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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Pasolini: Fascism & Pornography#2 « Previous | |Next »
October 18, 2004

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Axel Bruns

This post picks up on Trevor's earlier remarks, which Mike over at the Collective Lounge had picked up.

How to develop what Trevor has written? How about introducing Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Salo? This film is a loose adaptation of Sade's 120 Days of Sodom. Salò is situated in the last days of Fascism at the close of W.W.II. This film is chosen because it was banned in Australia for around 17 years---from 1976 to 1993 on the grounds that it was an offence against public taste (and would lead to the corruption of morals?)

Is the subtext here one in which all threats to middle class family life and romantic love must be policed?

Salo has not been given a video release in Australia and any application for one would probably coincide with calls for Salo's banning in the name of protecting family values from sexual violence, protecting the innocence of children; that using censorship to preserve public standards and community values. The right to screen Salo in Australia has been retrospectively withdrawn.

In the political reaction to the unbanning of Salo in 1993 Pasolini was seen as a sexual psychopath and Salo was seen as pornography by the pro-censorship discourses. This emerging new conservatism that built up around Pasolini and Salo in the 1990s turned the film into an imaginary object, less important for its actual content than for what it was seen to symbolise.

What is lost, or displaced, by the new conservatism is a critical discourse about a power politics (fascism) that comodifies the bodies of human beings and reduced them to things. It uses De Sade's work on sadomasochism to illustrate the perverse corruption and dehumanising practices endemic to the exercise of absolute power. Salo depicts the sexual degradation and torture of a group of young male and female prisoners by four high-ranking Italian Fascist officials. Here is a description of the plot:


"[Salo] is the story of four aristocratic noblemen during World War II. These four individuals: the Duc, the President, the Bishop, and the Magistrate, conceive an elaborate plan to kidnap eighteen teenagers and abscond with them to an isolated mountain retreat, taking along their own daughters (who the four main characters have swapped and taken as wives), an entourage of guards, and four prostitutes.

Once there, they will spend the next 120 days listening to stories from the prostitutes. Each prostitute has a different specialty—one tells of simple sexual passions, another tells more outré sexual fare (e.g. coprophilia, etc.), yet another tells tales of torture, and so on. Each libertine has a small entourage, which he can use as he pleases as the stories fan the flames of his desires. What ensues is a nightmarish vision of subjugation, degradation, and destruction of the human spirit as the four libertines continually assault their captives in order to procure their own pleasure."


Human bodies become sites for the inarrestible imposition of power in the form of fascism as sadism that has death as its end.

Something odd is happening in Australia when a film such as Baise-moi is banned, whilst the Hollywood violence of a Diehard series or the sexual perversions of Law and Order is shown on television. This indicates that it is sex that is problematic not violence; especially depictions of sex that are different from, and challenge, the mushy gushy visual diet of love and sex Hollywood-style.

The degradation of bodies, their use and abuse, torture, sadism, the corruption of eroticism and sexual relations, are the subjects of Salò. Pasolini believed that the fascism that had found fertile ground during the early to mid part of the century had not disappeared but had merely changed form. Consumer capitalism is the new cultural form, and it works by insinuating itself as protector of accepted norms, order and standards.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 4:19 PM | | Comments (0)
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