2024TAF: Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom

・Pier Paolo Pasolini | Italy/France | 1975 | DCP | Color | 116min | Restricted

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom was the last film by Pier Paolo Pasolini in his career. He borrowed the structure of Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, to visualize the taboo novel by Marquis de Sade. Due to its horrifying, violent, and radical images, the film was regarded “the sickest film of all time”, but also a “must-see film” to some people.

The story happened in the last days of World War II. In Republic of Salò, a puppet regime supported by Adolf Hitler in northern Italy, the Duke, the Bishop, the Magistrate, and the President were the ruling class. They abducted over a dozen young men and women, along with prostitutes and brothel keepers, to a remote mansion. Rulers listened to sexual and debauched stories from brothel keepers, and started to sexually abused young people. As desires heightened, tortures became brutal and violent, from rapes, forced intercourses, eating feces, scalping, blinding, cutting off tongues, to death. Pasolini completed the transition from totalitarian oppression to capitalist violence, and unveiled the black hole of capitalistic exploitation. Extreme images trampled human dignity. In an absolute worship to filth, viewers were brought to the ultimate view beyond norms.

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in 1922 in Bologna, Italy. His father was a military officer that passionately supported fascism, while his mother was an anti-totalitarian teacher. Under this familial conflict, his creative works were extreme and authentic. Pasolini also carried multiple identities hard to define, including a poet that made films, a gay that support Marxism, and a pagan that opposed authority. Pasolini was smart from an early age. He started to write poems at seven years old, read serious literature in high school, and published a commentary magazine with friends. During WWII, he and his mother found refuge at his uncle’s home in a small town. His fame began with the first poem collection in dialects. Pasolini wrote screenplays for Le notti di Cabiria and La Dolce Vita by Federico Fellini, and started to make films.

Pasolini used mythologies and classical literature, and innovated with familiar history stories, to express how arbitrary and unattached sex was. From Tetralogy of Myth (Oedipus Rex, Teorema, Pigsty, and Medea) to Trilogy of Life (The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales and Arabian Nights), he often used realistic approaches to recreate vulgar jokes and unethical relationships. In indecency, he discovered the divine truth. In elegance, he saw the omnipresence of filth. Pasolini consistently challenged the pretentious capital class. In the first film of “Trilogy of Death”, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, he used unbearable images to announce to rise of capitalism as a new fascism. Pasolini exposed the conspiracy of sex and violence, and described how consumerism and ruling classes hellishly searched for ecstasy at all costs.

He included abundant penises, breasts, feces, blood, and semen to contemplate on physicality. He believed bodies contained all kinds of resistances. When bodies endured pain or delight, all kinds of sorrow and excitement emerged beyond words. Among immorality, blasphemy, ridicule, revelry, sex, violence, and poetics, Pasolini brought divinity out of secularity. Through his works, Pasolini attempted to raise eternal, real, and heretical voices for people at the bottom.