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I was responding to

mfunk9786 wrote:That's such a bullshit argument. For the record, the movie doesn't bother me the way Pasolini wants it to bother me, but regardless, that's another awful defense of a bad movie. By this logic, those August Underground movies would sweep the Oscars every year.

[waits for domino to post suicide booth]

dr gennesier wrote:I was responding to

mfunk9786 wrote:That's such a bullshit argument. For the record, the movie doesn't bother me the way Pasolini wants it to bother me, but regardless, that's another awful defense of a bad movie. By this logic, those August Underground movies would sweep the Oscars every year.

I know what you were responding to.

Than what didn't you understand?

I didn't read it as saying you were less qualified to judge, just that your experience of the film would be different, and he understood what that difference was.

I for one am surprised that thread about Salo turned into a shitstorm.

Salo is one of my favorite films of all time. I do not even watch films with much if any violence and I try to avoid war films as much as possible. I personally dislike when a director tries to preach something in their movies. You can understand he/she must feel passionate about their subject to even make a film, but if it gets preachy, you lose me.

That being said, I did not feel Salo was a film where the director talked down to me at all. The events in the film are taken from something which happened in real life in the Republic of Salo + literary works. Pasolini certainly made this a film of his own. Not only did he take all that and put it in his film, he also put a piece of himself in it. He was not only a victim, but one of the oppressors as well. And he seems to come to that decision right after his trilogy.

Everything about Salo and it's politics fascinates me. It also makes me question and look back at how Nazism was born and why people got behind it. How people let all those crimes go unnoticed and some even try to cover up, is beyond me. As a human being, regardless of what race/genger/nationality, ect... I "belong" to, I condemn any and all crimes committed against humanity.

And this is where Salo threw me a curveball. It wasn't at the beginning or even towards the middle. It was towards the end. The "victims" are now engaging in their very own little perverse acts and when they get caught, they start pointing the finger at the next person. And the next person. "Oh, but so and so is doing something much worse..." By the end, the victims come to power. Some are given guns and partake in the activities themselves. They now torture their own people. Why when the boys get access to the guns don't they try and shoot the 4 bastards and escape their torture? This may be a small thing, but in how many movies have you seen anything like this? Pasolini not only got rid of the whole good guys/bad guys cliche, but in my opinion, put the very dark side of humanity up on the screen for all to see. How many times have we in our own lives not do the right thing and looked the other way because it was the "correct" thing to do?

Maybe it is just me, but I have never seen a film do this as powerful as Salo. It also brings the question of God into my mind. How can God allow this to happen? Why did God allow all these horrors to take place and continue to take place to this very day? Just turn on the news and you will see a crime against humanity.

All this and much more, which at this time I cannot truly express in words, is what Salo did to me and why I consider it a masterwork. Reading a lot of posts made me register just so I could post this! I am not trying to change anyones mind nor do I want anyone to change my mind. I am only stating why I like the film. It made me think of my own decisions, politics, religion, ect... I cannot ask a film to do more than that.

dr gennesier wrote:MichaelB, can you explain how your reaction changed over the years? I have had a very similar change since the first time i saw it.

Bear in mind that each screening was of different versions in different circumstances, and the first two were marred by, respectively, a lack of subtitles (my Italian was probably as good as it's ever been back then, but my vocabulary was far too limited for this material) and a truly appalling print (so riddled with splices that it was hard to tell the difference between damage and censorship). So I was effectively watching the film through thick fog both times.

Third time round, the print was still less than ideal and it was on a much smaller screen, but at least it was uncut and subtitled - and I was also far more familiar with Pasolini's work (I don't think I saw any of his other films until after I saw Salo for the second time), so could place Salo as the logical culmination of a sequence that began with Teorema and continued through Pigsty and the Trilogia della vita. What hit me much more than before (and I suspect this will be even more obvious with the new DVD) was the film's weird beauty - something that's probably only apparent once the initial shock/revulsion factor has worn off.

I can't remember if I'd read Gary Indiana's BFI monograph before my third viewing, but he articulates my feelings very well when he talks about:

What's depicted in the film is a situation of total control over certain individuals by other individuals. These controlling individuals represent the apparatus of the state: clergy, banking, etc. In Salò the model of totalitarianism has been given a kind of desublimated lubricity that's never found in totalitarian regimes, which are invariably puritanical. Yet the appeal of fascism is an erotic one, and Pasolini wanted to show this as an explicit thing, the power to control another person's body, to use it sexually while destroying it, to get sexual pleasure from another person's suffering. Salò tries to explain fascism as this physical expression of the will to power, and to lure the viewer into complicity by showing a lot of stunningly gorgeous, naked teenagers. So we become accomplices to this horror by virtue of our own desire to keep looking, to keep cruising these adorable kids.

And I think this is a very effective articulation of the way that it's impossible to watch Salo neutrally - and why both its defenders and detractors tend to get so impassioned: there seems to be an overwhelming desire to justify what can't help but be a largely visceral reaction, at least on a first viewing. It also convincingly argues that the film's presentation and analysis of fascism is vastly more complex and nuanced than the "fascism is bad, m'kay?" message of widespread caricature (not least in this thread).

Sorry, PC glitch. I agree. I find the movie as beautiful and uncompromising as a cut gemstone. I find it very un-preachy as well. he just lays the body on the table and invites you to look at it, examine it, get up close to it and form your own opinion of what you are watching. Of course, he never leaves any doubt in your mind what his opinion is. In the last scene with the two dancing young men, is he saying that humanity will find a way? That there is hope? Or, is he saying that the situation is hopeless that we all will succumb?

mfunk wrote:I was just trying to make a point that despite the fact that it's reported that the set wasn't as gruesome to be on as it may appear, it was still a travesty that these young actors were even recruited to make this film. I was obviously reaching a bit to make that point, but I figure people will understand that and therefore not take it so literally.

Trying to defend your aesthetic reaction to a film by making a vulgar moral tirade against supposed exploitations that you cannot show to have existed is bankrupt. If you cannot show that those actors did not have an enjoyable time making the movie, and suffered no emotional trauma on its behalf, then everything you have to say on the matter is presumption--and presumption not helped by your faux-pulpit. It's a poor attempt to take your subjective terms and turn them into objective terms: "if people refuse to hate it because it presents staged atrocities, I will force them to hate it by presenting it as committing real atrocities."

mfunk9786 wrote:

The best review of this film I've found so far wrote:"Salo" is, I think, a perfect example of the kind of material that, theoretically, anyway, can be acceptable on paper but becomes so repugnant when visualized on the screen that it further dehumanizes the human spirit, which is supposed to be the artist's concern. When one reads, one exercises all kinds of intellectual processes that are absent when one looks at pictures. An image frequently says less than a thousand words. It's of especially limited use when dealing with the kind of ideas that Mr. Pasolini was playing with here.

Ok:

nytimes wrote:When one reads, one exercises all kinds of intellectual processes that are absent when one looks at pictures.

What processes would these be, exactly? And why is someone any more likely to be empty-headed from looking at a picture than from reading a book? Am I to take it the author means that reading some trashy romance novel exercises "all kinds of intellectual processes," while a Turner painting can only produce a dumb stare? I doubt the author would find such a statement acceptable, and yet this is exactly what he says. It's as tho' a poem, by the mere fact of being "literature" and therefore high intellectual stuff, can produce "all kinds of intellectual processes" by the collocation of two images; but a film, being simply television's pretentious counterpart, produces more dumb stares with its collocation of two images.

There are so many awful and muddled assumptions behind this sentence that I'm surprised anyone could think it makes a decent (and quotable!) point.

nytimes wrote:An image frequently says less than a thousand words.

And I could show you several thousand words that say nothing at all (and on this very forum).

Please note that this is a 17 page thread and many of these arguments are making their fourth or fifth pass in this thread

It must have been a strange experience to watch it without subtitles. My first was VHS so I can understand the bad print issues. I also initially found it strangely boring and un-erotic for such a controversial nudity filled film. This movie was my first exposure to Pasolini and really made me want to explore the rest of is filmography. I was lucky enough to see the "trilogy of life" projected in a cinema and they are such an amazing counterpoint to Salo. anyone seeing those films will find it hard to believe he hated humanity. On the contrary. I think he loved humanity and sexuality as well. Only someone who truly loved humanity and sexuality could have created a movie like Salo.

domino harvey wrote:Please note that this is a 17 page thread and many of these arguments are making their fourth or fifth pass in this thread

wow, what a buzz kill

Oh, I speak snide quite fluently. and this makes me a troller how?

I used to think watching Salo with grungy image quality somehow heightened its power -- boy I was wrong! Criterion's amazing new transfer really amps it up to whole new level of wonder. The film is a one of a kind masterpiece.

Antoine Doinel wrote:Some people have "lived" more in their 20s than most people do in their entire lifetime.

Yeah, I used to think that when I was in my twenties, now I can look back and laugh at what a pretentious idiot I was to think that...

I loved hearing Michael Haneke talk about Salo in an interview once --

Michael Haneke wrote:...because when I go to the cinema, I also want to be a bit...puzzled. If I leave the room different to when I walked in, it was worth going. If I leave the room in the same mood as when I walked in, I lost two hours. And that's what I try to do with my audience, that's what I expect when I go to the cinema. The films that I remember are those that challenged me, those that might have shocked me, hurt me. It means I've learned something. The film that really touched me was Pasolini's Salo. It's a film that really moved me, I was sick for three weeks. It was unbearable. But it really affected my view on cinema as a whole. I think that it's hard to try and achieve that, but it's worth it.

I suppose I will need to watch this film again, although I would ideally prefer to do so with the hi-def Blu-Ray release upcoming from the BFI in London. I have seen Salo once, on a muddy VHS cassette years ago although even under those circumstances the films formal aesthetics were apparent and not unimpressive. Ultimately, I didn't quite hate the film (as I was expecting to) but had more than a few problems with it upon reflection afterward. For one, I had a hard time reconciling the films flat, realistic style with events that played out like the fever dream of a sadist rather than real events. The complicity of the films victims made me question the motivations of the director and like so many films intent on shocking viewers, whether In a Glass Cage or one of those Italian Cannibal things, the subtleties of character development tended to get lost and swamped by the directors determination to elicit a visceral response in the viewer.

Some of the apparant deeper meaning that many pull from this film is I believe indeed there but it is also conveyed in a simpler, more humane way in other films. One example is the girl asking why god has foresaken her. We'll the answer is summed up in one line in Terry Gilliams Time Bandits when a character asks God (Ralph Richardson) why there is evil in the world and he replies simply "I think it has something to do with free will".

I will admit that I have an easier time with depictions of violence that have some historical fact behind it (Saving Private Ryan, Downfall) then two hours of humiliaton and torture spawned from the mind of an overheated cineastes imagination.* I suppose it's part of why the violence in war movies usually brings me closer to the humanity of the characters while the sort in Salo, The Cook the Thief His Wife and Her Lover or Reservoir Dogs actually pushes me away with its gloating quality.

Pasolini was a brilliant filmmaker and The Gospel According to St. Matthew remains one of my favorite films. Unlike that film however, I do not expect Salo will be appearing on Roger Ebert's Great Movies series anytime soon. I will give Salo one more try (deep breath) but I suspect that my reaction will remain closer to CC forum poster 'Antoine Doinel' than many others on this thread.

*I have not read De Sade's book so cannot compare how much of the material in Salo is directly from the book.

I was a bit worried that the dvd would remove that grindhouse look I was used to seeing. I thought this would remove some of the punch from the film. I was not prepared for the sumptuous beauty portrayed in almost every frame. It truly is a pictorially beautiful film. Perhaps even more so than the trilogy films. What shocked me was how this added to the film's punch not diminish it. This beautiful exterior adds to the criminality of the 4 pillars of society. That they can turn such beauty into such ugliness stresses their non humanness. That for these people and people like them, beauty will not humanize them, will not allow them to be bargained with, it will only bring out their reptilian nature.

I get the impression from some on this board that they think this movie was meant to be enjoyed. It very much was not. Watching the human condition be inverted by absolute evil should never be an enjoyable experience.

It seems like Salò has taken quite a lot of beating (and defending) over the past few pages. Despite my intentions to drop to lurker status, it seems appropriate to interject my feelings towards the film at this point.

If I were to sum up all of my reasons for respecting Salò into one single argument, it would be that Salò is pure cinema. It presents the images simply and matter-of-factly and yet they have an intellectual impact on the viewer that could only happen through the medium of film. The use of devices like acting, music, and plot are all quite minimal and when they are used, it is for a reason. I’m so tired of hearing people say that the film works better on paper. It was written on paper when Sade wrote it, but the effect that work has on the reader is completely different the Salò’s. I think that if Salò was written down on paper, it would not at all have the same impact on me, or that I would even like it as much. I do not think that if the final scene was written on paper, it would make me involuntarily tear up like only one other film ever has- Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. This is why I feel admiration for Pasolini when I think of this as the last film he ever made. He began as part of the literary world, but he died a true filmmaker.

I think that it is far too simple an analysis of Salò to say that it is merely a critique of fascism. Few people today need to be told that fascism is bad. Just how bad is a different story- and that is one of the reasons why people should see Salò. I often consider the fact that Sade imagined the 120 Days of Sodom in the eighteenth century. The film is set in the forties when many similar monstrosities were being committed in real life. (Seeing Resnais’ Night and Fog again recently I was immediately struck by the similarities between two films that otherwise couldn’t be more different.) Finally, watching Salò today in the early twenty-first century I can not help but be reminded of the many similar atrocities being committed all around the world, both the ones I am aware of and the ones I am not. It would still be quite a simple conclusion to draw by itself, but Salò is indeed a testament to mankind’s enduring capacity for evil, and not just under the name of fascism.

Although many people are simply and understandably incapable of setting aside the subject matter enough to be able to perceive it, I also think Salò plays as a Marxist allegory of capitalist class systems. If I may indulge for a moment, perhaps the victims could represent the lower class, the guards the middle, and the libertines the upper and ruling classes. The final scene that I have said provokes such a reaction in me, particularly the scene with the dancing soldiers does so because in a way I see that somehow- through their total complacency throughout the film perhaps- the guards have become libertines themselves. That capitalistic ideal of upward class mobility is here rendered in terrifying actuality. I can find two other clues in the film that point to this metamorphosis. First, the act of dancing while the remainder of the tortures commence below reminds me of the libertines doing a little dance in the courtyard just a few scenes before. Also, since neither one of the soldiers can dance, (they decide to “try it a bit”) dancing seems here to be of the upper class high intellectual variety, like many of the other painters, writers, and philosophers the libertines so often reference.

I could just be spouting a lot of pretentious bullshit as mfunk has said, but I think that there are many other more widely celebrated films that spark my mind in the same way that Salò does, and that is why I classify it along with the others as a truly great film. Perhaps other people have different criteria by which they would not classify Salò as a great film and I am not about to begrudge them of that opinion. However, I do get frustrated when I see reviews of the film that fail to even acknowledge any of the thoughts behind the film simply with the excuse that “It was just too unpleasant.” I don’t think those people are “too prudish”, but I do think they are “stupid” as Michael put it (perhaps not quite the word I would have chosen) because they have denied a film rational analysis simply because of its subject matter. That would be like someone saying they detest The Gospel According to St. Matthew simply because they hate religious films. (I fit that category, but I acknowledge that it is a good film because of the thoughtfulness with which Pasolini approaches the subject.)

I think you are right about many points, Klaylock. Just like Pasolini devised this film in parts ala Dante's Inferno, I believe he many have done the same about the lower/middle/upper class. If you read any book on Pasolini, it always tells the tale of how Pasolini's father saved Mussolini's life. And of course how Pasolini later became a Marxist and was then disenchanted by them. You can also read many contradictory tales of religion and if he belonged/believed in any. This is a very complex man and this film is as complex as the man who made it. Many things are going on if one chooses to see.

There are very few filmmakers who are as open as Pasolini. Only a few come to mind like Fassbinder, Godard, and Bunuel. I basically knew who they were by the films they made. One wonders if the extras on the DVD are correct and if Pasolini would have been able to make Saint Paul with Brando after Salo! Very interesting indeed.

Oh... And anybody like Salo better with the poem than without it? After watching it both ways, I cannot help but feel the BFI version is better and makes a ton more sense. Why it was deleted or not in the negative is beyond me. Maybe it was a very late decision by Pasolini or someone saw the poem after Pasolini's death and snipped it out? We know Pasolini shot more stuff which is not in the final film. Just found it odd. Because it works so well.

There are many films people like and I wonder "What the hell are they thinking?" Salo is one I like and people wonder the same thing about me.

davidhare wrote:The last two posts are very fine and I respect them greatly. But I ask you both to look further at one more movie, in terms of form and intention - Franju's Le Sang des Betes.

The noble tradition of Sadean discourse which cinematically I suppose begins with Bunuel in L'Age d'Or gets itself picked up again not surprisingly after the end of WW2, particualrly by artists with a poetic core of despair, like Bresson, and Franju.

Have a look and tell me what you think.

Hi, there. Unfortunately I do not own Eyes Without A Face. Have always meant to buy it, but laid off. I will probably pick up the Blu-Ray if/when.

But I do not know if that short is something I want to see! There is some of that in Fassbinder's "In A Year With 13 Moons." Which is kinda interesting to go with the story of a Man who wants to be a Woman. Have you seen this film?

It is not one of my favorite Fassbinder films, but it is very interesting.

Se7en082 wrote:Oh... And anybody like Salo better with the poem than without it? After watching it both ways, I cannot help but feel the BFI version is better and makes a ton more sense. Why it was deleted or not in the negative is beyond me. Maybe it was a very late decision by Pasolini or someone saw the poem after Pasolini's death and snipped it out? We know Pasolini shot more stuff which is not in the final film. Just found it odd. Because it works so well.

It does, in my opinion, completely change the pacing of that whole scene. With the poem, the pacing is a little more bizarre. I like it, but if I had to guess a reason for deletion, I'd say Pasolini or someone else thought the scene flowed more smoothly without it (ordinarily, I'd prefer it with the poem. But, Salo placing as much emphasis on formalism and structure as it does, I wonder if perhaps the poem's omission is justified (at least by Pasolini) for the sake of smoother pacing).

I can kind of see how, for his own reasons, Pasolini might have gone back and forth on this issue for a long time. The poem presumably says something very important to Pasolini, but interferes quite jarringly with the pacing (which was, I assume, equally important to Pasolini)
I guess I prefer it with the poem. I rather like the weird little way it interrupts the rhythm. But, then, I'm not Pasolini and I don't know how important a smoothly flowing scene is to his overall vision.

Finally seeing those clips did get rid of what I previously considered the most obvious explanation; previously thought the poem had occured at the end of a reel and just been cut off by accident. But, it overlaps scenes in the 'non-poem' cut, so it couldn't have just been cut by mistake.

Se7en082 wrote:

davidhare wrote:The last two posts are very fine and I respect them greatly. But I ask you both to look further at one more movie, in terms of form and intention - Franju's Le Sang des Betes.

Have a look and tell me what you think.

Hi, there. Unfortunately I do not own Eyes Without A Face.

Here you go (part one, with English voiceover). Brace yourself.

Darth Lavender wrote:Finally seeing those clips did get rid of what I previously considered the most obvious explanation; previously thought the poem had occured at the end of a reel and just been cut off by accident. But, it overlaps scenes in the 'non-poem' cut, so it couldn't have just been cut by mistake.

The real mystery is how it ended up in the BFI's 35mm print, which was presumably struck in the late 1990s - i.e. when the uncut version was first screened in Britain. Which suggests that the scene must have been in the negative at some point, and that it's probably unlikely that Pasolini was around to personally supervise the cut.

There's no right or wrong answer to whether or not the scene should be included: I think it works very well, and I'm glad the BFI put it back, even if it does mean a noticeable (if brief) shift in image quality.

Michael wrote:It's not whether you like Salo or not. It's not my favorite film but I still defend it. It's perfectly wonderful that you detest Salo but failing or ignoring to respect or at least appreciate Pasolini's passionate drive to make this very fucked up piece of Italian history that ripped off the surface of all the taboos that still keeps Italy inside its bubble to this day is a tragedy.

I'd like to expand a bit on that comment I made yesterday. The Fascism may be long gone but its affect on Italy remains. Lets turn the Salo mansion into the Vatican, how much difference would it make? With all its power and wealth, it continues to influence the whole world - politics, religions, etc. Behind its altars, pedophilia thrives. I think the very thing that makes Salo so unnerving (more than lets say, war-violent films like Saving Private Ryan, etc) is the sex being incorporated into the violence and how sex is used as a tool for power and control.

The only 'fail' I see in this thread is the assumption that everyone knows fascism is bad.

Klaylock wrote:Few people today need to be told that fascism is bad.

This has been posted by numerous people in these 17 pages. Sorry, I wish it were true.