Salò: an assessment

When Salò was originally submitted to the BBFC, it seemed as if the UK distributors might be prosecuted. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith prepared this expert witness defence of the film:

Early in 1978, when it looked not only as if Salò would be banned in Britain but that the company distributing it would actually be prosecuted, I was asked to put on paper some thughts about the film which might be useful to the defence if the case ever came to trial. It was not a film I liked - I still don't - but it did not seem to me pornographic. Nor did it seem to me likely to 'deprave and corrupt', to use the curious phrase of the Obscene Publications Act. If anything it was liable to make people want to throw up. It was, possibly, obscene, but only in a rather special sense. It was cruel and perverse but the cruelty and perversion were a challenge, not an indulgence. Times have changed since I wrote down my reasons why I did not think it should be banned. It may be that people are less easily shocked and can take Salò in their stride. I hope this is not the case. Pasolini made this film in order to disturb people, in order to make them face up to something he felt they were unwilling to confront but was nevertheless real and unescapable, the relationship between sex, death and power. In this respect times have not changed. Ours is a highly sex-conscious culture which nevertheless displays a panic fear of the darker and more dangerous side of sexuality. Indeed the more liberal the culture becomes the greater the panic in the face of what is feared to lie on the other side. Salò faces up to that other side and that is the reason why it deserves to be seen.

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, August 2000

Pasolini's Salò

Pasolini's Salò is a disturbing but not necessarily particularly shocking film, and in many ways decidedly anti-erotic. In terms of its author it shows a certain continuity with the rest of his work in that themes are brought out into the open here which were latent in some of his other films, but it also marks a sharp, if provisional, turn towards the death forces against those of life and love celebrated elsewhere in his work. Pasolini's immediately preceding film, The Arabian Nights, was the last of a trilogy of films, based on medieval literary sources, which celebrated life, vitality and instinctual sexuality. Salò approaches sexuality entirely from its darker side and appears to represent a calculated break with its immediate predecessor (though not with the author's work as a whole); and it was to have been followed, according to report, by films which would escape from the nightmare atmosphere fashioned in it. Unfortunately the author did not live to make any more films. If he had it might be easier to see the present film in its full context, as a stage in a trajectory exploring the instinctual forces regarded by the author as governing human life and variously expressed, perverted and repressed in different historical and social circumstances.

I can understand Salò being found shocking by people with no knowledge of Pasolini's earlier work, or again by people with no experience of 'X' films or whose experience of erotic films is of a jolly (if occasionally perverted) romp. Salò, however, is absolutely not an erotic film in the 'blue movie' tradition. Its theme is not erotic pleasure as such but the perversion and subordination of love relationships to those of power. What makes the film disturbing, as I shall argue later, is the way it plays on the audience's uncertainties as to the boundaries separating normality and perversion, pleasure and distaste. However, unlike earlier films, such as for example Theorem (1968) with its affirmation of the positive, subversive value of homosexuality, Salò makes no claims on behalf of what it shows. The subversion of accepted sexual patterns is presented as almost entirely negative - with the proviso that a challenge is thrown out to members of the audience as to where exactly they, consciously or unconsciously, would draw the line between what attracts and what, inevitably, repels.

Perversion and Fascism

The film is set in the last days of Fascist rule in Italy, in a period when fascism had ceased to be either popularly supported or politically viable, and when Mussolini's puppet republic was sustained only by German arms and the fanaticism of the Fascist 'hierarchs'. It is significant - and the point would not be lost on an Italian audience - that the only place-names mentioned in the film are Salò itself (headquarters of the puppet republic) and Marzabotto (site of a notorious wartime massacre by the Nazi occupying forces).

The film thus situates its subject matter firmly in relation to Fascist political power - not so as to claim an historical connection between fascism and sexual orgies but rather to propose an analogy between two forms of 'anarchy of power', political and sexual. Just as fascism and Nazism can be seen as a form of the use of force and violence unconstrained by Law and thus as an anarchy of the powerful against their victims, so the world of the Marquis de Sade is seen as an anarchy of violence in sexual relations. But just as fascism is not really anarchy, because freedom to infringe the law is reserved to a small class at the expense of the rest, so the Sadian orgy is not an expression of freedom either but takes the form of a brutal tyranny. Whereas in his previous films Pasolini had attacked sexual conformity, here he considers - and rejects - the breakdown of sexual norms in a context where the breakdown of normal constraints is not part of a social and sexual revolution but simply the imposition, by a corrupt minority, on unwilling victims, of its own impotence and perversion.

The Characters and their 'Pleasures'

As the credits of the film make clear, Salò is an adaptation of Sade's notorious book The 120 Days of Sodom. It is important, however, to signal a major difference between the two works. Sade's novel is about pleasure, albeit inextricably connected with power and with death; Pasolini's film is almost exclusively about power, death and degradation, and hardly about pleasure at all. In Sade's writing cruelty and the death wish appear as a component of sexual pleasure, and when the pleasures of life are exhausted the supreme pleasure - the supreme orgasm - comes in receiving and administering death. In Salò everything turns on relations of power and the exercise of this power is shown in a pure state. The fact that the instruments of power are the body or its organs seems at times almost irrelevant. The holders of power in the film are shown as incapable of a direct experience of sexual pleasure and as sexually impotent (at least in the sense of being unable to make love). Male sexuality is represented in terms of the power of the penis, seen either as a weapon of assault or as an emblem of abstract phallic potency. Female sexuality and capacity for pleasure are totally denied and at any sign of their appearance are instantly suppressed. The stories told by the procuresses to excite the company contain no suggestion of there being any pleasure in it for the women themselves, while the pleasure described for the men is solely that of displaying or exercising their own force or of humiliating others. No woman is ever shown as choosing her own pleasure (except for two girl victims, who sleep with each other and are threatened with punishment, and a servant girl who sleeps with a guard and is shot on the spot). No men except the executioners have a right to choose their pleasures and even for the executioners bodily pleasure is masturbatory at best. More often 'pleasure' consists in acting out fantasies whereby others are degraded, punished or tortured.

The Audience

It is a normal characteristic of erotic visual art (painting, photography) that it appeals directly to the pleasure of looking. In pin-up-photography there is normally nothing between the viewer and the body on display. The situation is more complicated when the picture shows two (or more) people engaged in sexual activity, or when the picture contains another viewer looking at the scene. In erotic narrative, by contrast, the presentation of a pure object is relatively rare, and the involvement of the reader is with the characters in the fiction and their experiences. In these respects film stands midway between visual and narrative art. It can present a simple picture of a body as object, but more often this presentation is made part of a story and the body is therefore that of a character - either one who the spectator would like to possess of one the spectator would like to be (though occasionally a figure who interferes with the basic 'I am/I want' structure). Most erotic films allow for at least a component of looking directly, and pleasurably, at a body, or bodies, whether sexually engaged or not. It is a significant feature of Salò that it allows very little space for the simple spectacle of beautiful bodies or enticing sexual properties, and very little space for normal character-identification either. The shots in the film that have an erotic content are generally either 'point-of-view' shots from the stand point of the executioners (i.e., they are shots taken from the angle in which the executioners are supposed to be looking and therefore contain the implied presence of the executioners looking at the scene the audience is also watching); or else they are shots in which the executioners are themselves present in the frame and seen to be looking at the body or bodies which the audience is also looking at. The characters of the executioners therefore constantly intervene to cut off, or at any rate to modify, any simple pleasure in viewing. The audience cannot see with its own eyes but only via those of the executioners. Such a situation is not unusual in art generally (in most films about 30-40% of shots are 'point-of-view' shots) and it obviously plays a special role in erotic art. But it is rare under any circumstances for the direction of spectator interest to be quite so narrowly channelled as it is here, and via characters quite so consistently repulsive. The strategy employed seems to be that of giving the audience many of the ingredients of a pleasing spectacle but then just not allowing it to please - in the same way as the characters in the film, other than the executioners, are put in conditions of sexual licence and then not allowed to enjoy themselves.

Art and Repulsion

It may be asked at this point what is the purpose of a work of art whose intention and effect are to produce distaste at its own spectacle (which Salò undoubtedly does for a lot of the time, not only because of the content but also because of the structure of viewing). It can be responded that elements of distaste, displeasure, and even disgust, have been part of the functioning of art at many points in history. Not only satirists and moralists (Juvenal in the Roman empire, Swift in the 18th century) have played on these elements, but there is a sense of unredeemed horror in much of classical tragedy and in passages of Dante's Inferno (on which Salò is overtly modelled - especially in the division of the action of the film into 'Circles'). In painting the infernal visions of Hieronymous Bosch (15th century) are not merely grotesque but violently and purposefully distasteful. Salò, however, is singularly unrelenting in its pursuit of a hideousness redeemed only by an elegance of form. The only uplifting moments in the film are deaths - the soldier and the black girl, the procuress who plays the piano - since death is the only possible rebellion and the only possible release.

I would contend that the purpose of the film's makers was indeed to produce a vision of hell, playing on a movement of alternating attraction and repulsion already intrinsic to such visions but intensified in the film by virtue of its choice of subject matter. It may seem surprising to invoke the Christian tradition here, in relation to a film such as Salò, but it should be remembered that religion and the Church remained very important for Pasolini even after he ceased to be a practising Catholic and his work is often sustained by religious themes and a religious sensibility (most notably in The Gospel according to Matthew, 1964). Within the Christian artistic tradition hell is represented not just a place 'out there', a site of unimaginable torments the vision of which is sufficient to terrify people into keeping to the strait and narrow. It also represents something already present within the soul. The power of Dante's Inferno lies in the fact that the sins for which the characters are being punished are all sins which they are shown as having chosen and desired to commit, so that readers of the book are put in a position where they can identify with the sinner and with the ambition to commit the sin as well as with the justice which punishes them. Deprived of its formal religious armature, a similar conception can be found lurking not far below the surface of Salò - a conception of an art which explores and exploits the will to sin in the process of bringing judgement to bear on it. In lay terms what is at stake is the recognition (not always easy to make) of the existence of perverse desire as latent everywhere, though expressed only in certain individuals and under certain social conditions. What makes the film disturbing is not that it provides an outlet for such desires but that it constantly frustrates desire.

Conclusion

Viewing of Salò was not intended by the makers to be a pleasant experience and in practice most spectators do find it positively unpleasant - not because it is unequivocally repulsive (though it sometimes is), but because the repulsion is balanced against elements of attraction, whether normal or perverse. The fact that the film is disturbing in a deliberately unpleasant way does not seem to me an argument for not allowing it to be shown. Art - and film is no exception - has always contained elements that disturb rather than console, that frustrate rather than satisfy. If the subject matter of Salò is to be allowed to be spoken of at all, it must necessarily be disturbing. For it not to be so is indeed to pander to pornography.

31 January 1978

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith is the editor of The Oxford History of World Cinema. His study of L'avventura is published in the bfi Film Classics series.