Salo (Pasolini) 1975
BFI 4K UHD disc
In the 1980’s, at the Everyman Cinema in Hampstead, I attended the screening of the club edit (missing 6 minutes) of Salo. Then the BBFC granted the film an uncut 18 certificate and Salo was broadcast on Channel 4 TV in 2001 and I watched it on their late-night subscription service. Today in 2026 I gave it a third viewing on a 4K Ultra HD disc that is 4 times visually superior to Blu Ray.
Every time I approach Pasolini’s Salo I have to steel myself to witness its horrific degradation of the individual. This meant the challenge of once more viewing the notorious banquet moment when a huge plate of human excrement is served up to the perpetrators and victims of an Italian fascist regime. That meal (in reality chocolate) plus all the sexual abuse and cruelty, before and after, appeared, because of the latest disc technology, to be even more intensely real.
The shocks this time round were both the same yet also different. The film and I are older. Leaving to one side Salo’s almost unwatchable climactic moments of physical torture – the cutting, burning and branding of the naked body disturbing me as much the graphic violence of extreme modern horror films. But I can now take Salo ‘better ‘than before. What was, in the opinion of critic Robin Wood, perhaps the most shocking film in the history of cinema, has become, for me, an apolitical horror with really shocking moments and uncomfortable ideas. Salo is concerned with new fascism more than old fascism. For Pasolini the film is about the commodification of the body in the then modern culture of 1975 and not a document of extreme violence, inflicted by fascists, against the minds and bodies of innocent civilians in the 1940s. But my question to Pasolini is why couldn’t Salo have been about both things?
Before trying to answer that question let’s pin down the location of the real Salo and its fictional account of authoritarian madness. Salo is a town on Lake Garda, Italy. This was the seat of Mussolini’s puppet state, the Italian Social Republic (1943-45). Four corrupt libertines kidnap 18 teenagers and subject them to extreme violence, sadism, physical and psychological torture. The story is in four parts and modelled on the circle structure of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Pasolini wanted to create “a formally perfect film.” And he succeeded for Salo, in spite of its horrors, is beautifully composed, rigorously edited and directed. In no way was he creating a pornographic film. Nor an exuberant, earthy and sexy production like his previous trilogy (The Arabian Nights, The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales). In fact Pasolini wrote an essay abjuring the making of those films. Salo was never meant to be an arty entertainment more a deliberate and alienating endurance test that Pasolini knew would disturb critics and audiences.
Within the insular and hermetic world of the film Pasolini was also at pains not to simply make a monstrous piece on appalling sadists and their helpless victims. The teenagers have to follow the rules of their enslavement but sometimes they betray members of their own group. They inform the libertines of those that break the rules: only in order to survive a little longer before being murdered themselves. Even the fascists are depicted in a dual state of existence: whether rhetoric or reality the line “The libertine is to be both the executioner and the victim” cuts insightfully deep.
Salo is a chilling film but a moral one. Pasolini’s camera often maintains a severely correct detachment. The extreme sexual acts are simulated and shot in medium or long shot. It’s highly formalised and ritualistic. In this respect Salo is as controlling as the book (The film re-imagines De Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom – which is for me, and probably most readers, a boring and clinical list of sexual perversions.)
The obvious depravities of Salo are repugnant. But apart from the well-publicised scenes of people being forced to eat shit and those torture scenes, which still had me turning my face away from the screen, are smaller details of character. Take the scene when a libertine is addressing the teenagers about the rules and regulations of their stay. Pasolini masterfully cuts to three middle aged women (former prostitutes responsible for rounding up the victims) whose body language reveals a proud and yet mocking vanity – peacocks who are loving the plan, except for one unsure woman who can’t endure what’s happening and later on dies from throwing herself out of a window. Her role was the pianist, accompanying the prostitutes’ lurid stories of sexual encounters.
Repeated viewings of Salo have now left me ambivalent about its artistic success. Apart from the obvious fascist uniforms of soldiers in the early outside capture scenes the film remains apolitical. One haunting moment comes when we hear the sound of presumably enemy aircraft. Nothing is shown but Salo’s sealed off decaying chateau, with its arresting set design, becoming a character in its own right. Pasolini lets the aircraft sound enter the building but never cuts to a plane outside.
This is a contradiction – and let down? For at the roots of wartime fascism is sado-masochism (see here Moravia’s novel The Conformist even more than Bertolucci’s film adaptation). I feel that Pasolini’s apolitical stance is somewhat disconcerting. To have least acknowledged the wartime situation a bit more, with old fascism’s brutal power to de-humanise people, would have, for me, strengthened his critique of the new fascism of a consumerist society that’s manipulate, especially of the power and freedom of the body. The extreme authoritarian roots revealed in wartime, for the future consequences for society, should have been, at least, minimally mapped out.
Salo, a masterpiece then? Yes, but with serious historical omissions. But absolutely required if very difficult and problematic viewing.
Alan Price©2026
Salo (Pasolini) 1975
BFI 4K UHD disc
In the 1980’s, at the Everyman Cinema in Hampstead, I attended the screening of the club edit (missing 6 minutes) of Salo. Then the BBFC granted the film an uncut 18 certificate and Salo was broadcast on Channel 4 TV in 2001 and I watched it on their late-night subscription service. Today in 2026 I gave it a third viewing on a 4K Ultra HD disc that is 4 times visually superior to Blu Ray.
Every time I approach Pasolini’s Salo I have to steel myself to witness its horrific degradation of the individual. This meant the challenge of once more viewing the notorious banquet moment when a huge plate of human excrement is served up to the perpetrators and victims of an Italian fascist regime. That meal (in reality chocolate) plus all the sexual abuse and cruelty, before and after, appeared, because of the latest disc technology, to be even more intensely real.
The shocks this time round were both the same yet also different. The film and I are older. Leaving to one side Salo’s almost unwatchable climactic moments of physical torture – the cutting, burning and branding of the naked body disturbing me as much the graphic violence of extreme modern horror films. But I can now take Salo ‘better ‘than before. What was, in the opinion of critic Robin Wood, perhaps the most shocking film in the history of cinema, has become, for me, an apolitical horror with really shocking moments and uncomfortable ideas. Salo is concerned with new fascism more than old fascism. For Pasolini the film is about the commodification of the body in the then modern culture of 1975 and not a document of extreme violence, inflicted by fascists, against the minds and bodies of innocent civilians in the 1940s. But my question to Pasolini is why couldn’t Salo have been about both things?
Before trying to answer that question let’s pin down the location of the real Salo and its fictional account of authoritarian madness. Salo is a town on Lake Garda, Italy. This was the seat of Mussolini’s puppet state, the Italian Social Republic (1943-45). Four corrupt libertines kidnap 18 teenagers and subject them to extreme violence, sadism, physical and psychological torture. The story is in four parts and modelled on the circle structure of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Pasolini wanted to create “a formally perfect film.” And he succeeded for Salo, in spite of its horrors, is beautifully composed, rigorously edited and directed. In no way was he creating a pornographic film. Nor an exuberant, earthy and sexy production like his previous trilogy (The Arabian Nights, The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales). In fact Pasolini wrote an essay abjuring the making of those films. Salo was never meant to be an arty entertainment more a deliberate and alienating endurance test that Pasolini knew would disturb critics and audiences.
Within the insular and hermetic world of the film Pasolini was also at pains not to simply make a monstrous piece on appalling sadists and their helpless victims. The teenagers have to follow the rules of their enslavement but sometimes they betray members of their own group. They inform the libertines of those that break the rules: only in order to survive a little longer before being murdered themselves. Even the fascists are depicted in a dual state of existence: whether rhetoric or reality the line “The libertine is to be both the executioner and the victim” cuts insightfully deep.
Salo is a chilling film but a moral one. Pasolini’s camera often maintains a severely correct detachment. The extreme sexual acts are simulated and shot in medium or long shot. It’s highly formalised and ritualistic. In this respect Salo is as controlling as the book (The film re-imagines De Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom – which is for me, and probably most readers, a boring and clinical list of sexual perversions.)
The obvious depravities of Salo are repugnant. But apart from the well-publicised scenes of people being forced to eat shit and those torture scenes, which still had me turning my face away from the screen, are smaller details of character. Take the scene when a libertine is addressing the teenagers about the rules and regulations of their stay. Pasolini masterfully cuts to three middle aged women (former prostitutes responsible for rounding up the victims) whose body language reveals a proud and yet mocking vanity – peacocks who are loving the plan, except for one unsure woman who can’t endure what’s happening and later on dies from throwing herself out of a window. Her role was the pianist, accompanying the prostitutes’ lurid stories of sexual encounters.
Repeated viewings of Salo have now left me ambivalent about its artistic success. Apart from the obvious fascist uniforms of soldiers in the early outside capture scenes the film remains apolitical. One haunting moment comes when we hear the sound of presumably enemy aircraft. Nothing is shown but Salo’s sealed off decaying chateau, with its arresting set design, becoming a character in its own right. Pasolini lets the aircraft sound enter the building but never cuts to a plane outside.
This is a contradiction – and let down? For at the roots of wartime fascism is sado-masochism (see here Moravia’s novel The Conformist even more than Bertolucci’s film adaptation). I feel that Pasolini’s apolitical stance is somewhat disconcerting. To have least acknowledged the wartime situation a bit more, with old fascism’s brutal power to de-humanise people, would have, for me, strengthened his critique of the new fascism of a consumerist society that’s manipulate, especially of the power and freedom of the body. The extreme authoritarian roots revealed in wartime, for the future consequences for society, should have been, at least, minimally mapped out.
Salo, a masterpiece then? Yes, but with serious historical omissions. But absolutely required if very difficult and problematic viewing.
Alan Price©2026
By Alan Price • added recently on London Grip, film, film archive • Tags: Alan Price, film, film archive