Pier Paolo Pasolini. Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma
by Serafino Murri
Publisher: Edizioni Lindau
Salò or the 120 days of Sodom, the last movie shot by Pasolini, is a “movie in the forma of an enigma: the clear vision of a murderer and greedy society, against which the famous Italian poet and director struggled until the day of his obscure murder. The movie depicts the terrible and grotesque face of the fascism during the “Repubblica di Salò”, using the sexual imagination of a great subversive writer: the Marquis De Sade.: a revolutionary and a conservative, violent and embarrassingly gross, a sui generis intellectual. The “Divine Marquis”, representative of the Enlightenment degenerating into its contrary because of its excess of rationality, is the instrument for a ghastly and blocked narration, mirroring a society of consumerism made of words, laws and behaviours that are conceived to eradicate from humanity its thinking autonomy. Of this degeneration Salò describes causes and effects: the hirrir of slaughter turned into everyday normalcy.