Pier Paolo Pasolini
Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma

I am attached to this film by many fond memories, even though it really has nothing pleasant about it: one of the latest relates back to last year: oral exam of high school graduation 2006, I sit trembling with the grave feeling of not remembering a damn thing and let my terrified graduate gaze meet those of the 9 executioners who would soon examine me. The Italian teacher starts, remembering that I am a god in literary subjects (though attending experimental scientific high school…) "Well, Francesco, where do you want to start?" and I say: "Well, I've brought a topic that encompasses many points from different subjects, but unfortunately is not on the syllabus: I will discuss a thesis on the man of the 1900s starting from the analysis of the film 'Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom', by Pier Paolo Pasolini, focusing in particular on the parallel between the image of coprophagy and Marxist thought." I notice with fear, but also with undeniable sense of enjoyment, the wave of indignation and scandal that emerges on the faces of the 9 old fogies (besides 8 of them proudly right-wing)… I'll just say that I left high school with a respectable 92 :=)

I've always had a soft spot for Pasolini, even though I admit it's a bit strange for a 19-year-old. At about 12 years old, I had the fortune of encountering his version of the Decameron, and I was left speechless by his ability to imbue the frames with direct and simple poetry that enters the soul without frills and rhetorical figures. His films are visually and thematically shocking and revolutionary, always on the edge of censorship but at the same time dense with lyrical charge, almost cathartic in their entirety. Unlike many other cinematic products, where even just one erotic scene is enough to make them vulgar, in Pasolini's entire body of work, always charged with strong, sensual, even hard scenes for the era and context, there is no room for the vulgar, for the indecent: even the most grotesque carnal congress appears to us as an absolutely natural event, where by natural I mean part of the cycle of nature and man. And lastly, no one has ever succeeded in rendering with such fidelity the psychology and popular universe, in all its fragility and drama. And it is in this context that I would like to talk about his most discussed, hated and loved film at the same time: "Salò," indeed. Conceived as the initial chapter of a hypothetical "trilogy of death" (never completed due to the premature death of the director and set in antithesis to that of life formed by the Canterbury Tales, the Decameron, and Arabian Nights), the film was only screened in 1975 at the Paris festival, where it was met with a wave of scandal that was only the beginning of a long "inquisitorial" and derogatory period for this film.

What strikes about this film is that it's not suitable for everyone: no, I'm not referring to the trivial NC-17 warning (which now also towers over DVDs of the Teletubbies, and they still call it an emancipated and modern society…), but to the fact that if one doesn't have a vast literary culture, it will probably seem to most as an old-fashioned nazi-porn. The first literary reference comes right from the title, which takes from "The 120 Days of Sodom" by Marquis de Sade (from whom the term sadism originates, whose original non-derogatory meaning is fundamental to understanding both his works and Pasolini's film): besides the title, the director also takes the fundamental themes of the literary work, such as extreme pleasure, the exaltation of the senses, the pursuit of absolute pleasure through perversion and the total and uninhibited exploitation of the material means of the body, the total rebellion against good manners and conformist schemes imposed on man by society. The book’s story, however, is transplanted from the '700s to the '40s of the '900s, when Italy was still marked by the devastation of the second world conflict, and the fascist power had now undertaken the inexorable path of decline. Protagonists of Salò are 4 men: The Duke, the Bishop, the President of the court of appeals and the President (an extraordinary Aldo Valletti). Each of them represents a fundamental institution, as well as an expression of various powers (economic, political, religious, legal) and their stories are narrated in 4 circles similar to those of Dante's masterpiece, each of which has a fundamental theme.

The film begins with a prologue in which the protagonists agree on arranged marriages among their offspring to safeguard and perpetuate power, but there is also the kidnapping of a group of boys and girls, children of partisans, who will be subjected to this long and diabolical initiation process, accompanied by the perverse tales of 3 aging prostitutes (whose task is to excite the 4 masters) in this decaying villa near the city of Salò. In the first circle, that of manias, the Masters exercise a series of acts of torture on the naked or clothed bodies of the adolescents. Among the many tortures, there is making them eat on all fours, naked, barking like dogs, scraps of food thrown on the ground or in bowls, when some of these food morsels are filled, to the surprise, with nails. The second circle is the so-called "circle of shit", all about coprophagy: the youngsters are forced to restrain themselves from defecating, then to do so in special collection bowls from which they will be forced to eat (also famous is the scene where one of the girls is forced to eat kneeling on a rug and with a teaspoon). The Circle of Blood is the apex of the film's atrocities: here the Masters in a progressive orgy of torture, amputations, and various ritual killings, engage in necrophiliac sexual acts on the victims, expression of mutual disgust and contempt for the world.
In the Epilogue, during the massacre, two young desensitized soldiers, change the channel on the period radio broadcasting Orff's Carmina Burana, and improvise a waltz. Now I list the various images and significances of the film:

1 - It speaks of the man of the 1900s inserted into the infernal machinery of totalitarianism, which renders him devoid of personality. 2 - Sex here loses any natural connotation and is degraded to pure exploitation of the body in an animalistic and brutal way 3 - The excrement and the coprophagous act are nothing other than the metaphor of the Marxist concept of reification of man, who loses the effective value of things and is shown willing to do the worst atrocities in the name of success and the god of money, but they are also symbols of capitalism 4 - There is a very strong Brechtian contrast between the rigor and formalism of places and the corruption of the acts committed. 5 - It speaks of the domination of the strong over the weak, of the capitalist over the proletarian

In conclusion, I consider this film a pillar of cinema of all genres and times, a macabre fable about the future of man clouded by power, the testament of an immense artist and intellectual, killed for his ideas that he defended to the end: it is a duty to watch it to realize the greatness of Italian neorealism, to do justice to the greats of our country, to reflect on our past and meditate on our future.