On November 23, 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last movie premiered at the Paris Film Festival, and immediately garnered a reputation as the most gruelling, and least watchable, motion picture entertainment of all time. Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, took the lubricious catalogue of torture and depravity lovingly detailed in the Marquis de Sade’s infamous 1785 novel and transposed it to Mussolini’s Italy, where a group of eminent libertines confines a group of teenagers in a villa and subjects them to… well, here are some ‘highlights’ from the film’s Wikipedia page: “Three-way intercourse… eating his faeces with a spoon… the President leaves to masturbate… branding, hanging, scalping, burning.”
“Literally nauseous,” read one review; Mary Poppins, this clearly wasn’t.
Pasolini wasn’t around to see the film’s unveiling or the appalled reaction; his mutilated body had been found in a vacant lot in Ostia, a suburb of Rome, three weeks before. The assumed killer was a 17-year-old made abundantly, lip-smackingly manifest (“He has become the victim of his own characters,” opined his fellow director Michelangelo Antonioni). But while he was disgusted with the direction post-war Italy had taken — he saw the country’s boom as an irreversible blight, turning the masses into mindless consumers and creating a slavish monoculture — Pasolini was no nihilist. In fact, he’d spent his life wriggling free of any -isms that would claim him for their own. A lapsed Catholic who never lost his religious worldview (and who made one of the most reverent films about Christ), and a lifelong Marxist who was expelled from the Communist Party for being gay, Pasolini was a true artist and contrarian who set out not to flatten his contradictions but to embrace them fully. With a gift for polemic and a taste, if not relish, for scandal, he was routinely hauled up on blasphemy and obscenity charges (with the Vatican leading the charge) and regularly lambasted by all shades of the political spectrum. In this light, ’s equation of consumerism with fascism was merely his most audacious effort at giving a comprehensive épater-ing, and those who’ve endured its 116-minute running time have since re-evaluated it. “It’s a beautiful film,” says John Waters, one of many directors — Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Derek Jarman, Michael Haneke, Abel Ferrara, Gus van Sant, and Gaspar Noé among them — who’ve cited it as an influence on their own work. Waters adds: “It uses obscenity in an intelligent way. And it’s about the pornography of power.”
