#salò

[bobbole]

"In 'Salo' (1976), sex is nothing but an allegory of the commodification of bodies at the hands of power. I think that consumerism manipulates & violates bodies as much as Nazism did. My film represents this sinister coincidence between Nazism & consumerism."

Pier Paolo Pasolini (via DepressedBergman)

[psicochurroz]

Makima's Closet Picks

[poesie-abstraite]

Salo ou les 120 journées de Sodome 1975

Pier Paolo Pasolini

[celestialmega]

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

[dyouknowwhatimean]

blood cinema: the reconstruction of national identity in spain by marsha kinder

[transmutationisms]

omg what'd you think of salo...i personally love it, though the last 10 minutes of that movie are gonna haunt me for the rest of my life

god it was so good. i keep meaning to ramble about it on here. yeah i mean, 'haunting' might be a good word for it! i do also think it's a very hopeful film in certain ways though---yes of course the mansion is representative of the broader functioning of fascist repression, but pasolini was also very much making a film About Communism & about how no repression could actually be totalising (sergio's death, the betrayal sequence, ezio/inès, the pianist). even renata's tears and pleas to god throughout the film---the reason these bother the masters so much is because, although they can possess her body, they're being faced with the proof that she and the others have an interiority & consciousness that fascism is simply incapable of stamping out. it's very effective i think in simultaneously conveying the overwhelming horror of rape and general sadism (again, standing as representative of broader systems of political and social violence---the masters are the church/state/nobility) and yet also opening up those chinks in the armour where the victims reach for scraps of selfhood.

anyway because i read history of shit i will just say. what a fucking fantastic cinematic use of shit as well. obviously there's the imagery of fascism literally producing shit and feeding it to people (at a composed and ornamented banquet), plus the more psychosexual angle where so much of the rape in the film is specifically sodomy and so, of course for the masters coprophilia/coprophagia are simultaneously the taboo they cross to punish their victims even further. and i think this loops in too with the scene where they're judging who has the best ass, and so they have everyone bent over and they're only seeing them from behind---it's that reduction of all the victims to the anus, which again is in the film a site of pleasure as well as humiliation and therefore this kind of contested site that can be used to articulate and enforce power differentials. you love to see it.

anyway yeah you could honestly write a paper on any scene in this film it's all so good. i want to watch it again at some point and i maybe also want to read some sade (though partially for other reasons lol) also i will take this opportunity to say, if you haven't read the salòlita essays, do :-)

[dogmotifz]

salò is a movie about cannibalism as a metaphor for love

[familyabolisher]

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini

[twoheadedfilmfan]

[sroczko]

[insigni-insegne]

[dionysian-sadness]

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Pier Paolo Pasolini.

[poesie-abstraite]

Salo or the 120 days of Sodom

Pier Paolo Pasolini 1975

[celestialmega]

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

[greeetchens-blog]

I just watched Saltburn, I waited because people sell it like it's the most disgusting film ever.

The only thing I'm going to say is that I watched Salò when I was in hs and to this day wish I could unsee it. Saltburn was nothing.

[chaotic-history]

Went back to revisit the Sade chapter in The Rebel, and yeah this is the part that really stood out to me reading 120 Days. Like yes they're doing depraved things, but is it really libertine if you have a strict schedule for when and how those acts must be performed? The four libertines are still restrained from truly acting on their desires, because of the pacts they've made to wait to actually fuck anyone.

And the second part as well. The libertines still have much more agency than the others; at least their restrictions are self-imposed. But no one else is allowed any movement towards pursuing their desires, and in the movie the two girls get in trouble for that (possibly also in the book? it's been a while since I've read it).

Camus says that Sade extolled totalitarianism in the name of freedom, and I think the way he's reading Sade is very similar to an Objectivist philosophy, where the only moral goal is the happiness of the self (in Sade's case specifically sexual pleasure), which, while it posits itself as a philosophy of freedom, it's not. If the only moral law is to be selfish, that has to naturally lead to the subjugation and dehumanization of others. Any system that places individual gain as the highest goal at the expense of anything and everything else coughcoughcapitalismcough and also fascism bc the state becomes an individual rather than a community of people*, will inherently lead to the oppression of whoever in that society can't manage to fight their way to the top.

And he also says that these societies/systems built on subjugation are naturally doomed to fail if you follow the logic to its end. He doesn't go a ton into this and I wish he did, but I'm going to go on sort of a tangent and say that, in the sense of it being a regime, if you've built your identity on the massacre or supression of outsiders, if your unifying factor is an us vs them, someday that "them" will be gone and you'll fall apart. I think the metaphor works better if we're talking about an economic system that's like this, because if there's no constraints and the strong naturally subjugate the weak, you're going to end up with monopolies taking over everything and wiping out the competition that breeds innovation (fuck you Adam Smith; I'm right you're wrong go suck a dick about it). And if we follow it to the absolute farthest end, that company's gonna be the executioner standing alone in the castle amid the desolation of everything around it.

Re the green highlighted part:

this is The best part of the movie. Even in such as a place as their weird wacko murder sex mansion, there's resistance.

*not saying any of this is what Sade is saying