The club cut
The only version of Salò to be screened at all regularly in the UK during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s was significantly cut under the supervision of James Ferman, then director of the British Board of Film Classification. Ferman wrote a prologue and epilogue that were added (as spoken word) to the cut print of the film.
Prologue
Salò, a small town on Lake Garda, was the last place in Italy where Mussolini held power. He had been deposed in the summer of 1943 and then rescued by the Nazis from his prison north of Rome to escape the advancing Allied armies. With the help of German and Fascist troops, he set up a new puppet Republic - the Fascist Republic of Salò - and during the eighteen months that it lasted, over 72,000 people were killed, a further 40,000 were mutilated, and yet another 40,000 deported to the German concentration camps.
In the whole of Italian history, no period can equal the wave of concentrated sadism perpetrated in northern Italy during the last year and a half of World War II. Some of these deeds were the work of eighteen year-old boys, rounded up as conscripts to serve with the Fascists. In one horrifying massacre at Marzabotto, these boys were forced to help in the butchering of 2,000 inhabitants, including 53 other youths hanged for failing to report for this compulsory service. On other occasions, civilians were tortured, women and children sexually defiled and killed.
The names 'Salò' and 'Marzabotto' are instantly recognisable to all Italians. They symbolise the horror of this, their last civil war, the last time a truly evil government ruled in any part of Italy. For - what was to be his final film, Pier Paolo Pasolini chose the actual scenes of these atrocities - the region where he himself had grown up - as the setting for a denunciation of the corrupt use of power.
For his plot, he chose de Sade's novel The 120 Days of Sodom, in which four libertines order the rounding up of innocent young victims for an orgy of debauchery. In Pasolini's film, sexual brutality becomes a metaphor for political brutality, as four wartime Fascists act out these eighteenth-century fantasies with the help of four procuresses. In the ceremonies they perform, no speech has been added to what de Sade's characters say, and no detail to the acts they commit. Pasolini has simply transferred the action from eighteenth-century France to the 1944 Republic of Salò.
He uses, too, some of the imagery of Dante's Inferno, with its terrible Circles of Hell, where those who had done violence to man and God included the blasphemers and the sodomites. For Pasolini, there was, too, the violence of dehumanised sex, of the exploitation and degradation of the human body, which he felt to be at the heart of Fascism. In one circle of Dante's Hell, as in Pasolini's film, the sufferers are immersed in excrement to await their fate. In Italy, such imagery is traditionally associated with the degradation of the body and the spirit.
Without a knowledge of Italian culture, much of Pasolini's imagery will be lost to an English-speaking audience. But his meaning remains. It is a warning of the monstrous possibilities which man carries within him for the enjoyment of evil. Without justice and mercy, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Pasolini's horror at this unbridled use of power is one the distributors of this film believe we all share. They regret that the version you are about to see has had some of its most extreme moments eliminated. The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions has stated that if the full version were shown again in the United Kingdom, the exhibitor might risk prosecution. It is to avoid this that the film has been re-edited, but we hope that Pasolini's final testament survives.
Epilogue
It would be naive to think that what happened in Salò will never happen again. Murder and torture are still practised in secret in many parts of the world - and the families of the victims, as well as many of the collaborators, will have to live with the memory of these atrocities.
