Salo [DVD]

This is an outstanding BFI issue of Pier Paolo Pasolini's notorious final film, Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom (1975). Not only is the print uncut and uncensored, but it has been restored to its original aspect ratio (1.85:1) and looks absolutely fabulous. Tonino Delli Colli's extremely beautiful compositions and Dante Ferretti's superb symmetrical art direction are shown off to great effect with Pasolini's dark disturbing sexual-political allegory packing a powerful visual punch. There are 3 discs here. Disc 1 is the Blu-ray which contains the original English as well as Italian versions. Also there is the original Italian trailer and a music video track, 'Ostia - The Death of Pasolini' by the rock band, Coil. Disc 2 contains the same content but in DVD format. Disc 3 is an outstanding DVD collection of documentaries consisting mainly of interviews which cover many aspects of Salo. We see Pasolini in action directing the final gruesome torture sequence in the first documentary, Open Your Eyes! (2008). Probably the best documentary on the disc is the excellent Pasolini TV profile, Whoever Says the Truth Shall Die (1981) which gives an overview of the life of this extraordinary artist. In addition, I was delighted to find a very good 26 minute short film directed by Julian Cole, Ostia (1987) which stars Derek Jarman. It is a fictional reconstruction of the brutal murder of Pasolini at the beach in Ostia, just outside of Rome (but relocated to London's East End) at the hands of a homosexual prostitute and/or a possible political conspiracy. The short is a graduation film made at the Royal Academy of Art and its visual invention shines through the rough transfer quality. The film is made moving by the fact that Jarman learned he was HIV positive during the shoot and was acting under considerable personal stress. Cole provides an illuminating commentary. Added to the shear wealth of things to watch, there is also an excellent 30 page booklet on the film which contains a lucid introduction to Salo by Sam Rohdie, the original MFB review by Gilbert Adair, a printed version of the prologue and epilogue which the BBFC were obliged to attach to the film in its 'club cut' version which was the only way it could have been seen in the 1970s in the UK, James Ferman's 1979 letter to the Director of Public Prosecutions explaining in detail why he thought Salo shouldn't be banned, the lyrics to the Coil music track and a brief biography of Pasolini by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. The 150 minutes of high quality extra material on the third disc and the booklet make the best possible support program for a film which few like, let alone love, and which happens to be one of Pasolini's greatest achievements and a film which is essential viewing for anyone interested in cinema as an art form.It's very easy to see why Salo has kicked up so much hostility. It's undoubtedly 'repulsive, outrageous and abhorrent' as Malaysia's censorship board found it. Based on The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade, but updated to the Salo Republic of the last year of World War II, it charts the story of 4 rich Fascist libertines who kidnap 18 boys and girls, whisking them off to a country house where the most outrageously depraved sexual acts are perpetrated on them for the rich enjoyment of their masters. The narrative structure is lifted from Dante's Inferno and there are 4 parts to the film - the Anteinferno, the Circle of Manias, the Circle of S*** and the Circle of Blood. The Anteinferno sees the 4 libertines sign an agreement to what they are about to do, they marry each others' daughters, recruit 4 studs (or 'guards') who are chosen because they have large penises, personally select the 18 victims (9 boys, 9 girls) and then convene at the country house chosen for their debauchery. There they are met by 4 middle-aged collaborating prostitutes who are hired to tell filthy erotic stories in a salon of the house. The rules are read out to all and the debauchery begins. The Circle of Mania incorporates many of Sade's stories taken from the book which are read while the masters listen and enjoy the young bodies that surround them. Here no distinction is made between heterosexuality and homosexuality, vaginal intercourse and anal intercourse being freely interchangeable. Particularly nasty are scenes of rape and victims forced to behave as dogs tied to leashes as they eat out of dog bowls. One girl is forced to eat bread with nails which have been deliberately planted within. One of the libertines smiles as the girl's mouth flows with blood. The Circle of S*** sees the obscenity escalate even further with stories focusing on defecation and coprophagia. One of the libertines defecates in front of everyone and forces a girl to eat his feces. The victims are forbidden to defecate except when required and later everyone feasts on a giant plate of feces which has been collected from the bowels of everyone present. The names of those who disobey the rules are taken in a black book and marked down for later punishment. One girl is slated for invoking the name of God, another for daring to wipe his backside after defecating. The film assumes the form of Sade's book in its compendious cataloging of depravity and it never lets up. The final Circle of Blood forms the suitably sickening finale with the victims who have transgressed the rules being rounded up in a courtyard and then tortured and killed for the delectation of the libertines who both take part in the depravities and observe from afar, Pasolini controversially inviting us to share in their sick voyeurism. One boy is scalped, another's eye is gouged out. One girl is anally raped immediately before being hanged. Nipples are burned, breasts are branded, tongues and penises are cut off and two young boys (who have watched and taken part in much of the preceding depravity) dance a sweet little waltz. Yes, it's safe to say this is probably cinema's most depraved film this side of snuff. So why do acknowledged artists such as Martin Scorsese and Michael Haneke insist Salo is a masterful statement which should be seen?The main reason for Salo's high regard lies in the success with which its political allegory is rendered. The film's uncompromising depiction of sexual depravity had never been seen in the cinema before and has never been seen since. And yet the depravity is harnessed by Pasolini to make a political statement which is arguably profound and important as a cautionary warning. Before everything else I think it should be said that the subject of Salo is not sex. The subject is Fascism. Pasolini hated Fascism and made his feelings about it known in the strongest possible terms in this film. The film is obscene because Fascism itself is obscene. The film is an allegory which plays out on two different levels. The first is the obvious one of the Fascism of those 18 months towards the end of World War II when the Nazis set up a puppet Fascist state in Salo, a small town on the shore of Lake Garda. It was the last place Mussolini held power. The period of the Salo Republic was a time of unprecedented horror during which 72,000 people were killed, 40,000 were mutilated and another 40,000 were sent on to German concentration camps. The truck with the victims at the beginning of the film passes through the infamous town of Marzabotto, a place where 2,000 inhabitants were rounded up and massacred by 18 year old boy collaborators. Pasolini was personally affected by this horror. He spent part of his childhood growing up in the area, his brother had been killed during partisan skirmishing during the last days of the war, and his father (who he hated) had been a Fascist in the early days, decorated for having saved Mussolini's life. Add Pasolini's Communist convictions into the mix and we have good reasons for his desire to make a strong anti-Fascist statement. It's spelled out clearly at the outset that the film's 4 Fascist libertines represent the 4 sides of the Salo Republic power structure - there is the Duke (Paolo Bonacelli) representing the aristocracy, the Bishop (Giorgio Cataldi) representing religion, the Magistrate (Umberto P. Quintavalle) representing the Law and the President (Aldo Valleti) representing the political infrastructure. The agreement they sign at the start of the film represents the constitution, the rules of which are read out to the victims (representing the Italian people living in the Republic) and enforced by the soldiers and prostitutes (representing all Fascist collaborators). Fascism in Salo for Pasolini is a huge allegorical fantasy of power and male domination in which the human body is turned into an object to be exploited, hurt and destroyed. For the director, exploitation and degradation of the human body was at the heart of Fascism so that sexual brutality is synonymous with political brutality.The second level of the allegory is more controversial in that it focuses on what Pasolini saw as the Fascism of the day (in 1975). In interview he said, "I hate with particular vehemency the current power, the power of 1975, which is a power that manipulates bodies in a horrible way; a manipulation that has nothing to envy to that performed by Himmler or Hitler". We must remember that Pasolini made his first film when he was in his 40s and that he was as famed a poet, a novelist, an intellectual, a philosopher and a journalist as he was a filmmaker when he came to make Salo. He was a controversial public figure who had a regular newspaper column in the Corriere della sera which he used to attack the government of the day calling for the arrest and trial of all the major Italian Christian Democrat politicians for their part in what he saw as Italy's degradation thanks to capitalist materialism, the accepting of new false material values that were debasing Italy's beloved traditions and the ever-closer relationship with future scion of globalization, the USA. Pasolini had naively thought that the human body was the only site to have escaped domination by consumer capitalism and made his Trilogy of Life (The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales and The Arabian Nights) as a celebration of human sexuality. However, the commercial success of these films (because of their sex and nudity) and the cheap copies that came out ripping them off made him realize that not even the body was exempt from this exploitation and Salo is an admittance that he had been wrong. Therefore the second part of the allegory in Salo focuses on the Fascism of the 70s for which bodies were the mere sites for the inarrestible imposition of power for Power's own anarchy. The s*** that the victims are forced to sit in and eat is the food of consumer capitalism which Pasolini railed against daily in the Press. Those of us not familiar with Italian history of the 70s probably won't get this part of the allegory as there are no direct references in the film to 1975, but of course everyone at the time of the film's release had no doubt that Pasolini was attacking the Fascism of the day as much as the Fascism of the 1940s. This enraged Pasolini's already numerous enemies and is the source of all the rumors that his brutal murder just after Salo's completion was in fact a conspiracy plot.An allegory on Fascism, Salo is a serious-minded film and the way Pasolini treats the characters and the mise-en-scene supports this very closely. Brechtian alienation had already played a part in Pasolini's earlier films like Teorema (1968) and Porcile (1969) and in Salo it is no different. All characters are held at arm's length so that we never get to know them or feel for them. This goes for the victims as well as the perpetrators. We are removed from direct contact with personality and instead have political tableaux in which temperaments and ideologies are played out through characters whose conflicts are determined by and whose emotions are filtered through the filmmaker's analysis of the subject. This forces us to think through the links Pasolini has presented for us to make narrative sense for ourselves. The director showers us with cultural references throughout the film in a very carefully arranged mise-en-scene. The country house chosen for the debauchery is furnished in Bauhaus style and is covered in references to paintings by artists of this persuasion. On the walls we can see Leger, Feininger, Kandinsky, Klee, Mondrian, Mack and artists of the Dada movement. In the opening credits Pasolini directly lists a bibliography of 4 famous writers who have at some stage supported Sade's philosophical project - Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Simone De Beauvoir, Pierre Klossowski and Philippe Sollers. Some of these are quoted in the screenplay mainly by the libertines in addition to Nietzsche, Ezra Pound and Gottfried Benn. On the soundtrack we hear dance music associated with the Fascist period along with fascist anthems (sung at dinner-time) and even Carl Orff whose Carmina Burana is used during the final bloodbath - Orff was a Nazi who stayed in Germany throughout the war. To cap everything off we have bursts of Hitler speeches on the radio and the sound of bombers flying overhead (first heard just as the Circle of S*** commences) to warn us that the Salo Republic is about to come to an end. This bombardment of cultural references underlines repeatedly that we are looking at an allegory, distancing us all the time from any kind of emotional involvement with the characters. This distancing is important because we are never allowed to engage with or empathize with any of the characters as we are constantly invited to do in the average porno film or routinely violent action movie coming out of Hollywood. Like Michael Haneke (I'm thinking especially of Funny Games) Pasolini finds the routine commercialization of sex and violence more disgusting and more disturbing than anything he puts before us in this film.Finally I should address the question of Salo's supposedly pornographic content. I'm sorry but I fail to see it. Salo is a turn-off film, not a turn-on film. Pasolini is very careful never to dwell on human bodies coupling in any way that might be called attractive. When characters do attempt warmth they are immediately screamed at by the libertines and when one guard is caught making love to a servant girl he is killed instantly. All warm humanity is stripped away here in a film which Pasolini makes so clear is a visual depiction of Fascism. As such it should be despised. It's OK to despise Salo. That's exactly the reaction Pasolini wants from the audience, and as nauseating and as uncomfortable as watching it is, you have to admire the bravery and the sheer honesty of his nihilistic vision. There really is nothing else quite like it.

I must admit I was utterly shocked that humans could sink, or even be envisaged to sink, so low! I am somewhat mollified to hear thatPasolini intended his film to be a warning. Though surely after the terrible wars of the 20th century plus Cambodia, Rwanada, Iraq etc,is there really a depth of human vileness that we all are not aware of? I question the usefulness of Pasolini's film - apart from givingideas to our serial killers & torturers across the world: it cannot really be viewed for entertainment except to the mentally ill. So it onlyserves as instruction.So a group of depraved sadists, heads of a failing state, decide to humiliate, torture & murder a group of young people. There is not evena stern redeeming reason (like in pursuit of war) for this, no happy ending, no rescue, hardly even an analysis of their reasons. Men who arepure evil, straight from the Pit. I have always been for free speech, but this film makes me wonder... If our civilisation falls, as the one in the film did, it will surely be because of men such as the ones in this film and our inability to control them. Sensitive people - avoid this film,psychologists, doctors & spiritual teachers please see it & prevent such things, the rest of us please ask - do I really need to wallow in such evil?For the quality only three stars, despite Pasolini's fame. I found it too stuck in the chateau, too claustrophobic, too narrow, and the acting leaves something to be desired. It's even dull at times.

Oh dear. Here is a movie described by some as a masterpiece. Mmm, well my opinion is probably unprintable. suffice to say that this is no piece of art and one has trouble finding words to describe this work; probably the result of a depraved mind. I had triuble watching the film through and then immediately despatched the offending dvd to the trash.

The stagesets of this movie are incredible and utterly unique; essential for anyone who wants to see how art deco is best used in a large space. (It crosses your mind that all the pieces may have been looted - they are certainly 'decadent', underlining the hypocrisy of the lead characters.) Where Pasolini got them from heaven knows, or hell, but they are superb. Check out especially the large light fittings - utterly unique and may be in that house permanently. The actors who play the Duke and the two middle-aged prostitutes are fantastic, luminous, and using amateur actors who didn't know what was going on for the victims worked superbly. I am surprised at the 'uncut' claims - when I saw it in Portobello Road in the seventies there was a white rat which was missing this time. On razor-sharp upscaling dvd and a 32 inch flat lcd the interiors are pristine and walk-into-able (the original was so grainy you could hardly see anything). I have never seen such intimate, realistic interiors, the discarding of the religious applied art to the toilet is amusing. Modern technology also makes the horror scenes quite implausible because you can clearly see the artificiality; nor is the content that shocking given The Moors Murders, certain swimming-pool-of-the-stars deaths, and daily accounts of child-slaughter by the parents. Or their dogs. There is no bigger hypocrite than a communist and Pasolini identifies his main vice with his nationalist enemies; at least the Christians nowadays satisfy themselves with one crucifixion. The original book by the dear Marquis is far more horrifying, but then literature is greater than the visual arts. And De Sade suffered for his truth long before he died. A truly beautiful picture, however imperfect and false and self-indulgent the motives.