Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975)

ww.imdb.com/title/tt0073650

Ce pot sa spun este ca intrece Portocala mecanica prin efectul emanat de halucinantele imagini ce nu se regasesc decat in regnul uman ....

With Salo, Pasolini updates de Sade from early 18th Century France to Fascist Italy. (Indeed Salo is an Italian province where Pasolini spent parts of his childhood and had witnessed first hand the mindless thuggery of Mussolini’s fascists). In Pasolini’s view, de Sade’s work, which was essentially a work of pornography, takes on an added political meaning to talk about the corruption of absolute power. Outside of this though, Pasolini remains remarkably faithful to the text of the de Sade work, replicating the depravities and the structure of the nightly tales by the gathered guests. Salo is certainly Pasolini’s most controversial work and still remains banned in many countries of the world after more than two decades.

Writing criticism in the horror genre often leaves one feeling somewhat jaded about the genre’s capacity to shock and disturb. But Salo is one of the first films in some that held the capacity to genuinely disturb this viewer. If one measures a film’s success in terms of the ratio between the emotional response it sets out to generate against the response it does achieve then Salo may well be one of the most effective films ever made. There are times it is genuinely shocking. The scenes with excrement being served up at a banquet table and people taking delight in eating it are guaranteed to turn one’s stomach. And there is a scene where the duke squats, defecates on the floor and then by verbal abuse forces a naked girl to eat his excrement with a spoon really makes one flinch. The final segment, entitled The Circle of Blood, is a descent into genuine horror filled with disturbingly realistic scenes of people being raped and then hung, candles applied to nipples and genitalia, eyeballs being gouged out, scalps peeled back and tongues cut out – one of the few sequences in a film that has almost reached the unwatchable for this viewer. Certainly many among the audience walk out at this point. The film’s depiction of the extremes of human degradation is radical. If any film ever surpasses this in future, one is not sure if they want to see it.

Whether Salo is a work of art is an entirely different question. It is a film that squarely defies any type of pigeonholing. It never really offers a moral point of view about what is being shown – the acts of sadism and degradation depicted are certainly not shown in any erotic light nor in any way that appears to celebrate them, but at the same time the film takes a neutral distance and by the very fact that its camera remains squarely focused on what is happening, recording acts of genuine debasement and seeming to exist solely to parade them before us, it forces to accept them as art and in so doing question the meaning of a work of art. The result is a phenomenally powerful and disturbing film.