SALO
[Spoilers]
A film review by jwimp@king.mcs.drexel.edu
Copyright 1993 jwimp@king.mcs.drexel.edu
As you all know, I have solicited best film lists from the readership of rec.arts.movies. What has surprised me is that so far there has been so little overlap in the many lists sent to me. The lists have revealed very eclectic tastes, and have been generally unresponsive to what are often called "The Great Films." CITIZEN KANE has appeared on only one list, for example. I was intrigued by the fact that the only film common to several lists was the infamous SALO of the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini. I had not seen this film, but after an e-mail exchange with one of the readers whose list contained it, I decided to view it. Since I have read the book on which the film is based, THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM, by the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) and many have not, I thought my observations on the film would be of interest to the Net readership.
SALO is not for everyone. It's depiction of sexual torture and murder as well as other perversions is convincing and very graphic. Full nudity of both sexes abounds. In the films of established, "respected" directors, SALO has no antecedents. A measure of Pasolini's facility with morally extreme thematic material is the fact that many consider his THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW (1964) to be the finest film setting of the life of Christ. SALO (1975) is the moral obverse of the earlier film.
De Sade, from whom the word "sadism" derives, wrote THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM while imprisoned for sexual crimes. Though the book is considered his most important work, it was not published in his lifetime.
De Sade professed a philosophy of Rousseauian individualism, carried to psychopathic excess. Men have the right to do whatever they want to do. (It is not clear whether he would grant women the same authority, although many of the women in his writings have a startling degree of self-actualization.) Pity and compassion are lies, promulgated by the weak to procure the leniency of the strong. De Sade would revile the ideas of humanism as self-deception and folly. Humankind is divided into two classes, the oppressors and the oppressed. You must choose to be either one or the other. While you may cringe at making such a choice, you cannot change the facts: that's the way things are, and the history of our species proves it.
De Sade claimed that his philosophy brought him happiness: "On the basis of my errors, I have established principles; since that time, I have known felicity." His writings, as I point out later, reveal otherwise. De Sade placed himself in a prison grimmer than the physical prison he inhabited, a prison of the soul.
Some may question why we should tolerate de Sade's writings. Simone de Beauvoir has written a very perceptive defense of de Sade, and her essay is contained as a preface to the Grove Press edition of THE 120 DAYS, under the title, "Must we burn de Sade?" However, rather than get into a swivet of self-debate about whether such material should be permitted in even a free society, I suggest that, if the first paragraph or so of my description indicates the film would not be congenial to your tastes, you avoid it.
What follows is a TOTAL SPOILER! Also, I warn that my description of the film and book may offend some.
PASOLINI'S IDIOM
For a number of years I have tried to analyze the reasons for the exceptional texture of Pier Paolo Pasolini's films. His films seem to possess a strange kind of stasis, consisting of a series of brief, isolated set-pieces, not narrative but rather visual in character, somewhat like snapshots, mathematical lemmas, or pronouncements from a catechism. It is interesting that TEOREMA, one of his most striking films, takes its title from the Italian word for a medieval theological treatise.
The methods that Pasolini uses to achieve this effect, as I see it, are three: i) the frequent use of long shots, often with either no action or some non-committal action, like walking; ii) almost no camera movement; iii) the use of untrained actors. No one has used untrained actors more effectively than Pasolini. Directors working with trained actors rely on the reaction shot to establish film continuity. The more skilled the actors, the more emotional momentum the film has. When Pasolini's camera captures the face of a young peasant, the effect is one of disjunction: the film, in a sense, comes to a halt. The face is affectless, bland, passive--not even baffled or uncomprehending. There is no bad acting, there is simply no acting at all. Such devices allow Pasolini to produce an almost mechanical passivity, an implicit fatalism.
"This is the way things are," the films seem to be saying. "There's nothing that can be done about it."
Whether you like Pasolini's films will depend to a large extent not so much on the subject matter but whether you accept his film language. Some people can't. Several years ago I attended a revival of TEOREMA at the Theater of the Living Arts, in Philadelphia. There were titters and even guffaws from the audience during the film. In the face of what cannot be understood, Pasolini seems to be saying, passivity is inevitable. Audience laughter is a way of resisting this invitation to victimhood. On the other hand, Pasolini's films enjoy a rare timelessness because his style often lifts the material above social conventions.
Such a film vocabulary is, I believe, perfect for translating de Sade's dark vision. It is safe to say that no other director could have dealt with THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM, certainly the most appalling book ever written. Whether you think that Pasolini himself deals with it successfully is, I suppose, a matter of personal taste.
THE FILM
The Duc de Blangis, with a entourage of depraved nobles and prelates, a rogue Archbishop, servants, armed guards, and congeries of male and female youths kidnapped for the occasion, retire to an immense castle in the countryside. There, over a period of 120 days, they execute a series of activities designed to explore the extremes of sexual perversion, generally to the detriment of the kidnapped youths, including torture and murder.
The Duc begins the festivities by reading to the soldiers and the terrified youths certain rules: 1) the mention of God, or the undertaking of any religious observance, including prayer, is punishable by immediate death; 2) any private sexual act is punishable by immediate death. All sexual activity must be prescribed by the Duc and witnessed by him.
Each morning begins with a dissolute middle-aged courtesan named Duclos relating one of her past sexual escapades to the assembled nobles, youths, and soldiers--de Sade's version of matins. The assembled leaders impatiently prod Duclos for more details. These scenes follow the book closely. The furious probing for ever more lurid details suggests that de Sade during these episodes was the prey of his own fantasies, that he was indulging them as gingerly and fearfully as one might hand-feed a starving tiger.
Later in the day, sexual activities, orchestrated by the Duc, take place. The activities of the first several days are rather conventional, but because of the Duc's boredom and impatience, they soon begin to assume a cruel and bizarre aspect: frequent homosexual and heterosexual rape, coprophagia, uropinia, morophilia (I'm having to reach for my Greek dictionary now), miscegenation, elaborate tortures. There is a remarkable banquet with only one entree. A young soldier and a maid are found in bed together and are summarily executed.
The cynosure of the book is the Duc. In the Duc de Blangis, de Sade created an unforgettable character: implacable, fathomlessly evil, a moral black hole. He is the most intimidating figure in literature. "He may be regarded as the depository of every vice and crime," de Sade stipulates. "He has killed his mother, his sister, and three of his wives." One has to look to the Jacobean stage to find any close contenders in villainy. Even the Duc's lust, fueled by a sort of ethereal rage ("Today would go badly for them. The Duc was in a black mood...") seems theoretical, divorced from human concerns. For those of us worried about the redemption of our species, he presents a terrifying construct.
SALO is truly shocking. However, it is neither exploitative nor sensationalistic. Exploitation and sensationalism are film devices adopted for a particular occasion with the response of a particular audience in mind. Pasolini's adaptation of de Sade's long (500 pp.) book is measured, literal, almost reverent. He selects, but he alters little. He places the film in northern Italy during the Second World War--the leaders, in black business suits, are higher-ups in the Gestapo, the guards are SS men. We hear throughout the film the low distant rumble of war, as though some gigantic inscrutable machine were at work, a very effective device. The suggestion is that the only difference between war and systematic torture is the ingredient of specific human intent. The film attains some resonance because of the setting, which invites us to reflect on the nature of fascism. However the Duc is not a fascist. Fascism involves values, perverted, perhaps, but values nevertheless. The Duc has no values. The contemporary setting is useful only to explain the origins of the Duc's power.
Toward the end, de Sade's writing becomes frantic. Sentences tumble out. Tortures are more grotesque and abbreviated. The excised nerves of a maid servant are wound on red-hot spools of iron. "In order to combine incest, adultery, sodomy and sacrilege," we are informed, "he embuggers his married daughter with a Host." Like a racing driver trapped under the carriage of his runaway machine, de Sade has become the ejecta of his own fixations.
At this point Pasolini distances himself from de Sade's hysteria and shapes the material to his own ends, revealing a formidable artistry. The Duc and the Archbishop are seated in elegant drag, almost as though they were holding court. With binoculars, they watch through the castle windows the silent, prolonged torture of young males in the courtyard below: disembowlings, blindings, branding, the excisions of tongues, scalping. Beyond the small window panes partly obscured with dirt we can observe the silent, sprightly glee, the awful grin, of the torturer who presides over the mayhem. Pasolini's use of this distancing device is a stroke of genius. The effect it produces is unearthly.
The seated Duc peers through the eyepiece of his binoculars, then the lens piece, then again through the eyepiece, so the action is enlarged, diminished, and enlarged again. In just this way, Pasolini is saying, tyrants can always orchestrate their own reactions to the cruelty they inspire.
Then the film ends with an unexpected scene, typical of Pasolini's lavish use of irony. In an upstairs bedroom two handsome young armed guards in street clothes are listening to the radio. One tunes it from the ominous cadences of "Carmina Burana," which has been playing during the torture sequence, to a light-hearted '40's dance tune.
"Can you dance?" he asks the other.
"No."
"Let's try," the first urges.
"A bit."
They rise, put down their guns, clasps hands and waists, and proceed to move in a clumsy, yet stately, dance.
"What's your girlfriend's name?" one asks.
"Margarita," the other replies, with a soft, embarrassed grin.
My feeling is that SALO is a unique phenomenon in the history of film. It cannot be dismissed nor ignored, and those who view it must be willing to live with its images. It forces us to think in new ways about the nature of power and victimhood. Time and again it stresses that victimhood--far from eliciting pity in an oppressor--is the posture that is most likely to goad him to increased cruelty. In its ability to make such extreme material real, SALO is a testament to the franchise of film in today's aesthetic world, as unassailable and nonnegotiable as the hegemony of the Duc himself.
The Italian government pressed obscenity charges against SALO which delayed its release for many months. The film was finally released in 1975, the year of Pasolini's own death by homicide. A 17-year-old street tough, towards whom Pasolini had made sexual advances, bludgeoned him to death, than ran over him repeatedly with the director's Alfa Romeo.
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