Being Killed To The Limits of Eternity: Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom

Pasolini cleverly subverts the cinematic techniques of excitement to be in service of pure horror.

Image Credits: IMDB

In 1975, the immensely talented and moderately successful Marxist filmmaker, Pier Paolo Pasolini, directed Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom. Inspired by the eponymous novel written by Marquis de Sade, the film follows four wealthy and corrupt libertines who kidnap nine teenagers from rural Italy and subject them to months of torture. Famously, the film was strictly banned in Australia until 1993, and then re-banned in 1998, and finally re-unbanned in 2010. Between these periods, the film was practically never shown publicly and was mostly presented at private screenings by those who happened to own a copy. At a special reprise screening at the Randwick Ritz, I witnessed the movie. It was a showing I promised myself to go to as the film is notoriously difficult to view in a cinema. It was perhaps the most excruciating and sickening experience I ever had in a picture house. However, it was an enlightening experience, to say the least, as it pushed the boundaries of my own understanding of cinema and became crucial to my eventual respect and genuine admiration of Pasolini’s work. 

The depiction of the control and perversion of innocent minds proceeded by the cruelty of physical and sexual abuse rendered in the most austere and emotionally void way, spiritually pierced me like no other film had. Some very elaborate set pieces are sickly iconic and are concerningly attractors for the film as it proposes a challenge to thrill-seeking audience members. Perhaps, slowly desensitised over decades of progressively more challenging cinema, such audiences seek a strangely nostalgic rush, having been raised on the online horror of viewing scat fetish pornos like 2 Girls 1 Cup or cult objects like Be My Cat and A Serbian Film. Salo, on the other hand, was built far beyond the intention of pleasurable viewing or juvenile cheap dares. Pasolini designed, scripted, shot, and edited the film to transpose the psychological affect of living under Mussolini’s fascist, Catholic society as a gay atheist. Pasolini was one of the only openly gay creatives in Italy at the time, the other being another master Luchino Visconti (Il Gattopardo, Ossessione). Visconti, although proudly homosexual, was a devout Catholic and defender of the Church throughout his life. Pasolini, on the other hand, was truly an outsider. Not as critically acclaimed as Visconti, though the creator of other culturally challenging works like Medea, Theorem, and The Gospel According to St Matthew, Pasolini’s career lived on the fringe. 

A famous interview for Italian TV in 1964 perfectly encapsulates the social pressure and derision Pier encountered. Three suited older men essentially corner the director on the talk show stage, grilling his beliefs. At every turn in the conversation, there are attempts to expose some crude and shallow truth about Pasolini’s filmmaking intentions, obviously hoping to implicate his sexuality and consequential Catholic guilt as some reason for the depravity seen on screen. Intelligently and swiftly answering all questions, Pasolini says: 

“I’m not looking for consolation. Like any human being, every now and then I look for some small delight or satisfaction, but consolation is always rhetorical…insincere and unreal.”

Salo, produced years after this moment, completes the vision of the director’s body of work as a complete indictment of the systems, individuals, and rhetoric of oppression that governed his life.

The connective tissue between scenes and the exhaustingly rigid pacing of the film lays the groundwork for one of the simplest and harshest allegories for a tortured existence. To claim my admiration for the film feels odd. However, I would be lying if I denied Pasolini’s intense mastery of the form. The raw syntax of the picture is built to defy everything a movie was often intended to do up until that point in history: entertain. Contextually, the film sincerely deconstructs the ideological shackles placed upon the untampered mind by fascism and capitalism, and births a cinematic experience that defies the conventional logic of traditional artistic pursuits. It assaults the audience’s consciousness and melts away the expected tension of a melodrama, inducing pure anxiety and panic.

Pasolini cleverly subverts the cinematic techniques of excitement to be in service of pure horror. Subjects of this level of state control do not bend to the will of their psychological and political captors amidst torture and battle. Rather, during the scenes in which the teenagers could otherwise exercise control, they kneel to the unending possibility of the next round of sadistic activity; the stairwell and its door become the symbol of this achingly passive terror. Mostly empty and featured consistently in long takes and composed with perfect symmetry, a recurring shot of a stairwell signifies the beginning and ends of the film’s four main sections, marked also by intertitles: (1) ‘Anteinferno’, (2) ‘Circle of Manias’, (3) ‘Circle of Shit’ and (4) ‘Circle of Blood’. The staircase is grey, sharp, and boxy, and spills into a large living space. The audience quickly learns that this staircase is the mouth of madness set to spew outwards another terrifyingly gleeful middle aged sadist, an image that appears in perfect clarity,always centrally positioned to the audience’s eye. Yet it is not in these moments of madness, abasement, and violence that the film truly marks it’s meaning. It is in the silence, the time spent away from pain. The weight of the regime and the power of the four fascists sinks in at its deepest in the moments, producing a dreadful sense of the anticipation for what is next.

The effect of violence upon the young subjects of the film affected me so significantly that months after viewing the picture, I found that the repetitive sight of the door central to the foot of my bed conjured memories of Salo’s symmetry and I would be reminded of my body squirming and cringing in the theatre’s cushy seats. The memory of the screening made its way into the deepest crevices of my mind. The patterns of abuse of power and the innate sadism of mundane playfulness in benign social interactions to never ending global conflicts, near and far, felt so much more potent and painful with the image of a cheery lanky sadist stroking the hair of young, traumatised boys and girls. Pasolini weaponises poetry, and for this, cinema was never the same. This consistent recognition of revulsion to my environment turned towards my filmic viewing habits. A noticeable incline of this type of tortured works I found are considerably more common after the slow, trickling distribution of Salo throughout the 80s. European cinema and the American New Wave movement in the 90s to early naughties were a hotbed for challenging works echoing the influence of Pasolini’s cinema. Coming to mind are the films of Claire Denis and Michael Haneke, austere bodies of work that challenge not just the outlooks of an average audience but the patience and temperament too. Simple allegories exposing contradiction and the hereditary paths towards mutually assured destruction.

In the context of cinema history, Salo is essentially an introduction to a previously untapped version of the human experience. An inversion of the casual expectations of the cinema-going experience very directly places Salo as a trailblazer of elevating the form’s approach to drama and poetry; beyond its release, the picture’s influence is seen in essentially every filmmaking generation to this day. The spirit of defying the status quo of filmmaking, while also the pursuit of profound tales found only upon the fringes and extremes of life.