Tuesday, March 19, 2013

The Salóbsession: A Commentary

Saló or the 120 Days of Sodom

1975:  Italy
Director:  Pier Paolo Pasolini
Producers:  Albert Grimaldi
Screenplay:  Pier Paolo Pasolini & Sergio Citti (screenplay collaborator), Pupi Avati (uncredited), Marquis de Sade (novel Les 120 Journées de Sodome, uncredited)
Cinematography:  Tonino Delli Colli
Music:  Ennio Morricone
Editor:  Nino Baragli, Tatiana Casini Morigi, & Enzo Ocone
Running Time:  116 minutes

Cast:  Paolo Bonacelli (The Duke), Giorgio Cataldi (The Bishop), Umberto Paolo Quintavalle (The Magistrate), Aldo Valletti (The President), Caterina Boratto (Signora Castelli), Elsa De Giorgi (Signora Maggi), Hélène Surgère (Signora Vaccari), Sonia Saviange (The Pianist), Sergio Fascetti (Male Victim), Franco Merli (Male Victim), Renata Moar (Female Victim)



It’s hard for a person to write a review of Saló or the 120 Days of Sodom, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s disturbing piece of polemical exploitation, without flexing his or her vocabulary.  Thanks to the numerous Saló reviews online, I've added to quotidian, hegemonic, and, well, polemical to my own lexicon (not to mention lexicon).

I first stumbled across Saló in 1994, the year modern American culture received a quadruple whammy: the deaths of Bill Hicks (Feb. 26), Charles Bukowski (Mar. 9), and Kurt Cobain (Apr. 5), and the birth of Justin Bieber (Mar. 1).  In late March, I was sitting in my apartment in Emporia, Kansas, when I received in the mail a book entitled Cut! Horror Writers On Horror Film, ed. Christopher Golden (© 1992 Berkley Books, New York).  The book was sent by my best friend, who informed me in a note that he had purchased it as a Christmas gift the previous December but never got around to sending it.  He then directed my attention to an essay entitled “Disturbo 13: The Most Disturbing Horror Films Ever Made” by Stanley Wiater, then contributing editor to Fangoria.  My friend noted that he himself had seen seven of the 13 films listed, thus piquing my curiosity, so I cracked open the book to page 256, chapter 22, the essay that would change my life forever.

Although the movies were not ranked in any order, #1 on the list of “Disturbo 13” (and in light of where horror and exploitation has gone since ’94, I think we can safely say that this list is now a bit tame) was Pasolini’s infamous Saló.  Wiater had this to say about it: 

Saló, The 120 Days of Sodom (1977).  The last film from controversial Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, Saló is a well-mounted adaptation of the infamous work by the Marquis de Sade.  Updated to World War II when the Fascists have overtaken Italy, this move is almost unwatchable because it makes a heartfelt attempt to be as disgusting cinematically as de Sade (the man who gave sadism its very name) was in print.
The plot line has a group of adolescents being used as human fodder to satisfy the perverted desires of a band of Fascists who have occupied a castle in war-torn Italy.  The Fascists are also using the spoken memoirs of several prostitutes to ignite their already sick imaginations--as they endeavor to carry out the most perverse scenarios the human mind can devise.
What Pasolini supposedly was attempting to do here was concoct a parallel between the depravity of de Sade with the depravity of the Fascist state which was Italy in World War II.  However, Pasolini seems to relish staging the obscene tableaus in all their loathsomeness far more than condemning them.  Beyond the numerous rapes (both heterosexual and homosexual) and sexual perversions, we are shown extremely realistic scenes of young people being forced to dine on a meal of cooked shit, people urinating or shitting on one another, or choking on broken glass hidden in apparently edible food. 

Whatever his moral intentions may have been, Pasolini wallows so deeply in the filth that it's impossible to do anything but have an automatic gag reflex to the entire motion picture. 
Comic writers have a name for it--the smash cut.  This is ubiquitous moment in any recycled comedy where someone maintains with absolute certainty that they are not going to do something, only to be seen in that very next scene doing it (example: Gilligan’s assertion that “I’m not going to dress up like a girl,” only to cut to the very next shot of Gilligan in full drag).  This moment never fails to elicit a chuckle, even though audiences have witnessed it hundreds of times and can see it coming from miles away.

My smash cut begins with me reading the essay in March 1994 and muttering, “This film sounds disgusting.  I will never, ever watch it.”  

Comic smash cut six years to August 2001, and there I am, sitting in my tiny apartment in Hermosa Beach, watching Saló with my best friend.  

Comic smash cut another two years to June 2003, and there I am in the Egyptian on Hollywood Blvd., checking out a special double feature of Pasolini’s The Canterbury Tales and Saló.  

Comic smash cut another five years to October 2008, and there I am, cashing in $40 worth of change I had been collecting in an old Danish cookie tin (the cookies, a Christmas gift, long since devoured) so I can purchase the Criterion DVD of Saló.  Suffice to say, my life has never been the same.

In between those smash cuts, a number of things happened. 

In June of 1999, while browsing at the Los Angeles County Public Library, I stumbled across an entire shelf devoted to Pasolini.  All of the usual academic suspects were there: Naomi Greene, Sam Rodhi, Barth Roland Schwartz, Enzo Siciliano, et al., authors of scholarly tomes about the greatness that is Pier Paolo.  Prior to that moment, the only time I had seen the name of Pasolini was sitting in my tiny apartment in Emporia, Kansas, reading the above description of Saló by Stanley Wiater.  It was my assumption at the time that Pasolini was an exploitation director, someone fascinated by scat pornography, and I had no intention of taking him seriously.  Only upon seeing so many books dedicated to the man did I open myself to the possibility that he might be something more.

Pasolini was a dissident.  He was a Marxist.  He was an atheist.  He was a homosexual.  Not surprising, then, that I had never heard of him, having grown up in a small Kansas town with a population of roughly 10,000.  In simplistic redneck terms, Pasolini was a “godless Commie fag,” and his films would never be shown in my neck of the woods, not even at the art cinema in nearby Wichita.  For all intents and purposes, Pasolini was well outside my reticular activating system until the spring of 1994.

It is hard to say why I became obsessed with Pasolini.  Perhaps it was because upon perusing the volumes of printed word dedicated to him, I realize he had a particular vision from which I had been sequestered most of my life.  Rebellious and headstrong as I am, the idea of censorship always disturbed me, and yet most of the world was censored from me when I was a child.  I love the Kansas town where I was raised and always think of it fondly, but in hindsight, I was a bit like Chance (Peter Sellers) in Being There, the simple-minded gardener who spends most of his life sequestered in the Washington D.C. townhouse of his wealthy employer.  When his benefactor dies, Chance, now middle aged, is forced to go out into the world, his only knowledge coming from his insights into gardening and what passes for information on the television.  Is it any wonder that when I went off to college in Emporia, another small college town, it was, as I say in the afterward of my novel Pitch, as if I had “died and gone to Paris”? 

Shandean Digression: While in college in Emporia, my best friend discovered quite by accident the shooting script for Lindsay Anderson’s surreal masterpiece If…in the William Allen White Library.  After reading and rereading the script, he one day discovered that it was to be broadcast on USA Network, with commercials, of course, and the more objectionable scenes excised.  He recorded If…on VHS, and we watched it together several times, both of us unsettled by the incompleteness of this truncated version.  At last, we pooled our cash and ordered a VHS copy of If…from the local video store, and one fine Saturday afternoon we watched it uncut for the very first time.  It was wonderful.  Not only is If…an amazing film, but to see its forbidden scenes play out for the first time was like being a couple of kids taking a peek into the pages of Playboy.  When it was over, we watched it again, almost defiantly, each of us silently cursing a culture that forbade us to see such intriguing cinematic moments as the cold shower punishment and the haunting black-and-white sequence in which Mrs. Kemp wanders naked through the dorms. 

Yeah, Saló was kind of like that.  It was a film that the red state culture of Kansas had prevented me from seeing, had even gone so far as to hide its very existence--not to mention the existence of its prolific and controversial director--from my sight.  Imagine then, when I as a young man rediscovered Saló while reading the Pasolini papers in Los Angeles County Public Library. 

It took me two more years until I saw Saló.  Although I was in Los Angeles, mecca for film buffs and liberal thinkers alike, it was impossible to conveniently find a copy of the film.  A video store in Santa Barbara called Vidiots had a copy, as did Video-A-Go-Go in Silverlake, but both stores, and others, required hefty deposits before I could remove the coveted Saló from the premises.  The film was out of print, so copies of it were rare and quite expensive.  Rumors abounded that this was due to its unsettling content, but the truth had more to do with the actual rights of distribution, a battle that raged between a handful of companies--not to mention Pasolini’s estate--for years. 

The manner in which I finally viewed Saló is a testament to the nature of a film geek.  When discussing the film over the phone with my best friend (the same one who had discovered the shooting script of If… in a library in Emporia, Kansas), he remembered that he had once seen a copy of Saló in Liberty Hall in Lawrence, Kansas, while visiting his brother one summer.  A few weeks later, when his wife was out of town, he drove his kids over to stay with their grandparents, loaded up his two VHS players, some RCA cables, and a clean VHS tape, and drove the 100 or so miles to Lawrence for the afternoon.  Using his brother’s Liberty Hall rental card, he checked out Saló, then hooked up both VHS players and made a bootleg print.  A month later, he flew out to Los Angeles to visit me, bringing his second generation copy of Saló with him.

You probably wonder what I thought of Saló?  I really don’t care to discuss it.  Yes, I went on to watch Saló numerous times, even paying to see a “remastered” celluloid print at the Egyptian in 2003, and when the film was finally released on DVD by Criterion in 2008, I purchased myself a copy (ironically in Kansas, not California).  One would think that I love this film, that I place it at the top of some list of subjective favorites.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Someone once wrote that Saló occupies a place where cinema meets death.  For me, Saló is a personal Mendoza line.  It is not a mediocre film, not by any means, but just as the Mendoza’s .200 batting average in baseball has come to define the threshold of incompetent hitting, so has Saló come to define a similar cienematic threshold.  It is a powerful and important film, but by virtue of its disgusting imagery and cold, antiseptic style, I cannot say it is enjoyable, certainly not worthy of placement in any of my top lists.  At the same time, because of its historical and political substance, not to mention the timeliness of its thesis, it cannot, in my eyes, be deemed a bad film.  Neither good nor bad, but never pedestrian, it is celluloid’s .200 batting average, the touchstone against which all other films are measured.  When evaluating a film, the first question I ask is, “Was it better or worse than Saló?”  After that, my scales are divided, the Manos the Hands-of-Fate-to-Saló list on the bottom end, and the Saló-to-whichever-film-is-my-Citizen-Kane-du-jour (currently La Dolce Vita) on the top end.

Today I own Saló on DVD, not because I like it, not because I want to savor it through successive viewings, but because I can.  As of this moment, America is the land of the free and the home of the cinephile.  Until a law is passed that forbids me to own Saló, I shall cling to it as a testament to my persistence and personal liberty as an aficionado.  Of course, if anti-Saló laws are ever passed, I shall relinquish my copy willingly.  Hey, I may stand on principle, but come on, people!  It’s a movie where people eat shit!  Is it really worth fighting for the freedom to own a high-def, digitally remastered print of that?




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