SubVerse

Here’ some of Pasolini’s own writing on Salò I found.

Quite an intense subversive character. Poet, filmmaker, radical - murdered by a gay lover, or possibly a political assassination the week he finished editing Salò.

He makes it very clear here that his reason for making this film was to sensitize an audience to the horrors of fascism. And it’s hard to look at the images in this film - and not think of Bush’s Abu Graib.

…The entire film with its unheard-of atrocities which are almost unmentionable, is presented as an immense sadistic metaphor of what was the Nazi-Fascist ‘dissociation’ from its ‘crimes against humanity’.

Sade’s characters (who are clearly SS men in civilian dress) behave exactly with their victims as the Nazi-Fascists did with theirs. They considered them as objects and destroyed automatically all possibility of human relationship with them.

Practical reason says that during the Republic of Salò it would have been particularly easy given the atmosphere to organise, as Sade’s protagonists did, a huge orgy in a villa guarded by SS men. Sade says explicitly in a phrase, less famous than so many others, that nothing is more profoundly anarchic than power - any power. To my knowledge there has never been in Europe any power as anarchic as that of the Republic of Salò: it was the most petty excess functioning as government. What applies to all power was especially clear in this one.

In addition to being anarchic what best characterises power - any power - is its natural capacity to turn human bodies into objects. Nazi-Fascist repression excelled in this.