KIRAC movie talk - Salò, or the 120 days of Sodom (Full version on Patreon) 

“Salò will be a cruel film, so cruel that (I suppose) I’ll have to keep my distance from it, pretend I don’t believe in it, and play with it in a cold way…” It is with this words that Pasolini, in 1975, presented to a journalist his project to make a film where sex would have been used as a representation or metaphor of power. The last movie of the Trilogy of life, Il fiore delle mille e una notte, was released just a year before. It was a success, but media and consumerist power exploited that success to achieve its objective of imposing a fake tolerance disguised as a sexual liberation, forcing Pasolini to call into question his precedent works, to the point of abjuring his whole Trilogy. I quote: In the Trilogy, I evoked the ghosts of characters from my previous realistic films. Without social criticism, obviously, but rather with a love for days gone by, that was so violent that it constituted a criticism not of a particular human condition but of the present as a whole, which is so forcefully permissive. Now we are irreversibly inside the present. We have adapted ourselves to it. Our memory is always bad. So, we are living what happens today, the repression of tolerant powers that, of all types of repression, is the most atrocious. There is no more joy in sex. Young people are ugly or desperate, evil or defeated… He explained the ideological and historical reasons of his abjuration in an article that would be published posthumously, in November of the same year. In the first phase of the cultural and anthropological crisis that started at the end of the 60s - when the unreality of mass media subculture and mass communication began to triumph - the last bastion of reality seemed to be the “innocent” bodies with the archaic, sombre, vital violence of their sexual organs. Now everything’s turned around. […] First: the struggle for the sexual liberation has been overcome and thwarted by the decision of consumerist power to concede a wide (and fake) tolerance. Second: Even the “reality” of the innocent bodies has been violated, manipulated, tampered with, by consumerist power: actually, this violence on the bodies has become the most macroscopic data of the new human era. Third: the private sex lives (as mine) have suffered the trauma of both the fake tolerance and the corporeal degradation, and what in the sexual fantasies was pain and joy has become suicidal delusion, formless sloth. What Pasolini felt the urgent need to express in Salò is that there is something brutal about power-any type of power, legislative or executive. In its laws and in its practices, all it does is sanction and make realizable the most primordial, blunt violence of the strong against the weak - in other words, of the exploiters against the exploited. He explains it clearly in the following passage: In addition to the metaphor of the sexual relationship (obligatory and ugly) that the tolerance of consumerist power is making us live nowadays, all the sex in Salò (and there’s a huge amount of it) is also the metaphor for the relationship of power to those subjected to it. In other words, it is the representation (possibly oneiric) of what Marx called the commercialization of man: the body is reduced to a thing through exploitation. To show such a cold violence of power, Pasolini needed a structure that would maintain a very precise, well defined rhythm, which for this reason is less realistic precisely because it is more perfect. Four powerful men-a duke, a banker, a chief justice, and a cardinal- reduce humble victims to objects. They do so through a kind of holy ritual that is organized according to Dante’s forms: a vestibule to Hell, and three circles. The anarchy of the exploited is desperate, idyllic, and above all an air castle, eternally unattainable. While the anarchy of the powerful is concretized very easily into laws and practices. After all, power do nothing but this: write regulations, and regularly apply them.

Sorry, but this is a somewhat lazy reading of the film. The film needs to be contextualised: Red Brigades, Futurism, Italian fascism, Italian neo-realism but also de Sade, Bataille etc. The review also lacks self-reflection.

Well, good analysis. Pasolini was an annoying person for some little criminal associations in the area of Rome. Because of this movie reactions from audience and critics , he was censored from television and somebody decided to kill him. Pasolini had a reason to be named : un regista maledetto.

It might be preposterous, pretty common, to say but this movie showed me the importance of corruption in evil. If evil, in a kind of biblical, religious, way, exists, if we agree about the existence of evil on earth, corruption is its singular caracteristic. Evil comes from within. I don't quite understand the 'fascist' exposure in this Pasolini's movie (It is sold as a strong critic of fascism, an anti-fascist gesture) ; as an aesthetic, sure, a way to organize people, to some extent, sure, but I do believe that there is a total fusion between "a certain idea" of fascism, an artistic vision of it, and pure evil (the Marquis de Sade's fingerprint) It won't help to understand the vulgar use of "fascism" in contemporary's mouths.

Can someone elaborate on the notion of intimacy in the conclusion? It stops abruptly on the idea that we have intimacy now, but I have trouble understanding/ aknoledge that.

"That's why this cliché of the failed artist becoming a monster, there's a truth there" *Painful look on Stefan's face*

I have watched this film but still failed to get it's meaning coz the 4 officials were not touched at all

Love your work and the interesting discussion on this film. I think that Kate misses an important element of fascism that I see in the film though. Fascism has an obsession with beauty but it is a very specific kind of beauty, an obsession with an imagined traditional beauty. Umberto Eco's definition of fascism includes fear of the different. Fear of everything that deviates. The etymological meaning of perversion and pervert has this meaning, to be a pervert is to turn away from. In the case of fascism, anything that has deviated from the correct beauty And there is where the relationship between fascism and perversion really comes in. There is a paradoxical quality of fascism and its obsession with cleanliness and staying pure of deviants (free of perversion) where the fascist becomes a pervert in its path to destroying perversion. And I think this obsession with a particular idea of beauty that the film depicts. The young people are selected because they are beautiful. But is not simply because fascists like to destroy beautiful things, it is because fascists are obsessed with beauty that they destroy beautiful things.

Oh yeah, De Saad was an ardent Mussolini supporter

Een analyse van Speak No Evil lijkt me leuk. Een Deens-Nederlandse (gruwelijke) film met interessante onderliggende thema’s. Hoe ver ga je om beleefd te blijven? Lijkt me interessant om dat te koppelen aan de huidige samenleving.

Jullie moeten een Movie Talk doen met Alex van Warmerdam als gast

DO A MOVIE TALK ABOUT GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH!!! ---ULTIMATE #1 COMEDY ART FILM OF ALL TIME WITH A MASSIVE BUDGET!!!

Yes.

Ik hoor dat jullie ollanders zijn

Your house must smell like sweat

Stuur mij ff een foto van je grootste moedervlek voor deze verspilde 13:44