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Chris Kelvin Profile
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Pasolini's Salo


Dear Questers,

I have seen « Salo » a few weeks ago and I was really repulsed by it (especially the !@#$-eating part). Although after reading some of de Sade’s writings I understand what Pasolini was trying to do. « Salo » is the complete opposite of the deeply moving spiritual « The Gospel According to St. Matthew ». I was wondering what your views are towards this film (especially because it is made by Pasolini) ?

Chris.


Censorship is a fuckshitshitfuckdick. (the first one who guesses this censored word wins 20 dollars)
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Last edited by Chris Kelvin, 7/8/2004, 8:37 am
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questers Profile
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Re: Pasolini's Salo


Yes, it really is hard to believe that the same man made both "Salo" and "The Gospel According to St. Matthew". But then Pasolini's whole life seems to us to have been one determined movement towards self-destruction. For us the film reads as the condemnation of our entire civilization - the poor as well as the rich, the cultured and the uncultured. Perhaps the most shocking thing in the film is not all the horrors of depravity, but the "civilized" and "refined" manner in which they are carried out. Depravity is refined and cultivated to the point of "art" until the final sequence, when its mask is finally dropped. As we recall, Pasolini himself described the film as a beautiful wrapping for the horrible content within. He was, no doubt, aware of the practice of some of the Nazi commandants, who tortured and murdered Jews in the concentration camps while listening to Mozart.

The best part of the film is the closing conversation between the two young guards (recruited from the same ranks as the working-class victims they helped to torture and murder). It's very brief: while dancing a foxtrot together, one young man asks the other the name of his sweetheart and the other one gives her name. That's how the film ends - abruptly and perplexingly. For us, this is a phenomenal way to end the film, which can arguably be called the most repulsive vision of humanity ever captured on film. After all that depravity, in which these two young men have participated, they can talk of a "sweetheart" that they left on the outside! For us, it's an illustration that some part within them could not be touched, could not be soiled, despite everything they've been through. It remained pure and innocent and untouched, like the first breath of Spring. This impression is further reinforced by what Pasolini put on the soundtrack right before this conversation: it is music from Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana" and it is the sequence set to the words of the third movement, "The Merry Face of Spring:"
 
quote:

The merry face of spring
turns to the world,
sharp winter
now flees, vanquished;
bedecked in various colours
Flora reigns,
the harmony of the woods
praises her in song. Ah!



This music actually starts in the final third of the infamous "torture garden" sequence that serves as the coda for the film. As each one of the principle male characters takes turns viewing the depravity from a throne-like position set well above the proceedings, one receives the chilling realization that man has now become his own god, complete with his own rules and laws, which have nothing any longer to do with the Will of his Creator. Orff's music, which embodied the Nazi philosophy for a new mankind, is used here not ironically but to counterpoint the ultimate elevation of evil unfolding before our eyes. This brings to mind the following chilling words from Nietzsche's "The Anti-Christ":

quote:

"What is good?--Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.
What is evil?--Whatever springs from weakness.
What is happiness?--The feeling that power increases--that resistance is overcome.
Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, virtue free of moral acid).
The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it."



If things had gone right and our civilization had not developed itself in the twisted way that it has, this film would never have been made, could never have been made.

Our overview of Pasolini's life is, of course, on the site http://www.cinemaseekers.com/pasolini.html






Last edited by questers, 7/3/2004, 5:00 am
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MarkNA Profile
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Re: Pasolini's Salo


Viewing The Gospel According To St Matthew gives me a strong uplifting sense of the Message of Christ. It has a powerful spiritual message in itself not hindered by trivialities from His life that you usually see. It bothers me that the director was also responsible for Salo...

It is very sad that Passolini was unable to make use of the blessing that "The Gospel.." would have surely brought him and of the message of Christ in its true significance to uplift himself.
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JLGJLG Profile
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posticon Re: Pasolini's Salo


Pasolini's Salo is a film about transformation. It starts off as a simple neo-realist film about the final days of Fascism in Italy. It then changes into an erotic fairy tale en route to a nightmare in hell. The kidnapped children are the slaughtered innocent. Through these concepts and images Pasolini attempts, successfully, to implicate the inherent hypcrisy in fascism.

It is also a great film. It shows the storytelling possiblities of cinema. The courtesans are gilded, covered in sparkling evening dresses while they recount they're stories of debauchery. The scenes are built like tableau vivants - the stories create the character. Pasolini creates a strange cinematic world. Using old Italian and French movie queens - he makes you look for the beauty. He makes the viewer work to see the beauty in Salo. There is beauty in the grotesque. There is beauty in what we don't want to see. I think Pasolini's characters are living with emotions they cannot understand.
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Jago Turner Profile
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Re: Pasolini's Salo


Salo is not for everyone and nobody who feels it's going to upset them unduly should watch.

I've heard it described, by those who dislike it as: amateurish, pornographic, boring, attempting to shock, and a whole variety of other slurs.

For me it is an essential film. It's one of the few I force myself to watch at least once a year.

Mainly because I think it perfectly illustrates the nature of spiritual void.

De Sade is an author more talked about than read. 120 Days of Sodom is an unreadable book. It's a catalogue of atrocity. And yet within De Sade we see the very echo of our own age. Every nasty human urge that's exploited by the media is there. The attempt to find satiation until nothing but the worst extremes of human behaviour seem as unaffecting as a walk in the park is there. From the feeble passivity of victims to the unquenchable thirst for something more of the oppressors we should recognise ourselves in these characters. They are us. We may be revolted by what they do but our society is so close to this now.

Reality television shows in which millions tune in to see victims buried with rats or eating insects within the context of a society where eating insects is almost as taboo as eating filth. We are there already.

As enlightened as I'm sure most of the people reading this site are we cannot turn our backs on what has happened to our society in leisure. Obviously in reality television consent is given but throughout the world the events of Salo are committed on an almost daily basis.

When I watch Salo it does bring me down a little but after a while my spirit is always raised. Pasolini isn't judging these people. It's very matter of fact. These things happen. It's up to us, as an audience, to react.

A more politically correct Hollywood director would never be so bold. We would not be trusted to have a genuine response without a sentimental or horror score underpinning every incident. But then a Hollywood director would never dare to make a film which forced an audience to face the worst of humanity without a nice tidy moral conclusion to hang on to.

This is a brave masterpiece. It may not be as strikingly and movingly spiritual as Matthew or as witty and humanist as Accatone but then he wasn't offering humanity a slap on the back. The film is a dark and prescient mirror.

And if we think that this is only about Fascism then we're really seeing the mote in our neighbour's eye while missing the beam in our own.
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