SALÒ, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM

Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975

Starring: Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi, Umberto Paolo, Quintavalle, Aldo Valletti, Caterina Boratto

“Sade had to make up his theater of punishment and delight from scratch, improvising the decor and costumes and blasphemous rites. Now there is a master scenario available to everyone. The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.”

-Susan Sontag, Fascinating Fascism

In 1975 Pier Paolo Pasolini executed the final blow of his long career as an artist, intellectual, journalist, philosopher, poet, and filmmaker before himself being brutally murdered: Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma. Twenty-five years later, Saló remains one of the most loathed, banned, and unwatched films in history. A loose adaptation of the Marquis de Sade’s seemingly unadaptable eighteenth century novel Les 120 journées de Sodome, Salò is set in a fictionalized fascist Italy, in a version of Mussolini’s Republic of Saló populated by libertines and Nazis, clouded by an unmistakable aura of the Holocaust. Immediately following his bawdy, erotic Trilogy of Life, Salò is the first film in an intended, but uncompleted Trilogy of Death. While Pasolini’s three previous films, The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and A Thousand and One Nights, are all celebrations of life and sexuality, Salò utterly and bitterly rejects these themes. 

In Salò, four wealthy libertines (a bishop, president, duke, and judge) kidnap a group of teenage girls and boys and bring them to a picturesque, isolated villa to live out the rest of their days with violence, depravity, and torture. They are accompanied by equally sadistic guards a small group of aged prostitutes who spice up the events with depraved stories from their careers. The cycle continues until the libertines murder the remaining boys and girls in a gruesome, disgusting finale.

Though the most important, it is not the first or last film of its decade to explore themes of Nazism and fascism in conjunction with erotica. The first of these, Love Camp 7, and its more famous cousin, Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, spawned ten years of mainly Italian produced Nazi-themed exploitation films and pornography that polluted the European grindhouse market. In some ways, Salò is a response to these films. While it is intellectually and artistically superior, it also outweighs its rivals by containing more horror and nastiness than any other Italian film of the decade. Salò rose above the squalor through technical brilliance and theoretical postulating, which its contemporaries and descendants lack. Though Salò both borrows from and influences the disreputable genre of Nazi exploitation, its inherent intellectualism and powerful anti-eroticism set it widely apart. Unlike other exploitation films or Pasolini’s earlier works, Saló allows for no release or resolution, whether physical or narrative. Amid a faded, detested sub-genre (and related pornographic films), it stands as a cinematic howl of rage and anguish that is “as glacial and opaque as marble, as pure and cutting as diamond” (Marcel Martin, July 1976).

In early April of 1961 began one of the most infamous civilian trials in Western history: SS-Obersturmbahnführer (roughly equivalent to Lieutenant Colonel) Adolf Eichmann, the individual responsible for the deportation of millions of Jews and political prisoners to ghettos and concentration camps. After almost fifteen years since the liberation of the camps, the bubble of silence that had settled around the subject of the Holocaust burst. With hundreds of new testimonies and evidence exhibits, death camps were back in the news and, soon after, found their way into entertainment periodicals. Oddly beginning in Israel, a series of pornographic pulp novels known as stalag fiction birthed the Nazi exploitation genre. (Stalag is the German abbreviation for prisoner of war camps, called stammlager.) These are commonly depicted in post-WWII film and fiction, most famously in The Great Escape and Hogan’s Heroes. The most famous stalag fiction, I Was Colonel Schultz’s Private Bitch, is a classical example of the genre: sexually aggressive, female SS officers brutalize camp prisoners until the prisoners eventually revolt, in turn raping and torturing their buxom captors. Soon banned for its pornographic and morally offensive content, the genre relocated halfway across the world to the pulp novels of Italy. Known as gialli, they began as cheap mystery and crime fiction and rose in popularity in the late ‘20s. They eventually became more violent and sexual in nature, until they bled over into the film market with Mario Bava’s seminal La ragazza che sappeva troppo (1963), which created a popular and prolific film genre of its own.

Due to temporarily relaxed censorship and a boom in the European film market, the exploitation genre grew by leaps and bounds. As a result, producers constantly sought new material to push the bounds of decency, eroticism and violence. European cinema in the late '60s and early '70s, beginning primarily with Luchino Visconti’s The Damned, forged a link between Nazism, decadence, and sexual perversion, though this went back as far as some of Roberto Rossellini’s films of the late '40s, such as Germany Year Zero. The Damned depicts various fascist characters involved with transvestitism, child molestation, incest and a homosexual orgy. It was only a matter of time before these themes would attract the notice of the exploitation racket. In 1969 American sleaze producer Bob Cresse teamed up with exploitation director Lee Frost to create Love Camp 7, the first official entry in the Nazi exploitation genre and - with Jess Franco’s 99 Women from the same year - the first women in prison film. 

Two female British agents go undercover and infiltrate a Nazi camp to gain information and rescue a prisoner. They discover that the female prisoners are forced to serve as prostitutes for officers of the Reich and are tortured, humiliated and raped. In order to retrieve another prisoner from solitary confinement, one of the agents is forced to subject herself to extreme torture and punishment before they can stage their rescue mission, which results in a violent battle. In addition to soft-core sex, graphic torture and other violence, there is almost constant female frontal nudity. Though one of the first, Love Camp 7 is a fairly typical example of both the Nazi exploitation and the women in prison genre.

Unlike later women in prison films, which are based almost entirely in the realm of fantasy, early Nazi exploitation, Love Camp 7 and Salò included, take key elements from historical events. The medical experimentation depicted in films like Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1974) was heavily documented in the Nuremberg trials and includes such horrors as testing human aptitudes for poison, gas, explosives, malaria, sterilization, transplants, temperature and altitude. The atrocities committed by Doctors Wirths, Mengele, Heim and others have forever changed medical ethics and the research, though ghastly, has been used by government agencies. The sexual slavery in Love Camp 7, Ilsa, and Salò is also based in fact. Most famous were the Lagerbordell or military brothels; at the height of Nazi occupation in Europe there were allegedly over five-hundred of these across France and Eastern Europe. There were also camp brothels meant to reward compliant prisoners, usually prisoners of war or political enemies of the state. There is documented evidence of this at the Ravensbrück concentration camp, among others. Known as the Freudenabteilung, or Joy Division, women were forced into sexual slavery and raped, abused and frequently tortured to death to be replaced by women of neighboring camps. This is explored in House of Dolls, a controversial novel by Yehiel De-Nur or Prisoner Ka-tzetnik 135633, who survived Auschwitz and spent the remainder of his life writing novels that straddle the line between memoir and exploitation. More factually, it is documented in Memory of the Camps, a documentary produced by the British Ministry of Information. 

Though these factual elements are present in Nazi exploitation films, they are ultimately sexualized caricatures that cannot be placed inside an accurate historical context, which further problematizes an already troublesome genre. The powerful shadow of the Holocaust that falls over Salò is also filtered through this lens of fantasy and exploitation. Though Pasolini takes care to name and place Salò within the historical location of Mussolini’s Salò, these exploitation caricatures play a significant role in the visual and thematic context of the film. “Not only had Pasolini arrived at the conclusion that making sex the centerpiece of cinematic populism brings one closer to exploitation than to liberation, but he was also reacting to the exploitation of sex in the Nazi-porno films that were flooding the Italian market at that time. In Salò, the substitution of the Italian fascist establishment for the Nazi-porno caricatures of German war criminals became an important part of Pasolini’s cultural commentary” (Mira Liehm, Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present, 291).

Instead of responding to the trauma of the Holocaust or factual political fascism, Pasolini constructed his cinematic world around a visual language partly inherited from exploitation and erotica. Like his Trilogy of Life a few years before, Salò exploited and anticipated a new wave of sexual commodification. When Pasolini completed The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and Arabian Nights, directors and producers were pushing the ever widening envelope of taste, censorship, and acceptable visual representations of sexuality. With his trilogy, Pasolini was one of the first filmmakers to push mainstream and art cinema farther than it had previously been allowed to go in Italian film. As a result, a series of pornographic and exploitation films followed in its wake. Such titles as The Sexbury Tales, The Lusty Wives of Canterbury, The Other Canterbury Tales, Forbidden Decameron, Hot Nights of Decameron, and Decameron’s Sexy Kittens flooded the market (Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs, Immoral Tales, 32-34). Immediately after Saló’s completion and release, this trend was echoed with Nazi exploitation films. Tinto Brass’s Salon Kitty (1976), Luigi Batzella’s SS Hell Camp (1977), Cesare Canevari’s Last Orgy of the Third Reich (1977), and Alain Payet’s Hitler’s Lust Train (1977) are a few of the more well-known titles in a cycle of films that came to be known as il sadiconazista.

Salò, despite its connection to this disreputable genre, rose above its exploitative brethren as a true work of art. With an icy, intellectual beauty, it manipulates the commodification of fascism, or what Susan Sontag called the “master scenario.” In his study Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, Saul Friedländer described a “new discourse” of Nazism, one where the Third Reich is no longer a symbol of pervasive, all-corrupting evil. Instead, it exists with a contradictory, dual function. Partly it is the kitschy shadow of a horror that is no longer possible in the current social and economic climate, a once indescribable trauma that is now explained over and over again, pinned down by language. Conversely, it lingers as a recurrent psychological hold for “a particular kind of bondage nourished by the simultaneous desires for absolute submission and total freedom” (19).

I believe Pasolini was responding to this new interpretation of fascism. His recreation of Mussolini’s Salò, like any good fantasy, is replete with accurate details, but otherwise removed from factual historical context. What began as a fantasy was quickly dashed against the rocks of intellectualism by Pasolini. He destroyed any notion that we are simply viewing a catalog of perversions, monstrosities, or erotic curios. He is quick to ensure that Salò is, if not an intellectual exercise, at least steeped in a rich tradition of literary scholarship and philosophy. Astoundingly, we are given a bibliografia essenziale or reading list at the end of the opening credits. He lists Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Simone De Beauvoir, Pierre Klossowski, and Phillipe Sollers as his co-conspirators, giving book and article titles as well as specific published editions. Though this indicates some sort of explanation, warning or possible apology for what we are about to experience, it makes an undigestible film more difficult to process. The lengthy scenes to come are difficult enough without Pasolini's challenge for us to understand them in an isolated, intellectual context. 

Murder, suicide, ritual torture, and degradation are on the daily menu in the villa in Salò. There are a number of murders that punctuate the cyclical rhythm of the film, subverting and breaking the building loop of intensity that would otherwise end in climax, whether violent or sexual. In fact, the film begins with a murder that is cruel, casual, and separate from the libertines’ program of perversion and torture. It indicates to us, early on, the worth of human life and dramatic importance of extinguishing one: null. After the children are rounded up, introduced, and examined by the four libertines, they are shipped off to the villa at Salò in covered trucks. A young boy leaps out of the truck and escapes over the side of the road, running along the scenic riverside. The libertines laugh, barely notice, and joke about the number of boys in their possession. Once nine, now eight, like the fr”eight” in the trucks. The soldiers don’t bother to chase him, but stand at the overpass and shoot him with their machine guns until he falls down, riddled with bullets.

Salò’s complete disregard for death is one of its nastiest and most chilling elements. While the libertines will kill to punish, they really ascribe no value to human life. Even suicide, which Michel Foucault describes as having a certain power of its own, is also lost on them. "It is not surprising that suicide - once a crime, since it was a way to usurp the power of death which the sovereign alone, whether the one here or the Lord above, had the right to exercise - became, in the course of the nineteenth century, one of the first conducts to enter into the sphere of sociological analysis; it testified to the individual and private right to die, at the borders and in the interstices of power that was exercised over life" (Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, 138-139). However, the libertines give suicide — or death itself — no power of its own. No one is buried during the film and no funeral rites or rituals of mourning are enacted. Though there are a few characters who kill themselves in the course of the film, it is clear that this is not an act of freedom or liberation. It is a meaningless exercise that only serves to illustrate the valuelessness of human life in Salò.

Salò has an inherent, repeated denial of eroticism provides no release from its world of torment, humiliation, and ugliness. In his theoretical work, “The Cinema of Poetry,” Pasolini states that a director “chooses a series of objects, or things, or landscapes, or persons as syntagmas (signs of a symbolic language) which, while they have a grammatical history invented in that moment... do, however, have an already lengthy and intense pregrammatical history” (Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, 171). He purposefully chose a series of acts, both sexual and perverse, that have direct origin in de Sade and are explored in ’70s exploitation cinema. Through these, Pasolini intentionally and uncomfortably pushes us into new territory. The taboo, but familiar world of perverse sexuality is stripped of its eroticism, resulting in what critics have called the “funeral dirge” of eroticism or what Gilles Deleuze describes as a “theorem of death.” There is no escape from this inferno-like realm of torment. Saló never ends. It forces us to constantly relive past and present trauma without placing that trauma inside a historical framework. The specter of fascism is named, but never really exorcised as it is in other Nazi exploitation films of the era. Though the end of the film culminates in an orgy of violence, Pasolini simply focuses on the different libertines watching the scene through a window and binoculars, reminding us of our own voyeuristic complicity in the horror of sexual commodification.

One of the most important works of cinema, Salò is not something lightly recommended. It’s chock full of rape, torture, murder, coprophagia (shit eating for the uninitiated), and a further array of atrocities all captured with expert technical precision. If you are a cinephile and have not seen it, I think it deserves at least a single viewing. If you're a casual horror/exploitation fan, it could honestly go either way. Just know what you're getting yourself into. The Criterion Collection DVD is the only way to go.

Viva la muerte!

ARABIAN NIGHTS aka IL FIORE DELLE MILLE A UNA NOTTE

Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1974

Starring: Franco Merli, Ines Pellegrini, Ninetto Davoli, Franco Citti

Pasolini’s adaptation of the anonymous collection One Thousand and One Nights foregoes the popular framing story — Scheherazade telling her new husband the king story after story so that he doesn’t kill her — in favor of some of the more obscure stories about young lovers, murder, loss, and much more. As a framing story, Pasolini selected that of Zumurrud, a headstrong, beautiful young slave who choses her new owner, Nur Ed Din, a handsome young man. They fall in love, but are soon parted when Zumurrud is kidnapped. She escapes and finds her way to a far off kingdom, where they mistake her for a man and, thanks to a prophecy, crown her king. She is determined to use her new power to reunite with her lost love.

While it’s easy to see the Trilogy of Life as a ribald celebration of humanity and sexuality — and that’s certainly what I remembered it to be — it actually marks a somewhat obvious progression towards Pasolini’s notorious final film, Salò. While The Decameron is lighthearted and whimsical, it doesn’t shy away from humanity’s weaknesses, which it exposes without judgment. But The Canterbury Tales is steeped with images of death, torment, and the inherent faithless and unpredictable nature of romantic relationships. Arabian Nights, the actual title of of which translates to “The Flower of the Thousand and One Nights,” is the grimmest and most defeated of the three, though it is still spectacularly beautiful and full of the depictions of nudity and sexuality that marks the trilogy as a whole.

Arabian Nights, the slogan of which is “Truth lies not in one dream but in many,” is essentially an anthology of tales all about jealous and/or heartbroken lovers who are mourning the loss of their love objects. This is the only film of the trilogy in which Pasolini did not appear, but it is arguably his most autobiographical of the three. The story of Aziz and Aziza is particularly heart-rending. One of Pasolini’s regular actors, the sunny Ninetto Davoli, plays Aziz, who on the eve of his wedding to Aziza, falls in love with another woman. Though heartbroken, Aziza stands by him and gives him advice on how to woo the new young woman. When he eventually wins over the new love, Aziza kills herself. His new partner declares that he must build a marble temple to Aziza, but when he goes on a quest to make that happen, he falls in love with a third woman. He is eventually castrated for his troubles.

In a story that somewhat mirrors that of Aziz, Davoli, who met Pasolini when he was just a teenager, was the great love of the director’s life and the two lived together as a couple (and then as platonic companions) for many years. But in the early ‘70s, Davoli met the woman who would soon become his wife. Though he remained Pasolini’s close companion until his death, it is impossible to ignore this subtext of heartbreak and betrayal. I’ve never read any interview with Davoli that specifically address this role in terms of his relationship with Pasolini, but it must have been painful for actor and director alike.

The stories are far less humorous than the first two films of the series and the majority of the film’s characters have at least one scene where they shed tears and the violence is more extensive than in the rest of the trilogy. For example, Aziz is castrated and in another tale, Pasolini regulars Franco Citti stars as an improbably red-haired demon (with giant earrings) who hacks a female lover to pieces and then transports her boyfriend through the air and turns him into a chimpanzee. In another tale, a young man swims out of the sea and comforts a frighten child. The two quickly bond and frequently embrace, but then he stabs the boy in the back in the night, killing the child as he was prophesied to do.

Despite this, there are some whimsical elements and some humor. Thanks to Walerian Borowczyk’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne, I’m a little obsessed with cult films that feature use of a bow and arrow. Arabian Nights has not one, but two instances of someone shooting a golden bow and arrow. The first time, in the Aziz segment, is a real doozie where Aziz symbolically shoots a golden, penis-shaped arrow (!) into the woman he has fallen in love with as a symbol for their first sexual encounter.

The film is especially worth watching because it is one of the most beautiful in Pasolini’s output — though that’s not saying much, as most of them are visually spectacular — and Ennio Morricone yet again provided another wonderful score. Pasolini removed Arabian Nights from the Western studio set interpretations of Middle Eastern life so familiar to anyone who has seen either version of The Thief of Baghdad or even Disney’s animated Aladdin. Instead, he set the film in the villages, palaces, ancient temples, and deserts of the Middle East itself — a vision that spans three continents. Based everywhere from Iran and Yemen to India, Nepal, and Ethiopia, the extras are real-life locals, as was Pasolini’s custom, and the film represents an impressive breadth of landscape. For anyone who thinks that A Thousand and One Nights, the source material, is solely Arabian, it’s actually a collection of medieval stories from the Middle East and Asia, which I think Pasolini is alone in representing cinematically.

Of course Arabian Nights comes highly recommended, particularly the Criterion box set, which is one of their best recent releases. This is Pasolini at his most tender, romantic, and melancholic, and it’s particularly hurtful to know that this would be his second to last film before his death.

THE CANTERBURY TALES aka I RACCONTI DI CANTERBURY

Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1972

Starring: Franco Citti, Ninetto Davoli, Laura Betti, Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pasolini’s second film in his Trilogy of Life after The Decameron is this adaptation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s medieval poem, The Canterbury Tales, about English life in the Middle Ages. A group of pilgrims arrives in Canterbury. Among them is the poet, Chaucer (played by Pasolini himself), who writes down some of what he witnesses. The eight, often bawdy tales frequently focus on sex, infidelity, difficult marriages, and sin. For example, in the first tale, a recently married merchant is temporarily struck blind, allowing his younger wife to pursue an affair. In the second, the Devil has two licentious peasants killed in the Inquisition. In the third, a foolish man searches for employment and accidentally causes mayhem, and so on.

This is a fitting follow up to The Decameron and includes much of what made the first film so masterful, such as a subtle score from Ennio Morricone and stunning cinematography from Tonino Delli Colli, which focuses on the English countryside rather than a customary Italian landscape. Bright red costumes contrast with the green, blue, browns, and grays of the countryside and this film certainly retains the painterly feel of The Decameron. In general, this trilogy represents Pasolini at his most playful, colorful, and ribald. In particular, The Canterbury Tales features far more singing and slapstick than the first film, with an unexpected emphasis on farting, mooning, and naked horseplay.

It’s nice to see Pasolini again appearing in a central role of the film — he was a painter in the framing story of The Decameron — and here he is Chaucer himself. With that said, The Canterbury Tales is maybe not as whimsical and celebratory as the other two films and there is more of a sense of underlying bitterness. The characters simply don’t have the same lighthearted attitude as in The Decameron and the body, sometimes a source of pleasure and humor, is also frequently a source of pain. There was the sense that even if bad or unpleasant things happened to characters in The Decameron, no one was really damaged physically or psychologically, but that’s less the case in this film. One character gets a hot poker in the ass when he participates in a fart joke that a woman is playing on her other lover, while a man trying to have sex with someone else’s wife pretends to have arrived on an errand of prophecy and predicts an apocalyptic flood to the tearful husband. 

There are some raucous depictions of Hell in Pasolini’s interpretation of “The Summoner’s Tale,” complete with more asses and fart references, the appearance of the grim reaper, and Pasolini regular Franco Citti as a charming, if not outright smarmy Devil — undoubtedly one of the film’s best characters. One of the most disturbing, knowing Pasolini’s own history, is an anti-gay segment where a man caught having an affair with another man is saved from prosecution because he is rich; his destitute partner is not so lucky. If anything, this is a celebration of the anti-sacred and is surprisingly darker than his spiritually-themed first films, Accattone and Mamma Roma, with their depictions of martyrs from the Roman borgate. 

Though The Canterbury Tales is primarily a discussion of carnal matters and the human propensity for misbehavior, Pasolini leaves his own mark on many of Chaucer’s original stories, even reworking some of them. For instance, Chaucer’s brief “The Cook’s Tale” is here turned into one of the most lighthearted segments — a lengthy homage to Charlie Chaplin starring Pasolini regular Ninetto Davoli as a fool who causes destruction while searching for employment. The sweet-faced Davoli’s character has a lovely dream sequence where a band of female musicians is suddenly playing naked, and when he’s later carted off to the shackles, he signs a delightful song. It’s likely that the dark tone of the film is due, at least in part, to Davoli. He was Pasolini’s partner for many years, but finally left the older director for marriage to a woman during this time, though they remained close until Pasolini’s death.

The Canterbury Tales comes highly recommended and the Criterion release is a must-have. Though Pasolini felt it was the least of the trilogy, I found a lot to love and it honestly might be my favorite of the three. Though I have to say I was surprised by two things. First, in the colorful depiction of Hell, a demon farts out Christian friars — and in a close up we see them fly out of his asshole and land, with a rain of shit, on nearby demons. This is actually the ending of the film and must be seen to be believed. Secondly, the film features a totally naked Tom Baker — which I still can’t decide if I was excited about seeing or deeply regret — as the unfortunate husband in “The Wife of Bath” segment. If you grew up as a Doctor Who fan, prepare for your innocence to be lost… nay, stripped violently from you. 

THE DECAMERON aka IL DECAMERON

Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1971

Starring: Franco Citti, Ninetto Davoli, Pier Paolo Pasolini

Based on Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th century novel of 100 ribald tales, Il Decameron, Pasolini chose nine stories of varying content. A carefree young man is cheated by a woman claiming to be his sister and later by a pair of thieves, though he ends up with wealth. A man claiming to be deaf and dumb is hired as the gardner at a convent and begins a tryst with some of the nuns, though their sexual demands soon exhaust him. A woman cheating on her husband manages to have an affair literally behind his back when she claims her lover is in the house to buy a massive clay pot. An excessively sinful man lies to a priest and convinces everyone he was actually a saint. Young lovers plan a secret tryst but discover their parents approve of the match, while other young lovers are separated by the girl’s jealous brothers. A man cons his friend into having sex with the man’s wife when he convinces the couple he can turn her into a horse. Two sinners dream about heaven and hell, and a painter (a cameo from Pasolini) completes a difficult church fresco.

This Italian-French-West Germany coproduction is the first film in Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life, which truly celebrates life in all its imperfections, humanity in all its frailty, and the stories we tell each other. Renaissance paintings come to life in this most beautiful of Pasolini’s films to date, and Pasolini himself plays an apprentice of real-life 14th century painter Giotto, a contemporary of Boccaccio, in the film’s loose framing device. The film is well worth watching for the visual splendor alone and the richness of color and texture is so dazzling that it’s easy to forget about the different plots. This wondrous portrait of daily life in medieval Italy has a few professional actors — including some great appearances from Pasolini regulars Franco Citti (as a luxuriously sinful man), Ninetto Davoli (as an innocent tricked into jumping into a latrine in the first episode), and Silvana Mangano (as the Virgin Mother) — but is primarily made up of extras and non-professional actors from rural Italy that brings an enormous weight to the proceedings. 

While Boccaccio’s novel is set during a plague outbreak in Florence, Pasolini moved the proceedings to the southern Italian kingdom of Naples. You can occasionally hear the Neapolitan language, an Italian dialect, and the southern setting is an intentional movement from “civilized,” cultured northern Italy to the more unruly, rural south, a division explored earlier in Pasolini’s documentary about sex and love, Love Meetings. Despite the use of earthly humor, frequent nudity, and sexual themes in The Decameron, there is something inherently innocent and optimistic in all the film’s debauchery. Characters are frequently punished — a young man is dumped in a pile of shit and then locked in a tomb, another dies of a life-threatening illness, a woman’s lover is killed by her brothers, and so on — but they are not presented as being fundamentally changed or ruined by these hardships. Nearly all of the stories have happy endings and the characters are often presented as ridiculous, if sympathetically so. 

Like all of Pasolini’s films, The Decameron is undoubtedly satirical of religion and bourgeois society, but he seems to have left the scalding, Marxist criticisms of bourgeois life — the kind found in Porcile andTeorema — behind for something lively, earthy, and utterly devoid of cynicism. A common theme throughout Pasolini’s career is that he viewed poor Italians and those in rural communities with a sort of unchecked romanticism and he does depict many of the characters in The Decameron through rose colored glasses. They are essentially the same pre-Industrial, borgate type citizens of Accattone and Mamma Roma, just filtered through a different age. Pasolini continued the Trilogy of Life with these period settings and simple characters in The Canterbury Tales and Arabian Nights, but I get the feeling that there was something more personal here in his choice of an early Italian text.

The Decameron comes highly recommended, particularly the edition from Criterion. In addition to the masterful directing and legendary cinematography, there are a number of performances that represent the best of what neorealism was trying to achieve, as well as an enjoyable score from Ennio Morricone. Be sure to follow it up with the rest of the Trilogy of Life — all three are uninhibited, humorous, whimsical works that provide a great introduction to Pasolini for anyone scared of his more overtly Marxist, intellectual works. Though be forewarned that Salò is not Pasolini's first film to explicitly feature fecal matter.

MEDEA (1969)

Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1969

Starring: Maria Callas, Laurent Terzieff, Massimo Girotti

The young hero Jason is charged with retrieving the legendary golden fleece from a foreign land, an animal pelt infused with magic powers. When he arrives, he meets Medea, a princess and priestess of the fleece. She falls quickly in love with the handsome, charming Jason, and decides to help him steal the fleece, betraying her father and brother at the same time — she actually kills and dismembers her brother to keep her father from following Jason, herself, and the Argonauts, all fleeing with the fleece. She and Jason settle into marriage and have children, though Jason later decides to abandon her in favor of a new bride, which will result in a favorable partnership with the Corinthian king. In retaliation, a heart broken Medea kills Jason’s bride to be as well as their sons, before burning their house to the ground.

A companion piece to Pasolini’s earlier Oedipus Rex, Medea bears much in common with the former. Like Oedipus Rex, it is a beautifully mythic film from its costumes and dialogue to its cinematography. And like Oedipus Rex, as well as several of Pasolini’s other films, including Accattone, Mamma Roma, Teorema, and Porcile, it is closely concerned with difficult family relationships and familial violence. But this is far more abstract than Oedipus Rex — with hardly any dialogue — and, in a way, more menacing and violent. A key early scene includes an elaborately staged human sacrifice, where a young man is crucified and then Medea and her countrymen drink his blood and eat his flesh. 

The centaur in the film’s opening segment is the key to understanding Pasolini’s anti-religious, post-Freudian, post-Marxist themes. Played by the beautiful Laurent Terzieff (Milky Way, Kapò), he explains to the young Jason that acts of magic and belief in gods is fundamentally irrational and almost childlike. Pasolini’s changes to Euripides’ play Medea, the film’s source material, revolve around this point. In the play, Jason cannot attain the fleece without Medea’s help and her magic and her violent, sacrificial acts are crucial to his success. Here, it seems that these acts don’t have any basis in reality and she is just delusionally convinced of her own importance and of the effectiveness of her religious rituals. I interpret these scenes in two ways: either Pasolini is depicting her belief in the supernatural and the religious as being all in her head, or magic is only real in her homeland — sort of a version of believing in a thing it makes it reality.

In this way, Medea provides an interesting parallel to Lady Macbeth, another woman who relies on violence to support her husband’s ambitious acts. While Lady Macbeth doesn’t directly practice witchcraft, her most powerful soliloquy is a plea to the spirits to strip her of her feminine attributes and prepare her for murder and violence. She literally summons Hell to aid her. In Act I Scene V she delivers her famous speech that could easily have come out of the mouth of Medea:

“Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,  

And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full  

Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;  

Stop up the access and passage to remorse,  

That no compunctious visitings of nature

Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between  

The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,  

And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,  

Wherever in your sightless substances

You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,

And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,  

That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,  

Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,  

To cry 'Hold, hold!'

Maria Callas, of course, made her fame playing both of these characters and she remains one of the greatest opera singers to attempt Verdi’s Macbeth. In 1953, in the early years of her career, she allegedly learned the part for Cherubini’s Medea in just a few days, one of her great successes, and I can’t help but wonder if this contributed to Pasolini’s casting decision. The two were great friends and Callas only outlived Pasolini by two years, dying young of a heart attack. The Greek Callas also had dramatic, striking looks which match perfectly with the alluring, aloof, and mystical Medea. This was her only film role and was undertaken during a stressful time in her career, but it’s a powerful testament to her stage presence. Thanks to my grandmother, an opera singer herself, I grew up with a thorough education in opera, particularly Callas’s classics, and when I found out about this film, it was like worlds collided in the best way possible.

The success of Medea lies not only in Callas’s moving performance, but also in Pasolini’s choice of landscape, imagery, and powerful use of colors (particularly gold, black, and green). It makes me wish Pasolini had taken on an adaptation of Dune. With shooting in Italy and Turkey, many of the ritual scenes were filmed in the early Christian church ruins of Göreme, a history region of Turkey. Pasolini, who typically used nonprofessional actors, rounded out his cast with extras from North Africa who give a palpable foundation for Medea’s later profoundly isolated state as a foreigner in a Greek court. The amazing score, full of world music and eerie chanting, is one of the best in any of Pasolini’s films.

The score and the landscape serve to support Pasolini’s anti-religious themes, which make Medea out to be a sympathetic, yet hysterical figure of religious paranoia. Chiron, sometimes a centaur, sometimes Jason’s human teacher, says she is in the midst of a “spiritual catastrophe,” a “reverse conversion” that she has never recovered from. It is this sense of trauma, violence, and abandonment that allow her later actions to make sense. Calling her a woman scorned is too belittling for the sense of justice, revenge, and absolute violence that Pasolini instills in her. 

Medea will not be for everyone, but it comes highly recommended, partially thanks to this sense of gravity. Unlike Oedipus Rex, Medea is not a case of inevitable doomed fate, but the tragedy comes at the thoughtless decisions of men. Find this astounding modern rendition of one of the Mediterranean’s most violence ancient myths on joint Blu-ray and DVD from the BFI.

PORCILE aka PIGSTY

Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1969

Starring: Pierre Clémenti, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Marco Ferreri, Franco Citti

“We have decided to devour you for your disobedience.”

A quiet man wanders a foreboding, volcanic landscape, willing to go to any lengths for survival. He attacks a soldier and cannibalizes the body. Later, he teams up with another man and they attack a wagon carrying female slaves. Eventually he is arrested and executed. Before dying, he states, "I killed my father, I ate human flesh and I quiver with joy." Meanwhile, in postwar Germany, a powerful industrialist, Herr Klotz, is trying to convince his son Julian to marry a young woman. But Julian’s dark secret is that he’d rather spend time with the family pigs, which his father’s nemesis, Herdhitze, discovers. The two industrialists team up — Klotz blackmails Herdhitze to keep the latter’s Nazi activities quiet — and dispose of Julian.

One of Pasolini’s most difficult films, but also one of his greatest triumphs, Porcile is at the center of a fascinated web that connects the director’s cinema as a whole. It strikes a fine balance between the mythic works like Oedipus Rex, The Gospel According to St. Matthew, and Medea. Like Oedipus Rex, it is concerned with polluted lands, patricide, and crimes against the family. Like the later Salò, this is one of Pasolini’s few films overtly about the devastating effects of WWII, and also like that last, greatest of his films, it is comprised of a mix of storytelling and highly intellectual language. This is closely related to the bourgeois satire found in Teorema, but here Pasolini exchanges sex and religious epiphany for violence and discussions of the Holocaust. 

I’ve read that his satire of the bourgeois industrialists in Porcile is too heavy handed, but if you assume that Pasolini always knew what he was doing — and was always in complete control — he provides a nasty, blackly comic tale of pervasion and murder. The contrast between the two stories is where the crux of Porcile lies. Pasolini’s choice to blend the two together may seem jarring at first; roughly every ten minutes or so he cuts back and forth between them with some obvious noise (black screens with a soundtrack scratch) at the end of each reel. Pasolini often spoke of “disinterested cinema” and included references to Brecht in Porcile. Brecht was a German playwright known for his “alienation effect,” a theatrical technique meant to distance audiences from a story’s sense of artifice and melodrama so that they could gain a deeper appreciation of political and allegorical themes at play. While Brecht sought for an experimental break with realist cinema, I believe that Pasolini also sought this kind of separation from neorealism at this point in his career.

But Porcile is not as experimental as it seems and provides two coherent stories. The parallel between the two is both incisive and terrifying, as Pasolini conflates a seemingly medieval tale of human sacrifice, pre-modern terror, cannibalism, and savagery with Germany’s economic miracle (known as the Wirtschaftswunder). Ultimately he shows us that little has changed with a chilling, casual discussion between Klotz and his right hand man. The latter states, “In various shipments the prisoners were driven into the gas chambers, naked. The crystals were placed in the pipe. The pipe was closed with a plug. The plug had a metal tube, which sprayed the crystals. The prisoners breathed for 30 seconds and fell to the floor, covered with excrement. The corpses arrived at the Institute still warm, their eyes wide, glistening.” This exposition is accompanied by harp music (Klotz, who has a very intentionally placed Hitler mustache, is literally playing the harp in this scene), while he goes on to explain the autopsy and dismemberment process. It seems Herdhitze, Klotz’s rival, developed quite a collection of the bodies of Holocaust victims and it is this discussion of getting rid of the doctor’s “prize collection” — the corpses — that inspires the men to get rid of the pig-loving son with Herdhitze’s assistance.

I haven’t written much about the parallels between Pasolini and the younger German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose career I covered in depth earlier this year, but the similarities are many. Two of Europe’s most towering cinematic intellects, both men made films deeply critical of life in postwar Europe. While Pasolini lived through the war, Fassbinder was born in its last year. Though fundamentally leftists, they were both ostracized by the political left (and right). They were highly controversial and often in the media spotlight in their own countries. They were prolific with output that included much more than directing. They were gay (loosely bisexual in Fassbinder’s case), had difficult relationships with their absent fathers, but close relationships with their mothers (who both men cast in their films), and they both died tragically young. 

More than these personal similarities, their films contain overlapping themes: a rejection of realism and explorations of postwar trauma — while Fassbinder made many films (and one of the most incredible television series in history) directly about or with references to WWII, Pasolini will be forever remembered for Salò — combined with aggressive barbs directed at capitalism and bourgeois Europe; discussions of the family and sexuality; and a certain romantic idealism about crime, poverty, and prostitution. Many of their protagonists possess a sense of irresponsibility and a certain disregard for the rules; they also embody the German concept of Sehnsucht, a sense of profound longing or craving, a search for what is often indescribable. 

This hungry, ravenous searching is literally embodied by Pierre Clementi’s angelic cannibal. Like Fassbinder, Pasolini was often dead-on with his casting and Clementi — one of Europe’s most underrated actors — carries his half of the film magnificently. For my money, he is the ultimate symbol of European art house cinema and I wish that Pasolini had worked with him more (and that Fassbinder had worked with him at all). 

Porcile comes with the highest recommendation. You can find it on region one DVD, though I recommend the superior Masters of Cinema UK disc. Hopefully it will soon find a home on Blu-ray. I can’t understand why it doesn’t have a wider audience, and anyone weighing whether or not to watch (or re-watch) Salò would do well to dive in here first.

AMORE E RABBIA aka LOVE AND ANGER

Carlo Lizzani, Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Luc Godard, Elda Tattoli, Marco Bellocchio, 1969

Starring: Ninetto Davoli, Julian Beck, Nino Castelnuovo, Tom Baker

I just wrote in my review of Capriccio all’italiana, an anthology film from the previous year that Pasolini also contributed to, how sick I am of European art house anthologies, but Amore e rabbia was blissfully the last of these. When these anthology films weren’t completely self-indulgent, like The Witches, they tended to focus on the fraught political situation of the late ‘60s. Marked by protests, strikes, and government-wide shut downs, this period was the closest Europe has come since 18th century France to attaining revolution. 

While the US was home to the Civil Rights Movement and anti-Vietnam demonstrations, French students nearly overthrew their own government, Italy had a major anarchist conference, and Czechoslovakia underwent the Prague Spring, etc. Without understanding the political climate of the period, it’s almost impossible to absorb everything going on in Amore e rabbia, which is made up of five clips from six directors. 

Carlo Lizzani, one of neorealism’s foremost screenwriters and a prolific director in his own right, kicked off the anthology with “L’indifferenza" aka “Indifference,” the most effective segment of the film. In the courtyard of an apartment, a woman is attacked while onlookers ignore the crime to listen to a sporting event (based on the true story of Kitty Genovese, who was raped and stabbed to death just outside her apartment complex), and elsewhere people refuse to help an injured man and woman trying to get from a car accident to the hospital. This latter tale would be more effective if I hadn’t already watched a more comical version in The Witches, which this much more somber retelling closely mirrors. Still, its implications are chilling and there is an almost Cronenbergian feel to the hostility and violence of the city.

Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Agonia” aka “Agony,” on the other hand, is really an acquired taste. A man is passing away and his death is accompanied by a troupe of dancers who form body sculptures (like something you might see at Cirque du Soleil), spout pseudo philosophical nonsense, and otherwise guide the man to his death in the most ‘60s European counterculture way possible. Put together by The Living Theatre and with a performance from the company’s founders Julian Beck and Judith Malina, you really have to know the background to get this one. It might be nice to watch after checking out Fassbinder’s documentary on experimental theater, Theatre in Trance (1981).

Next up is Pasolini’s segment, "La sequenza del fiore di carta” aka “The Sequence of Paper Flowers,” which is surprisingly short and simple. His regularly star from this period, the irresistibly likable Ninetto Davoli plays an innocent young man who wanders the streets in utter harmony with the world, sometimes carrying a large paper flower. These images are contrasted with clips of atrocities and historically important moments and the youth is eventually struck dead, as if the heavens are outraged by his innocence and gaiety. This one would be unlikable if it weren’t for an infectious performance from Davoli, whose sunny personality shines through. It’s easy to see why he become one of Pasolini’s most used comic actors.

The little dialogue in “La sequenza del fiore di carta” is more than made up for with the dialogue-heavy story from the film’s only non-Italian director, Jean-Luc Godard. His “L’Amore” aka “Love” is a fascinating companion piece to some of his films that revolve around relationships — such as Contempt and A Woman in a Woman — as it follows a couple who sit around and argue. Their discussions of love and politics are underlined by the fact that she is Jewish and he is Arabic and they are contrasted with another couple who discuss the actions of the central couple.

Marco Bellocchio and Elda Tattoli segment, "Discutiamo, discutiamo” aka “We Tell, You Tell,” is the last and will probably feel as relevant as the first segment to contemporary viewers. It follows a group of politically-minded students who don’t take any action, but sit around preaching ideas of Marxism and anarchism that they all already agree on. Essentially their discussion is about whether it’s possible to change things from within the system or whether the system should be destroyed and rebuilt. It’s not the best of the short films, but the discussion feels fresh and some of the themes haven’t changed at all.

Overall I can only recommend Amore e rabbia to Pasolini and Godard completists, or to anyone with an interest in or knowledge of ‘60s history. You can surprisingly find the film on DVD, in a nice-looking edition from NoShame. It’s definitely worth watching at least once and I would be fascinated to hear some feedback from viewers totally ignorant to the events of the late ‘60s.