Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom

Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma
File:SaloDVDCover.jpg
Directed by	Pier Paolo Pasolini
Written by	Pier Paolo Pasolini Sergio Citti
Produced by	Alberto Grimaldi
Starring	Paolo Bonacelli Giorgio Cataldi Umberto P. Quintavalle Aldo Valletti Caterina Boratto Elsa De Giorgi Hélène Surgère Sonia Saviange Renata Moar Sergio Fascetti Franco Merli Inès Pellegrini
Music by	Ennio Morricone
Distributed by	United Artists
Release dates	22 November, 1975 (première at Paris Film Festival) 3 October, 1976 (limited)
Running time	117 min.
Language	Italian

Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom) is a 1975 film by Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, based on the book The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade.

Relationship with Pasolini's life and art

Main article: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pasolini spent part of his early twenties in the Republic of Salò. During this time he witnessed a great many cruelties on the part of the Fascist Collaborationist Forces of the Salò Republic. After studying major literary giants in high school, Pasolini enrolled in the University of Bologna for further education. Many of his memories of the experience led to the conceptualization of Salò. He also claimed that the film was highly symbolic and metaphoric; for instance, that the coprophagia scenes were an indictment of mass-produced foods, which he labeled "useless refuse."

Pasolini's earlier work contains the seeds of the imagery in Salò. His first published novel, Ragazzi di vita (1955), dealt with the concept of pimps and scandals within a world of prostitution. The reception of this first novel created much scandal and brought about subsequent charges of obscenity. One of his first major films, Accattone (1961), dealt with similar issues and was also received by an unwelcoming audience, who demanded harsher codes of censorship. It is hard to briefly summarize the vast amount of work which Pasolini created throughout his lifetime, but much of it focused around a very personal attachment to subject matter, as well as overt sexual themes. Salò was Pasolini's last major work.

Plot

Salò (as the film is commonly abbreviated) is set in the Republic of Salò, the Fascist rump state which was set up in the German-occupied portion of Italy in 1944. The film is divided into four segments that loosely parallel Dante's Inferno: Anteinferno, Circle of Manias, Circle of Shit and Circle of Blood.

File:Hall of Orgies.jpg

A scene from Salò : the four studs and the sixteen remaining victims (in white) stand behind the four daughters, who are leashed to a table in the Hall of Orgies.

Four men of power, referred to as the Duke (Duc de Blangis), the Bishop, the Magistrate (Curval), and the President agree to marry each other's daughters as the first step in a debauched ritual. With the aid of several young male collaborators, they kidnap eighteen young men and women (nine male, nine female), and take them to a palace near Marzabotto. With them are four middle-aged prostitutes, also collaborators, whose function will be to recount various arousing stories for the men of power, and who will in turn exploit their victims sexually and sadistically.

The film depicts the three days spent at the palace, during which time the four men of power devise increasingly abhorrent tortures and humiliations for their own pleasure. In one of the film's most infamous scenes, a young woman is forced to eat the feces of the Duke; later, the other victims are presented with a giant meal of human feces (the "feces" were created with chocolate sauce and orange marmalade). At the end of the three days, the victims who chose not to collaborate with their tormentors are murdered in various gruesome ways: scalping, branding, having tongues (see also Franco Merli) and eyes cut out.

The film's treatment of sexuality

File:Libertines and dogs.jpg

A scene from Salò in which the libertines reduce their captives to the status of dogs subject to the Pavlovian conditioning of sexual commodification and consumption.

One of the most common threads throughout Salò is the all too true reality of consumer culture’s restraints. Throughout the film the human body is turned into something of lesser value. There is no such thing as a private sexual encounter throughout the film, and if there is, it is quickly shared with the rest of the cast of characters.The exception is the sex scene between the Bishop and one of the four studs.

Much of the film lacks what most erotic cinema ultimately uses towards its purpose, which could be viewed as "cinematic foreplay": making sexual acts seem either passionate or exciting.

In Salò every single bit of possible intrigue involving the sexual acts is utterly and completely absent. Therefore, no one obtains any type of pleasure, and the acts could be viewed as almost completely pointless. This could be why Salò has been referred to as a film which presents the "death of sex" or a "funeral dirge" of eroticism in the midst of its mass commercialization (Musatti 1982, 131; Chapier 1975-6, 116).

Controversy

Controversy over the film exists to this day, with many praising the film for its fearlessness and willingness to contemplate the unthinkable, while others condemn it roundly for being little more than a pretentious exploitation movie.

The film has been banned in several countries due to its graphic portrayals of rape, torture and murder—mainly that of people suspected to be younger than 18 years of age. Many questions about the film's legality have been raised—namely, whether or not the actors and actresses who participated in the (admittedly simulated) sexual or violent acts in the film were of the age of consent.

File:Salo mutilation finale.jpg

The gruesome finale of Salò : an irised shot showing the mutilation of a victim (Franco Merli) as seen through opera glasses by one of the libertines, who is perched on a balcony high above the courtyard.

Some critics have argued that Salò embodies Pasolini’s lust for young boys to be willing participants in sexual acts. But mostly Salò is about uniting all of Pasolini’s ideas involving sex, religion and politics into a uniquely cohesive whole; the four libertines represent a monstrous, apolitical power that consumes and degrades all that it touches.

The fact that Salò was set in a Nazi-Fascist period makes much of the sadomasochistic aspects of the film even harder to bear than in the original novel. This setting and the emphasis on perverse consumption connects the brutality of Fascism to what Pasolini saw as the brutalizing effects of the commodification of sexuality under late capitalism.

It was banned in Australia in 1976, unbanned in 1993 and rebanned in 1998 . In 1994, an undercover police officer in Cincinnati, OH, rented the film at a local gay bookstore, then arrested the proprietors for pandering. A large group of artists, including Martin Scorsese and Alec Baldwin, and scholars signed onto a brief arguing the film's artistic merits. Eventually, the case was thrown out on a technicality.

For a time the film was unavailable in many countries, although it is now available uncut on DVD in the United Kingdom, Norway, France, Finland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and Italy.

See also banned films.

Versions

Several versions of the film exist. The film originally ran approximately 145 minutes, but Pasolini himself removed 25 minutes to help the pacing. The longest available version is the widely sold DVD from the BFI, which features a short scene usually missing from other prints -- during the first wedding ceremony, one of the masters quotes a poem by Gottfried Benn.

The film has run into intermittent legal trouble in the United States. Criterion Collection laserdisc and DVD editions were released for North America; the DVD is now out of print due to conflicts with Pasolini's estate over the licensing to the film.

The Criterion Collection release of the film in 1998 on DVD has created a great deal of interest because of its rarity. It is so rare that it has been labelled by some to being possibly the rarest DVD in the world. Shortly after the Criterion edition was released, the rights for the DVD were not renewed by its distributor and Criterion were forced to discontinue the title, as they have done in the past with some of the films in their catalogue. Whilst many of Criterion's discontinued titles have became much sought after, Salò has generally seen prices for an original copy range from as little as US $250 to US $1000. Due to the rarity of the title many bootleg copies are routinely passed off as originals.

Ironically, despite all this, the quality of the DVD is quite inferior by today's standards. In addition to the widely available BFI edition (which is somewhat better than the Criterion edition and includes an additional missing scene), there is also a French version distributed by Gaumont Columbia Tristar Home Video which features a restored high definition transfer and color correction, and is vastly superior to both the Criterion and BFI versions. However, it lacks English subtitles.

A recent entry on the Criterion Collection's blog, On Five, revealed that they have recently regained the rights and are working on re-releasing the film in 2007.

The rights to distribute the film in the USA (and through most of the rest of the world) appear to be held by MGM / Sony.

External links

• Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma at IMDb
• Rare OOP DVD's Guide to identify original Criterion DVD.
• Criterion Collection essay by John Powers
• DVDBeaver.com Version Comparison Features, image, and sound quality comparison of the different DVD releases.