Venus In Forlorn

It is when I see others degraded that I rejoice knowing it is better to be me than the scum of “the people”. Whenever men are equal, without that difference, happiness cannot exist. So you wouldn’t aid the humble, the unhappy. In all the world no voluptuousness flatters the senses more than social privilege. - Paolo Bonacelli. (from Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Recently, I had to watch Pasolini’s Salò for a college essay. When I was younger, I always wanted to watch this film, mainly, because every website and film critic ranked this film as a top 5 most disturbing films of all time. 

Pasolini did a wonderful job doing this adaptation of the Marquis de Sade’s 1904′s unfinished novel The 120 Days of Sodom. There was only one change he made while he adapted it: he translated the story from the time of the Marquis, to the time of WWII, when the fascist government of Mussolini allied with the Nazis.

He also did something very interesting, dividing the story in four segments inspired by Dante’s Inferno: the Anteinferno, la Girone delle Manie (Circle of Manias), la Girone della Merda (Circle of Shit) and la Girone del Sangue (Circle of Blood). Every segment succeeds in the test of surpassing it’s predecessor in terms of the disgustingess it causes in the viewer. 

While many cinephiles may think that Pasolini maybe tried to somehow give the viewer a message about how dictators and the riches abuse their power in this society to their advantage (in this case, sexual advantage). But… nope. I don’t feel like Pasolini tried to do anything else than a faithful adaptation, word by word sometimes, of its source material.

And yeah, it is fucking disgusting. 

Fun Fact: There’s a popular urban legend that says that Pasolini was murdered because of this film. But that’s not true. Pasolini was supposedly killed by a young male prostitute, who refused to have sex with him in Pasolini’s car, on a beach in Ostia, Italy. Pier Paolo was open to the world about him being a homosexual, and also a comunist. But, the real reason why he was murdered, and how it happened it’s… unknown to this day.

For my essay I had to read a very interesting text written by Pasolini himself, The “Cinema of Poetry”, from a book written by himself called Heretical Empiricism. I don’t think I fully understood it, but it was interesting to see how he compared language and his codes and tried to compare it to the codes of images, and how language had a structure you can follow when you want to create any sort of text, but images don’t have that structure to follow. At least that’s what I could partially understand. I strongly recommend you to read it. 

The only weird thing about Pasolini, and something I still don’t understand, is how a film director with some heart-warming and luminous films like his “Trilogy of Life”, suddenly had a 360º degree swivel and decided to do a “Trilogy of Death”. Strange.

Elizabeth Kirkman Fitzhugh, Militant Mary