SAUL SYMONDS: Salò has a unique history in my own country, Australia, which is fairly revealing: it was banned in 1976, the ban was lifted in ‘93, and reinstated in ‘98. The inability of the censors in Australia to make up their mind about Salò reflects, in a limited but precise way, the fact that Salò has remained a live-wire over the 30 years since its original release. Most films made in the 70’s that were considered sexually shocking then, would barely raise an eyebrow now. So why can Salò? A first-glance kind of answer would point to the Sadean nature of Salò’ sexual relationships. It’s a fair enough answer that I’m not quite happy with. I think that Salò subversive power is directly proportional to Pasolini’s cultural credibility. It is precisely because Pasolini has been accorded the status of a great postwar Italian filmmaker that his critique of culture is so effective. With the passage of time, by the laws of a fairly conventional cultural process, Pasolini’s status has come to carry greater, not less, cultural clout. The same culture that accords Pasolini such an honoured place, still has the greatest of difficulty in watching his film. It’s like claiming that Mr. X is the greatest of chefs and not being able to digest his food. The existence of Salò forces our culture into an aporia from which it struggles to extricate itself. I’d like to initiate this jam session on Salò by opening up the question of the nature of this aporia.
Most film critics and theorists repeat Pasolini’s claim that the film is “a sexual metaphor, which symbolizes, in a visionary way, the relationship between exploiter and exploited.” These repetitions consist of analyzing “Salò” as a sexual metaphor for class struggle and power politics in general, or for Italian Fascism in particular. But the two basic dimensions of Salò – the political and the sexual – can be read both ways. That is, if Salò can be seen as a sexual metaphor of political relationships, it can also and equally be seen as a political metaphor of sexual relationships. In general, film criticism seems to have preferred exploring the ramifications of the political reading, rather than the sexual one. On a number of occasions, however, Pasolini admitted his fascination with the purely sexual dimension of his film.
DAVID EHRENSTEIN: And it’s because of this “sexual dimension” the film has been dismissed by all and sundry.
Needless to say, aforementioned all and sundry have never read Sade. Had they done so they would realize that Pasolini wasn’t recreating his own sexual fantasies, but rather staging a very small selection of the sexual fantasies inscribed in Sade’s massive, very much unfinished work. It is absolutely imperative to read Sade in order to understand what Pasolini has done with his text.
In the three-volume Grove Press edition of Sade’s writings there are photographs of the ruins La Ciste Chateau – the site that inspired The 120 Days of Sodom – taken by Alain Resnais. Resnais was, of course, being a good surrealist. Sade isn’t evoked in his work. Buñuel recreates a scene from Justine in The Milky Way, and in the popular cultural imagination Sade is Patrick Magee. The Marat/Sade is a very important piece of theatrical literature. But the Sade it depicts is quite selective. It’s better, however, than Kaufmann’s Quills, which merely romanticizes Sade – treating him as a naughty book writer. Huxley makes this mistake as well in his otherwise sublime After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. He seems to imagine The 120 Days – which he obviously hadn’t read – was something Marion Davies would have found exciting. It’s not. It’s an impossible book. And Pasolini has made of it an impossible film.
NOEL VERA: Not just an impossible film – an absolute, a sort of focal node for the far end of what's possible in cinema. Pasolini takes the text, and (Ehrenstein is right, this should be read first) and infuses it with a breathtaking visual beauty that you do not find in the book, which is a relentless cataloguing of perversions and violence in minute detail that has more of the spirit of the auditor than the artist in it – an obsessive dwelling upon long beyond and way past any notion that this can be in the least bit arousing, much less entertaining.
But there’s a fascinating power in Sade’s thoroughness, this need to imagine every kind of horror and present it in a kind of barely credible tableau (the four friends, for one, insist on kidnapping upper-class or high-born victims, and are perfectly confident that there will be no consequence to this). Pasolini’s achievement is to give us a sense, a whiff, of Sade’s thoroughness (as opposed to merely presenting it complete and uncut, which might have resulted in a ten-hour film), then investing it with the kind of aestheticizing transformation cinema can give – Sade’s tableaus, in effect, backgrounded by Dante Feretti’s brilliant colors, surrounded by Osvaldo Desideri’s luxurious sets, scored to Ennio Morriconi, Frederic Chopin, and Carl Orff's music, infused overall with Pasolini’s cool, equally pitiless sensibility.
Then, as David mentions, there’s the shift in locale, from some fantasy neverland located outside of France (Resnais may have taken pictures, but I’m sure Sade embellished on the actual location) to a Fascist vacation chateau, equating this kind of horror with that particular regime. Obvious connection, maybe, heavy-handed, maybe, but it does bring Sade up with considerable credibility to the 20th century, the denizens of whom I believe he speaks to the clearest.
SS: David, I like the concept of an “impossible film”, a whole category unto itself, kind of like “midnight movies”. But I’m sure what I think of when you say “impossible film” will not be exactly what you think of. How would you define this category?
DE: What I'm thinking of relates to Roland Barthes review of Salò published in Le Monde in 1976 (translated in the BFI booklet Pasolini edited by Paul Willemen, 1977) in which he declares: “Pasolini did two things he shouldn't have done. From a value standpoint, his film misses on two counts: everything that renders fascism unreal is bad, and everything that renders Sade real is wrong.”
In other words by recontexualizing Sade in the Italian fascist era Pasolini dares us to imagine Sadean acts as historically real, thus spoiling Barthes’ theoretical good times.
This is a clear manifestation of bad faith on Barthes’ part. He refuses to see that Pasolini has upped the ante – dared to take Sade’s fantasy into the realm of real, dared to make viewers consider these acts not in a removed context of pristine ahistoricism, but as relating to an understood historical reality. Never forget, Salò is a film made in opposition to “le retro”: The Damned, The Night Porter, Lacombe Lucien, and Le Dernier Metro. Into this chic “nostalgia” Pasolini enters with a plate of shit.
Barthes’ seems at the last aware of this, as he ends his piece stating: “This is why I wonder if, as the outcome of a long string of error, Pasolini’s “Salo” isn’t when all is said and done, a peculiarly ‘Sadean’ object: absolutely irreclaimable. Nobody, in fact, seems to be able to.”
This is what I mean by “impossible object.” What audience is there for this film? Not the art houses. Not the larger public that embraced Pasolini’s “Trilogy of Life” as a mere erotic fantasy for their delectation.
Maybe it was made for his murderers. They killed him because of it, you know. They thought Pasolini was going to set Sade’s “recit” (it’s not a story in any conventional sense) in modern times, ie. Italy 1976.
I trust the newly reopened investigation into the murder will make this clear.
NV: Interesting that Barthes repudiates the film, since he wrote parts of it. Also, Buñuel not just recreated a scene from Justine, he referred to 120 Days of Sodom in L’Age d’Or, equating one of the four friends in the novel to Christ – a breathtaking piece of blasphemy not Von Trier, nor Haneke, nor Noé has yet to dare try.
SS: David, your “plate of shit” works as a pretty deft translation of Barthes’ reference to Salò as a “‘Sadean’ object: absolutely irreclaimable”. It inextricably melds ‘desire’ together with the ‘repulsive’. The Sadean structure of this “plate of shit” is clear, just as it is clear that the larger public will not embrace it “for their delectation.” But I also think that this Sadean structure is incapable of exhausting the film. In fact, I think one of the main problems audiences have is their tendency to see the film wholly in terms of Sade. (There are also problems with the claim that one must be literate in Sade to understand Salò. Does this mean we can only see Pasolini’s film properly if we can read French? And the problem of basing our understanding of Salò on what we believe is the meaning of Sade’s unfinished text becomes even more problematical. In this regard, we should also be aware that our understanding of the sexual relationships in The 120 Days is likely to be contaminated by Krafft-Ebing’s creation and conceptualization of the term ‘Sadism’. In fact, claiming that Sade “should be read first”, as Noel puts it, is like saying you’ve got to be Jewish before you can understand what it’s like to be Christian. The most we can say is that understanding the difference between Sade’s text and Pasolini’s film can generate one way of understanding Salò.)
The Jewish/Christian metaphor isn’t that arbitrary: just as Christianity used Judaism as a base on which to build something totally new, so Pasolini builds on Sade’s foundation. Instead of trying to enter Salò exclusively through Sade’s sexuality, we could also try to enter it through Pasolini’s sexuality. I’m thinking of two things here. Firstly, Pasolini shows that politicized sexual relations that can be described in terms of the conceptual structure exploiter-exploited, controller-controlled, etc., are inhuman, corrupt. The implication is that the one condition for a truly human sexual relation is its lack of an oppressive hierarchical political structure. Secondly, one of the ramifications of Pasolini’s critique of large-scale political control surely has to be the political control of sexuality. It’s hard to believe that Pasolini, given his homosexuality, did not feel the arbitrary hand of an oppressive power in society’s insistence that heterosexuality was the one condition for a truly human sexual relation.
NV: On reading text and watching films – I’d agree that watching the film without reading the book isn’t the only way to approach the film; however, I do believe it’s the most fruitful, the most promising. When you look at Sade’s text – obsessive, repetitive, in some parts actually dull, an extreme, uncompromising text in every way, it’s fascinating (perhaps somehow even distracting, if you like) to see what Pasolini adds or subtracts from it. To the shock of the extreme, Pasolini adds the shock of realism (a plausible scenario), and the shock of beauty (the lighting, colors, décor).
I’d also further qualify that “Judeo-Christian” metaphor. Where Christianity would undoubtedly claim that they’ve improved on Judaism, I’d disagree – if the transformation were such an unqualified success, why is Christianity accused of so many crimes, and why do so many Jews remain unconverted? The Christians have merely modified Christianity to suit their particular (even, from where the Jews are sitting, heretical) needs.
Likewise with 120 Days the film over 120 Days the book – it’s made compromises, reduced the text, changed it considerably, to become its own entity, in an entirely different medium, and it has paid a price in some ways (you lose some of that extremism, for one). It's not so much an improvement as an interpretation, albeit one remarkably faithful to its source.
Something else on which I wish to disagree with/qualify somewhat/develop further: I can see where you’re saying that Pasolini is trying to make the political point that sexuality under the shade of repression isn’t true sexuality (the metaphor carried further, life under the shade of repression isn't true living, either). I can certainly agree with the general outline – repression and in particular political repression is largely not fun – but I'm not sure everyone will agree that repression doesn't have some kind of heightening effect on sexuality. Erotic literature thrived under British culture in the Victorian age, and as a Filipino living in a Filipino society, where even the suggestion of a woman having had more than one lover, or a lover that isn’t her husband, is still shocking, repression, in this case social repression, does have the effect of spicing up one’s sense of the erotic – adding a sense of the forbidden to one’s sexual activities. Add to that the possibility that the repressed or the dominated or even the victims of sexual acts might at times collaborate, seek out, even enjoy the various acts of sexual domination/repression/violation describe by Sade (and Sade, as we’ve noted so many times here, is nothing if not comprehensive), and the picture may be more complex, or even more perverse than you might initially suggest.
DE: But then hasn’t Pasolini always wondered what “true sexuality” consists of? His relationships were invariably with men outside of his class, age-range and intellectual authority. Yet he never really sentimentalized this situation – though Gary Indiana in his otherwise excellent book on Salò accuses of precisely that with Ninetto Davoli. Of course Indiana also makes clear that Ninetto isn’t his type and therefore he’s out of sympathy with Pasolini from the start. However Indiana goes too far in his assumption of romantic despair on Pasolini’s part in the wake of Ninetto getting married and starting a family. Pasolini’s poetry makes clear that he knew this was in the cards. And to a large degree “Fiori di campo” in which God kills Ninetto, quite arbitrarily, is Pasolini’s way of dealing with this. Moreover their relationship, while no longer sexual, never ended. Ninetto was the last close friend to see Pasolini alive. They had had dinner the evening of the murder. Over and above all, Ninetto doesn’t appear in Salò. Pasolini would have had been forced to cast him as either a victim or an executioner, and he couldn’t bear that. Indiana tries to make the case that one of the actors looks like Ninetto to some degree and is therefore a stand-in. But it won’t wash.
SS: This one’s for Noel: in Salò sex ain’t just “under the shade of repression”. On the one hand, we have sexual relations that are structurally fascist; on the other, we have a critique of all political power that I think in Pasolini must, (though this is rarely?/never? mentioned), implies a critique of the use of any society’s political power to control sexuality. And this control is not simply material, (i.e. through laws, courts, police), it’s ideological. It’s the sort of oppression, to paraphrase Pasolini, that ‘steals your soul from you’, (i.e. there’s no opening for heightened eroticism here). It consists in the god-like role that society appropriates for itself when it presumes to define the true nature of things. In relation to society’s control of sexuality it consists of equating ‘heterosexuality’ with ‘natural’/‘normal’/‘healthy’/‘good’/etc and ‘homosexuality’ with ‘unnatural’/‘abnormal’/‘unhealthy’/‘evil’/etc.
This one’s for David: if “Pasolini always wondered what ‘true sexuality’” was, then I think we have to ask how this helps us to understand Salò. At the beginning of this session you pointed out that Pasolini isn’t recreating his own sexual fantasies in Salò, but is staging Sade’s sexual fantasies. Why? Pasolini’s own answer is that the fascist nature of Sade’s sexual relations allows them to function as a metaphor of power. But the moment he uses these sexual relations as a lens to help us see the true nature of power they go beyond what Sade intended and, in fact, take on a decidedly un-Sadean moral dimension, (and I don’t mean that Pasolini makes moral judgments on Sade’s material, because he doesn’t – the moral dimension I’m referring to is implied in the structure of Pasolini’s metaphor). But there’s something else behind Pasolini’s faithful re-presentation of Sade’s orgies. The shocking realism of these orgies, (which you both pointed out earlier), is, I think, designed to be ‘unwatchable’. This brings us back to the idea of Salò as an “impossible film”: we watch what we can’t watch, and the result is that it repels us. But in what direction? We can endure these scenes more easily when we are aware that they are functioning like a window or mirror that we look through or beyond to see something else, (in this case ‘power’). But Pasolini’s realism continually undermines this allegorical function and forces us to see unwatchable sexual humiliations which repel us in a direction that may lead us to wonder what a true human sexual relation might be.
DE: A lot of this stems form what can only be called Pasolini's disappointment with his success in “The Trilogy of Life.” Clearly he wanted these films to be something more than “sexy movies.” But that’s the level on which they were consumed, world-wide. Inevitably this led him to contemplate what it would be like to make a film that isn't consumed so easily. And Salò is most definitely that film
In his “repudiation” of the trilogy Pasolini writes “the progressive struggle for sexual expression and for sexual liberation has been brutally superceded and cancelled out by the decision of consumerist power to grant a tolerance as vast as it is false.” He goes on to say “private sexual lives (like my own) have suffered the trauma both of false tolerance and of physical degredation, and what in sexual fantasies was pain and joy has become suicidal disappointment, shapeless torpor.”
Clearly Salò is about torpor – but it has a definite shape. “Suicidal disappointment” has of course been seized upon by Pasolini's enemies – even though he was referring to a class of gay as a whole, not just himself. That class has in fact embraced a consumerist plan of “tolerance” accompanied by the illusion of “privacy” – something Pasolini, who never in his life was granted any should have known better than to invoke.
NV: Just to add to my previous comment: Of course, I must admit that Sade doesn't depict that kind of psychology in 120 Days that, in fact, he doesn’t depict much psychology at all; at most, we have the philosophy justifying the four friends’ acts explicitly laid out, though what actually goes on in their heads is ignored in favor of what they actually say or do. For a more thorough exploration of the nature of sado-masochistic relationships, I'd say Dominique Aury’s (a.k.a.) Pauline Reage’s The Story of O, written in the more sophisticated, post-Freudian 1950’s is a better bet – it shows that there’s a dynamic between the dominator and the dominated, that one is every bit in need of and wields power over the other, whatever their ostensible role might be. Interesting to further note that the film that best captures O’s spirit and sense of danger for me isn’t Just Jaeckin's soft-core porn adaptation, but a Filipino film: Init Sa Magdamag (Midnight Passion, 1983) – written, interestingly enough, by a woman (Racquel Villavicencio), directed by a woman (Laurice Guillen) and starring a woman (Lorna Tolentino), perhaps the finest erotic film ever made in the Philippines. Women, it seems have a knack for understanding the subtleties of power relationships.
Saul, I definitely don’t disagree that apparently part of the reason Pasolini transposed the story from France in Sade’s time to Italy under the Fascists is to make a connection between political and sexual repression – that sexuality is yet another field of human activity that the Fascists, among others, have sought to control. But just look at the film: the will and freedom of everyone in that chateau is circumscribed and manipulated to exact specifications; everyone is under strict and comprehensive control…except for the very four “protagonists” (I use that word for want of a better one) that instigated the whole orgy in the first place. It’s their will that's being done, their sexuality that’s being fulfilled, and, evidently, their sense of the erotic that's being heightened to the nth degree. If you want to talk about repression of freedom or rights, you can't include their freedom, and their rights.
But to extend that thought further – you’ve got around sixteen prisoners (plus the wives, who are practically prisoners), and four masters: surely sixteen youths and four grown women can escape from four decrepit old degenerates? They don’t, of course, and that’s because the four are helped by a number of servants, chaperones, guards, what have you, who also participate in their own way. So the whole thing really works if the victims are a numeric minority and the four friends and their collaborators are the majority…meaning more peoples’ sexualities are involved, and not in a repressed or victimized capacity.
As for the victims…I’ve mentioned the psychology behind victims and the dominated, and The Story of O. It might not be the case for every one of the prisoners, but I submit that it could be the case for some of the prisoners, some of the times.
I do think it would be more accurate, or perhaps more useful to say that Pasolini presents to us the eroticism, the sensual pleasures of absolute power as it might have been possible under the Fascist regime: that what we’re seeing is a tidal pull exerted on the will of almost everyone in a country – or in this case, a chateau – to fulfill the wishes of a minor but powerful few. I’d try go ahead and tie in what David is saying: that the kind of torpor, that kind of disappointment (and in fact, two of the four friends have difficulty achieving erections, or orgasm) Pasolini describes is what gave rise to this kind of hunger for power, and the need to exercise it just so. What Pasolini channeling Sade is saying is that the flip side of Sade’s sexual sadism is sexual impotence, and the flip side of desire in Sade’s mind is boredom with conventional sexuality – that boredom and impotence, and not sexual orientation, are what truly drive destructive or extreme sexuality.
DE: And what enrages the four friends the most is any expression of genuine sexual tenderness. For them sexuality and brutality are one and the same. Remember how Pasolini ends his film – with the two boys dancing, a moment of tenderness that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Bresson movie. No irony is intended either. Consequently we’re left to wonder what will become of these boys. A fair question.
SS: In my own mind this question tends to take the form: why did Pasolini choose a final moment of tenderness for Salò? A more interesting incarnation of the same question might be: why, in a film in which all music is diegetic, does Pasolini let us hear the same music in this final scene as he lets us hear playing over the opening credits? This piece of music closes a circle, and locks a moment of tenderness (?) into the structure of despair.
NV: That’s true, tenderness was a serious crime for them, any expression of love in fact, and they dealt with it quickly and cruelly. Perhaps the most electric moment for me was when the young girl – Pasolini picked the freshest, most innocent face possible, something Sade might have done, and which the four friends had already done at the start of the film – and had her sit on the floor, weeping at the thought of her dead mother. The four friends were dumbfounded: this was the most flagrant defiance of their rules that they had yet seen. Her punishment, of course, befitted her crime – if love came out of her mouth, the exact opposite will be fed into it.
DE: Interesting too that Indiana mistakes that piece of music for These Foolish Things. The tune Pasolini chose (with the help of Ennio Morricone as usual) sounds a bit like These Foolish Things, but isn’t. I'm sure it’s a tune Pasolini recalled from the period. It denotes a sense of casual calm before the storm of grotesque torture to follow. Calm returns at the end as the boys dance. But can no longer accept this image at face value as we might have had it opened “Salò” rather than closed it.
SS: The first image of a film is always difficult to construe. A film begins at the point that we first become aware of what is happening. In Salò this point might come when we see the boys being rounded up and notice the dead body lying in the middle of a large courtyard, or it might not come till the libertines read out their Laws. But wherever the beginning begins it has Dante’s words branded into it: “lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate” (abandon all hope, you who enter).
NV: Going back (or circling back, if you like) to tenderness and love and their violent reaction to it, I suspect a vital clue as to why this may be can be found in the Laws read out by the four libertines: at one point they say the utterance of the word “God” will be punished by the worst penalties. Expressing love and/or tenderness would have been tantamount to expressing God (in Christian and many other religions one is the equivalent of the other), and the libertines would not tolerate the mention of one whose powers they have decided to usurp.
DE: But what cannot be tolerated in the world of Salò is not God but the People. No “solidarity.” No thought of the pain and suffering of another person – save to enjoy said pain and suffering. No “revolution.” What disturbs Pasolini is his own doubts concerning “the People” and his disbelief that “Revolution” was truly possible.
SS: I wonder if I wasn’t mistaken all along. Has Pasolini simply mislead us with all this talk about politics? The chateau is a Dantesque Hell – the inversion of every value. Why did he want to create this cinematic inferno? Barthes tells us he made two mistakes – two and not three, two and not one – he is quite precise. But unless Barthes has certain knowledge of what Pasolini wished to achieve with this film, then he has no measure by which to judge its success or failure. And Barthes is characteristically silent on this point. Did Pasolini really make Salò to critique political power? As a metaphor of power Salò really doesn’t tell us anything exceptional. On this level, it’s all very ordinary. As an inferno, however, it is deeply convincing. I am beginning to suspect that Pasolini’s ‘fascination’ with this inferno may be personal in a way we have not yet articulated.
NV: Now this is interesting – I think it's pretty clear to Sade that it’s God his four heroes (for want of a better term) are proscribing, and I believe David's right in that Pasolini has probably imposed on his adaptation the idea that it’s the People they’re trying to banish from their chateau, and all this naturally has Saul confused, or at least in doubt. God or the People? Sade or Pasolini? Whose vision, and whose interpretation, prevails? Saul, if I interpret your last comment correctly, feels it’s possibly Sade; I think it’s an interesting dynamic between the two viewpoints that leaves the film in an ambivalent state – not so much confused as constantly changing, struggling, in a state of flux.
SS: Gideon Bachmann noted (in the 70’s) that “where de Sade attacks God and Nature, Pasolini attacks power and exploitation”. Nothing confusing about that. I meant what I said: “Pasolini’s ‘fascination’ with this inferno may be personal in a way we have not yet articulated,” (that is, in a way that is neither political nor Sadean)
DE: Let us not forget that Pasolini had post-Salò plans. He was going to make a film about the Apostle Paul set in contemporary New York – which he visited in the 60’s and where I had the great pleasure of meeting him. We had a serious conversation about art and politics – after which Pasolini went on to explore the not inconsiderable pleasures the city had to offer a gay man at that time.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
© Copyright David Ehrenstein, Saul Symonds and Noel Vera 2006. No part of this article
may be reprinted without permission of the authors.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
