Salò
1976 Pier Paulo Pasolini

“Nothing is more contagious than evil.”

Pedophilia, misogyny, rape, coprophagia, filicide — Salò has it all. Based on the infamous 120 Days of Sodom, written by the Marquis de Sade whilst he was imprisoned in the Bastille shortly before the French Revolution, the film’s setting is transposed to 1943 Italy, just after Mussolini’s fall. Here, four fascist libertines carry out an agenda of sadism against nine girls and nine boys in three stages: the Circles of Mania, Shit, and Blood, structured as a perversion of Dante’s Inferno. The tone of the film is one of overwhelming disgust, affording no humanity to those in power, and, even more disturbingly, little more to the victims, making for a harrowing objectification of its characters. The film was highly contentious upon its release and is still censored in some countries. Martin Scorsese and Simone de Beauvoir are among those who have defended the artistic value of this orgy of rape, torture, and murder, which acts as a political allegory of 20th century dictatorships and a cinematic demonstration of the extreme violence and excessive power perpetrated by such systems. Aside from the ritualised atrocities carried out against eighteen children the film is without a plot to contextualise its relentless graphic content, which is at times unwatchable and always degrading. Salò’s grand statement? Life is a banquet of shit.