbed, some better than others. The disc also includes an English-language track, although not a French language track that was being recorded when Pasolini died, which is unfortunate because the film actually premiered in Paris and was a French coproduction.
    SUPPLEMENTS
    If there has ever been a film in the Criterion Collection that absolutely demands a plethora of supplements to help viewers better understand it, Salò is it. Unfortunately, Criterion’s original DVD was bare-bones, but this new edition boasts an entire second disc of supplements, albeit without an audio commentary, which is a bit of a disappointment. The supplements that are included are certainly intriguing and go a long way toward contextualizing this most difficult of films, even if most of them are several years old. “Salò: Yesterday and Today” is a 33-minute documentary that features interviews with Pasolini, actor-filmmaker Jean-Claude Biette, and Pasolini friend Nineto Davoli, as well as quite a bit of footage of Pasolini shooting the final torture sequences. “Salò: Fade to Black” is a 23-minute documentary in which directors Bernardo Bertolucci, Catherine Breillat, and John Maybury and University College London professor of Italian David Forgacs give us their take on the film. Not surprisingly, Breillat thinks it’s a masterpiece, but Bertolucci, whose directorial debut La Commare secca (1962) was from a Pasolini script, admits that he hated it when he first saw it. Finally, we have The End of Salò, which is a more expansive 49-minute retrospective documentary about the film’s production and reception. It includes interviews with actors Antinisca Nemour and Paolo Bonacelli, screenwriter Pupi Avati (who, ironically enough, has never actually seen the film and still refuses to), and production designer Dante Feretti. In addition to these three documentaries and the U.S. theatrical trailer, the second disc gives us new video interviews with Ferretti (11 min.) and director and film scholar Jean-Pierre Gorin (26 min.), who is so good at talking about the film that I wished he had recorded an entire audio commentary. And, rather than giving us one take on the film in the insert booklet, we get six new essays by Neil Bartlett, Catherine Breillat, Naomi Greene, Sam Rohdie, Roberto Chiesi, and Gary Indiana, as well as excerpts from the on-set diary kept by Gideon Bachmann, a close friend of Pasolini’s. The essays are essential reading since they approach the film from a different angle (historical, aesthetic, political, social, personal, etc.), resulting in a multifaceted portrait that is sometimes contradictory (is the film a serious moral treatise, as Green argues, or a satire, as Indiana argues?).

    Copyright ©2008 James Kendrick

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    All images copyright © The Criterion Collection

    Overall Rating: (4)




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