Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom (Bfi Modern Classics Distributed for the British Film Institute)

Rating:
Summary: A rather muted appreciation of a 'scandalous' classic.
Review: 'Salo' is a prominent in that select group of 'scandalous' 1970s films (e.g. 'Straw Dogs', 'In the Realm of the Senses') which retains the power to shock, appal, unnerve today (although I personally found 'Salo' more numbing that anything). Pasolini's last film before his brutal murder in 1975, it is a transplanting of the Marquis de Sade's infamous 1785 novel to the dying days of Fascist Italy, in which four prominent figures (a bishop, an aristocrat, a banker and a judge) retire to an abandoned villa with soldiers, courtesans, collaborators and 18 slaves to indulge in a ritualised orgy of sexual excess, faecal banquets, storytelling, torture and murder.

Gary Indiana's monograph starts well, with a number of apparent digressions effectively contextualising 'Salo': the author's first encounter with the film in the ... L.A. of the 1970s; 'Salo''s place at the culmination of Pasolini's career (with a clear-eyed appraisal of that career, and the personal and political biography that was inseperable from it); 'Salo''s status as the last major art-movie, released in the same year as 'Jaws' destroyed auteurism, independence and experiment forever (a development Indiana bracingly rants against).

Indiana is very good on Pasolini's contradictions, his courage and frequent dislikability, his style of 'contamination' (e.g. interspersing 'real' actors in a predominantly unprofessional cast; his recourse to pastiche and allusion) and some of his major themes - the lingering fascism in the soulless corruption of consumerist society and its debasing of the human body; the superiority of pre-industrial rusticity etc.

But when he gets to the film itself, Indiana opts for a lengthy description of its plot with occasional asides. As so often in this series (and the BFI classics), the lack of systematic criticism (from non-film-academic/critics)leads to a frustratingly bitty stu.

Rating:
Summary: Hyperbolic study of a once 'infamous' film.
Review: Salo, infamously, was Pier Paolo Pasolini's final film before he was bludgeoned to death in the street (allegedly) by a young hustler. His death remains one of the most fascinating 'in suspicious circumstances' ever to transpire in the history of 20th century cinema, on which the director had already left his mark with films like The Gospel According to St Mathew, Medea, The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales, long before he decided to update the Marquis de Sade's story of torture, greed and captivity to the morally-bankrupt Fascist Italy of the 1940's. The film caused a scandal on initial release and was eventually banned from most countries for a number of decades, with many critics even devising theories that the controversy of Salo had ultimately led to its maker's untimely death.

Whether or not this was the case is unknown and sadly, it seems that things of this nature will remain as such. Critic Gary Indiana here, seems non-to interested in mining the deeper implications of the filmmaker's death and the public opinions of the film, save for a few quotes he no-doubt ripped from the archives. The first few segments of the book do offer snippets of interest, with, as the other commentator noted, Indiana offering up a personal and honest account of how he discovered the film and what it (the film) and Pasolini as an artist meant to him at that difficult period in his life. However, considering his position, Indiana's assessment of the film (and the artistic and sociological credentials) are naturally biased, and instead, lean on occasion towards cascading passages of hyperbole. He also fails to offer up a cogent or persuasive argument as to WHY we should experience this film and what we will take from it, with his personal explanation/assessment of the film comprising of little more than passages of verbose descriptions and quotes from other people.

Now, personally, I don't rate Salo as a particularly great work, being a film that, in my opinion, has achieved notoriety not by the assuredness of it's makers nor on cinematic merit (or, even more so on it's subtextual ideology or analogies to the second world war and Fascist dictatorship in general) but more on it's scenes of censor-baiting torture and perversion, the confrontational, hyper-real documentary-style employed during the scenes or rape, humiliation and ritualistic excrement consumption and, of course, the lurid demise of its director. All of these points and more could have been looked at with a greater sense of depth and objection by the critic in order to give those of us who have failed to buy into the hype of this film a reason to go back, re-experience it and try to look for the many merits that Indiana so delights in pointing out.