Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)
(Salò o le centoventi giornate di Sodoma)
Country: IT/FR
Technical: col 115m
Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Cast: Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi, Umberto Paolo Quintavalle, Aldo Valletti
Synopsis:
In the dying days of the fascist government in exile towards the end of the Second World War, four pillars of the establishment gather together bevies of young men and women, guarded by soldier/torturers and listen to lascivious stories told by a raconteuse before sating their whetted appetites with ever-increasing acts of humiliation and sadism.
Review:
For Pasolini, then, the logical implication of Sade's very logical system is fascism, and with this comes the disturbing thought that the author's titillating fantasies have no doubt become fact. The film is divided into chapters, or 'circles', of perversity and is shot in the director's heavily naturalistic style, the camera lingering on the leering faces of the tormentors to uncanny effect. As an adaptation of Sade it is necessarily selective and bowdlerised, but then, the cinema being what it is, a little goes a lot further. As drama it is unsatisfying since it offers few points of identification and no nemesis for the despicable characters at the film's centre; in this respect it is faithful to the author's intentions and serves his interpreter's new purpose. For by identifying the spectator at the film's climax with the torturers who observe their devices through field glasses (resembling the early commercial manifestations of the cinematograph), Pasolini renders us more complicit in their voyeurism than Sade could achieve on the printed page. At the same time he makes the agonies witnessed endurable by eschewing any sound save that of Orff's Veris leta facies, one of several ironic uses of music in the film (the song prefaces a section of Carmina Burana devoted to the life-giving forces of nature).
(Salò o le centoventi giornate di Sodoma)
Country: IT/FR
Technical: col 115m
Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Cast: Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi, Umberto Paolo Quintavalle, Aldo Valletti
Synopsis:
In the dying days of the fascist government in exile towards the end of the Second World War, four pillars of the establishment gather together bevies of young men and women, guarded by soldier/torturers and listen to lascivious stories told by a raconteuse before sating their whetted appetites with ever-increasing acts of humiliation and sadism.
Review:
For Pasolini, then, the logical implication of Sade's very logical system is fascism, and with this comes the disturbing thought that the author's titillating fantasies have no doubt become fact. The film is divided into chapters, or 'circles', of perversity and is shot in the director's heavily naturalistic style, the camera lingering on the leering faces of the tormentors to uncanny effect. As an adaptation of Sade it is necessarily selective and bowdlerised, but then, the cinema being what it is, a little goes a lot further. As drama it is unsatisfying since it offers few points of identification and no nemesis for the despicable characters at the film's centre; in this respect it is faithful to the author's intentions and serves his interpreter's new purpose. For by identifying the spectator at the film's climax with the torturers who observe their devices through field glasses (resembling the early commercial manifestations of the cinematograph), Pasolini renders us more complicit in their voyeurism than Sade could achieve on the printed page. At the same time he makes the agonies witnessed endurable by eschewing any sound save that of Orff's Veris leta facies, one of several ironic uses of music in the film (the song prefaces a section of Carmina Burana devoted to the life-giving forces of nature).
(Salò o le centoventi giornate di Sodoma)
Country: IT/FR
Technical: col 115m
Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Cast: Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi, Umberto Paolo Quintavalle, Aldo Valletti
Synopsis:
In the dying days of the fascist government in exile towards the end of the Second World War, four pillars of the establishment gather together bevies of young men and women, guarded by soldier/torturers and listen to lascivious stories told by a raconteuse before sating their whetted appetites with ever-increasing acts of humiliation and sadism.
Review:
For Pasolini, then, the logical implication of Sade's very logical system is fascism, and with this comes the disturbing thought that the author's titillating fantasies have no doubt become fact. The film is divided into chapters, or 'circles', of perversity and is shot in the director's heavily naturalistic style, the camera lingering on the leering faces of the tormentors to uncanny effect. As an adaptation of Sade it is necessarily selective and bowdlerised, but then, the cinema being what it is, a little goes a lot further. As drama it is unsatisfying since it offers few points of identification and no nemesis for the despicable characters at the film's centre; in this respect it is faithful to the author's intentions and serves his interpreter's new purpose. For by identifying the spectator at the film's climax with the torturers who observe their devices through field glasses (resembling the early commercial manifestations of the cinematograph), Pasolini renders us more complicit in their voyeurism than Sade could achieve on the printed page. At the same time he makes the agonies witnessed endurable by eschewing any sound save that of Orff's Veris leta facies, one of several ironic uses of music in the film (the song prefaces a section of Carmina Burana devoted to the life-giving forces of nature).