Salo o le 120 giornate di Sodoma.

‘All things are good when taken to the extreme’ says one of the characters in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final and most controversial film, it’s a statement that goes a long way to sum up the great Italian directors film career. I have enjoyed much of Pasolini’s body of work but even I must admit that Salo o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (1975) content and imagery is extreme! ‘It retains the power to shock, repel and distress almost 40 years after its release, but remains a cinematic milestone – culturally significant, politically vital and visually stunning’[1] 

 

Inspecting the 'victims'

Happy families?

The movie exposes a degenerate mini world where sexual pleasure and death are the only significant things. It’s based on the novel 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade but is transposed from 18^th century France to the last days of the Republic of Salo where Benito Mussolini made a last stand at the end of World War 2. (Pasolini’s brother was actually killed in Salo a formative event that haunted him all his life![2]). The novel has been described as pornographic and erotic and although it was written in 1785 was not published until the 20^th century. 

 

The wedding.

Pasolini’s adaptation of the story retains de Sade’s original spirit. Four wealthy and powerful male libertines, The Duke, The Bishop The Magistrate and The President desire to experience the ultimate in depraved sexual gratification. To this end they kidnap nine teenage girls and nine teenage boys and take them to a large inaccessible Mansion for four months. Also in attendance are four middle-aged prostitutes three of whom recount stories to arouse the four men of power who in turn subject the teenagers to a series of sexual tortures and humiliations. The forth prostitute accompanies the telling of the stories, entitled Circle of Manias, Circle of Shit and Circle of Blood, on a piano.

The three ladies tell their arousing tales.

The film was made by Pasolini as a metaphor for Fascism (the worship of power for its own sake) and consumer capitalism and its production of junk food (the infamous scene where a naked young girl is forced to eat faeces) as well as his normal anticlerical stance (one of the libertine’s is a Bishop and we witness a wedding ceremony between two of the teenagers that is consummated by the libertine’s and not the bridegroom). The final scene, where the DOP’s camera replicates a pair of binoculars looking through a window seems to represent the final day’s of the Fascist regime where every decent thing that is left is destroyed and we witness strangulation, scalping, tongues cut out and nipples burned with red hot pokers all set to the music of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana.

One of the last pictures of the great director.

A powerful and disturbing film that will never be repeated, no director will ever again give us quite such an erotically profound political statement! Pasolini paid for this with his life. Shortly after it was finished he was murdered in suspicious circumstances that some observers say is related to his making of Salo others say it was due to his sexual orientation. Would I recommend you to watch this film? Yes I would pacifically because it is the final piece in a very great directors body of work and is ‘still relevant, still troubling’[3] and I would like to think that it still gives us all food for thought - wealth and corrupted power should never be the only criteria of our rulers.

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[1] British Film Institute 1998.

[2] Roger Clarke DVD Sleeve Notes.

[3] Time Out.

Comizi d’amore.

How are children born? Pier Paolo Pasolini asks a group of young boys in the feature length documentary Comizi d’amore (1964) or to give it it's English title Love Meeting. The answer he gets involves a stork, a “Madwife” God and/or Jesus. People, in general, do not discuss sex on screen or off and certainly not in 1963 when Pasolini took his camera and microphone to North and Southern Italy, to the countryside and the cities to interview a cross section of Italian society on questions of sex, virginity, prostitution, homosexuality, divorce and basic sex education.

 

Pasolini interviewed men old....

.... and young....

This documentary was made during the period that Pasolini and his producer Alfredo Bini were sourcing actors and scouting locations for The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964). With time on his hands he decided to find out the Italian view on sex and how it had changed since they were now living in the so called enlightened 1960’s and whether sexual ignorance, confusion and conservatism drive peoples morality.

 

....couples....

The questions included: is sex important in people’s lives, would a man be happier as a lady-killer or a loyal family man, are women inferior to men, do 14 year old girls have the same sexual freedom as 14 year old boys, does the Catholic religion repress sexual inclinations, why don’t more women take up prostitution rather than earn low wages in a factory, should men marry a non-virgin. Two of the most interesting answers came from questions on divorce and homosexuality. Most agreed that divorce should not be allowed while some people went as far as admitting that it would be preferable to kill your partner rather than face the indignity of a divorce. Everyone interviewed agreed that it was totally unacceptable to be sexually different ‘inverts’ of both sexes were offensive to any decent human being and should not be allowed and spoke of it as a disease that should be eradicated! They obviously had no idea of Pasolini’s sexual leaning!

 

....and women.

This is a totally fascinating, and humorous, example of the cinema veritie style of documentary film attempting, as it does to reveal the ignorance and fear involved around sex - not helped by a catholic upbringing. The expected generation gap did not always make a lot of difference to the views expressed but we are never sure if these views are what they were expected to say in front of there contemporary’s and one would imagine there were a lot of sexual hypocrites in Italy in the 1960’s, as probable there was in most other countries! As one commentator put it the impression one gets from this extraordinary film-investigation is that of a large, widespread ignorance of even the most educated strata of the population, a deep backwardness and fear related to the topic of sexuality. That’s it in a nutshell!

Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Accattone.

Pier Paolo Pasolini did not write and direct his first film until he was 39 years old. Up until then he had been a novelist, poet, intellectual and journalist but along with Bernardo Bertolucci (Before the Revolution 1964) his assistant director; who also had never made a feature film before, made what is alleged to be a movie based on two of his novels, Boys of Life and Violent Life. Pasolini, like Fassbinder in Germany a generation later, lived at the cutting of scandal that is reflected through his films and none more so than his frank depiction of the steamy underbelly of Roman society in Accattone (1961).

 

Maddalena (Silvana Corsini) 

Accattone (Franco Citti)

This movie is a bleak portrait of a pimp, Accattone[1] of the title, a man who surrounds himself with the lower end of Rome’s peasant society including prostitutes and petty thieves. The real victims of this film are the women and how they are treated just because of the way they earn their living. Seemingly fair game for being abused, beaten and cheated by not just their clients but by the men they work for: men like Accattone. When his ‘prostituta’ Maddalena (Silvana Corsini) gets beaten by his rivals, and put in prison for reporting the men, Accattone finds another meal ticket in the form of a rather naïve young virgin, Stella (Franca Pasut) who he puts to work. But gradually he falls in love with her, which complicates their working relationship. Set in a sordid district of Rome, where Pasolini had lived during the early war period. Franco Citti plays the young pimp a man who lives a nasty brutish life but tries desperately to change.

 

Stella (Franca Pasut) 

A film of ‘hard faced men’ who are constantly provoking one another to violence, and because unemployment is rife there is always the question of where to next meal is coming from? What makes Pasolini different from some of his contemporary’s is that his filmmaking is influenced by literature and art and as Phil Kaufmann opined "I remember seeing Pasolini's Accattone in Florence, and thinking, my God, the faces! The subject matter! The camera being there! What an interesting way to tell stories” An intelligent piece of work full of expression and feeling, one which points out the trademarks to be found in other Pasolini movies including a cast of non-professional actors hailing from where the movie is set, and thematic emphasis on impoverished individuals. His work, most of which is widely available on DVD, is still an influence on some of the better filmmakers working today.

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[1] The word "Accattone" is alleged to be a slang term mainly used for beggars, referring to people who never do well, who are lazy, and who rarely hold down a job which certainly fits with the films main character.

Pigsty

Peir Paolo Pasolini

My second Peir Paolo Pasolini film of late was the fascinating Pigsty (1969). Written by Pasolini it conveys two stories running in conjunction with each other. The first involves a young man who roams the volcanic wastes of Mount Etna and becomes a cannibal devouring unsuspecting people to stay alive. Gradually others join him, forming a small murderous band that is eventually caught by soldiers from a nearby village. All are condemned to death while most except their fate the leader is unrepentant and before he dies he shouts out ‘I’ve killed my father; I’ve eaten human flesh; I tremble with joy’.

‘I’ve killed my father; I’ve eaten human flesh; I tremble with joy’.

The second deals with the anguish of the children of the bourgeoisie. Its set in contemporary Germany and is about Julian, the son of a powerful former Nazi industrialist, who seems more enamoured with the estates pigs than he does with his beautiful fiancée, eventually being eaten by them leaving no trace.

The anguish of the children of the bourgeoisie

Pasolini’s satire is said to be his most vicious attack on the capitalist society he so despised. He stated ‘the ultimate message of the film was that all societies devour their own children; therefore an a-political anarchism would be the only visible stand’. It’s alleged that these feelings where brought about by Pasolini’s mixed reaction towards the uprisings of 1968 where student’s fought against the police and Pasolini came out on the side of the policeman when every left wing organisation was backing the students. He considered them true proletariat, sent to fight for a poor salary and for reasons, which they could not understand, against pampered boys of their same age, because they had not had the fortune of being able to study. It takes a masterful director to be able to express his political beliefs on celluloid so vehemently even if Pigsty is a rather self-indulgent piece of work but it still allows the viewer an insight into how this great Italian director’s mind worked