Today from 17:00-20.00 hrs, the UvA Film Club will continue their weekly screening in HVL/BuzzHouse’s Co-Working Space! This week's film is Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975), with an introduction by Prof. Jacob Engelberg.
The reputation of Saló, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) precedes it. The final film by Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, made shortly before his murder, Salò’s controversies around its stark depiction of torture, violence, and humiliation have reverberated across the five decades since its release. Salò relocates the Marquis de Sade’s tale of a group of libertines’ meticulously systematised quest for the acme of sexual excess to the short-lived fascist puppet state from the final years of WWII, the Republic of Salò. In this historical context, Pasolini recasts Sade’s libertines as Italian statesmen who orchestrate the kidnapping of a group of teenagers. With the help of a team of henchmen and a coterie of experienced sex workers, the statesmen play out their final months of impunity, subjecting their abductees to various forms of torturous degradation.
50 years since Salò’s release, we find ourselves in a time of rising fascism in many global contexts. Reviewing the film in today’s world perhaps allows for a reflection on how fascist politics both mobilises and manages desire, what Judith Butler has recently called the “fascist passions” that animate contemporary far-right forms of collective fantasy. Beyond Salò’s reputation for the difficulty of its viewing, we might, instead, consider its value as a means of working through issues around power, domination, violence, and desire.
Salò’s enduring power lies in its stark presentation of the violence to which humans can subject one another and in its refusal to grant the spectator a comfortable distance from what we witness. Instead, we are made complicit in the statesmen’s actions, entering the subjective space of their destructive desires, where we might be horrified to find a capacity for cruelty that lies in us all. One of Salò’s most smarting provocations is to be found in its refusal to cast the fascist, the torturer, the collaborator as icons of inhuman evil. Instead, we must confront these figures’ very humanity, a humanity we share.
