Salo or the 120 days of Sodom

Salo or the 120 days of Sodom, by Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975.

If you want to make films, you cannot ignore that masterpiece. Its visual richness matches the power of its purpose. It is a visual adaptation drawn from texts by Donatien de Sade, Roland Barthes, Pierre Klossowsky, Maurice Blanchot, Simone de Beauvoir, Philippe Sollers. Because of its abstractness, it is a most radical statement about hierarchical relationships of power, history, human nature, and cinema itself.

In an insular castle, notables of the republic of Salo, Lombardy, Italy, train a group of youth in a totalitarian spirit, and apply in the straightest manner an array of rules which sole aim is their own pleasure.

“Indeed, the true and only anarchy is power.”

The whole film takes place in a doubly enclosed space: the city of Salo is surrounded by water, representing the political isolation of the republic in its historical context; within the city, the castle is enclosed in a circular quickset hedge concretising the isolation of the youth out the outside world. The action is organised in three topical circles, directly drawn from Dante’s Divine Comedy. To this pitiless logic of the spatial and temporal structures, responds the no less straight social organisation of the group. The paradisiacal setting hosts an infernal action.

Strictly hierarchical, that organisation constitutes a structure as symmetrical and hermetically uniting than the neo-classical architecture of the place. Age and gender acting as discriminating factors, a rigorous parity reigns, giving each character their role and position in the hierarchy. The masters, the ‘notables’, call each other ‘Duke’, ‘Excellence’, ‘My Lord’, ‘President’. The symbolic order in Salo is an alliance of moral, military, socio-profesional and political regimes, namely nobility, middle class, church and political class. They are accompanied by four old women who have the double task to publicly tell them tales meant to stimulate their desires, than to make sure these desires are immediately and fully satisfied. The objects and instruments of these are eight young men and eight young women, carefully chosen amongst the population of the city. Eight soldiers enforce the law, and eight servants discretely provide material services.

The unity of the castle is founded on the law, written by the masters. Its aim is to systematise the training provided to the youth during their initiatory stay, ruled in its most minute details. Salo law equally applies to all, but it codifies the desires of the masters, therefore securing their double power, to use the body of the youth at their free will, and to punish them if they transgress the order that objectifies them, if they disobey the leaders they are the subjects of.

The population of the castle is a church, i.e. a religious assembly united by rituals replicating parts of the Christian liturgy to its own ends. All the activities apart from sleep are performed in common; eating, singing, listening to stories, and highly ritualised so as to coerce the individual to give up its critical distance and stick to the values of the group. Solitude and intimacy are repressed, as well as free sexuality, for they threaten the coherence of the flock, which symbolic order is based on the sacrifice of the child. “In the shadows of young girls in flower, they won’t believe their misfortune. They’re listening to the radio, they’re sipping tea. At the degree zero of freedom, they don’t know that middle class has never even hesitated to kill its sons”.