27Aug08
A few months back, after we announced our upcoming release of Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom, we received a note from a viewer asking us which version of the film we would be releasing, noting that a 2001 British Film Institute (BFI) release featured a brief scene not contained in the original Criterion DVD. Dealing with various versions of a film is a common situation for us, and as a producer it’s one of the first issues I address.
The scene in question occurs at the end of the wedding sequence, approximately forty-four minutes into the film. In the Criterion master, the scene cuts just after the magistrate shuffles the wedding guests out the door and down the stairs. In the 2001 BFI release, this scene extends to include the magistrate reading a short poem.
Whenever I have a question about a master on one of my projects, my first stop is with our technical director, Lee Kline. He confirmed that our new HD transfer was made from an interpositive (IP) off of the original camera negative, which exists at Technicolor in Rome. An IP is usually the preferred source, especially when made from an original negative, since it’s wet-gated and contact-printed, and typically safer then using a cut original negative. Lee also confirmed that the missing scene is not in the IP. I had been in touch with a number of Pasolini collaborators, friends, and scholars as part of my general research on the project, and so I began asking them about how this scene might have made its way into the print used by the BFI for their 2001 release.
In this case, I first went to Roberto Chiesi, head of the Pasolini Foundation in Rome. He checked his archive and confirmed that their prints did not contain the scene. In one of his notes to me, Chiesi indicated that Pasolini died shortly after supervising the French version of the release and that the problems relating to the versions might have emerged after this point, although he didn’t have any information to confirm this.
Next on my list was Gideon Bachmann, a close friend of Pasolini’s who was on set during the filming. He was puzzled too. And hoping to cover all bases, I got in touch with Sergio Toffetti, who worked on a special version of Salò for the Venice Film Festival in 2006 that included deleted scenes. Unfortunately, he was not familiar with the scene either.
Meanwhile, Lee touched base with James White, the technical director at the BFI, who was in Rome this summer working on a new transfer of the film for their upcoming rerelease. James used original film materials in Rome that didn’t contain the scene either. He said he didn’t know where the BFI got the print with the extra footage.
Where this scene came from—how it appears in a UK print but not in original elements in Italy—remains a mystery I just cannot solve. It could have been present in an early print made for color timing or for an eager foreign distributor or for a festival, then cut later by Pasolini. Or it’s possible that the footage was lost from the original negative after Pasolini's death. The only thing we know is that no one had the answer, and in that case the film has to speak for itself. We went with the version that matched the original materials, our existing version, and the prints at the Pasolini Foundation. It’s kind of a shame to lose this little bit, because it does add a little something to the scene, so for those of you who are interested, here it is . . .
The first is from the BFI print, and the second is from original materials:
25Aug08
In Pasolini’s last interview, just before his murder, and prior to the release of Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom, he identified himself simply as a poet. His most well-known essay on the cinema was entitled “Il cinema di poesia.” In his writings and films, he referred to the poetry of the paintings of Giotto, Michelangelo, Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino, and Masaccio. His notion of the poetic was broad and encompassed all the arts. Such a view had a classical ancestry (Aristotle; later, Horace). It also belonged to an Italian idealist philosophical tradition represented by Benedetto Croce, whose thinking touched every Italian intellectual of Pasolini’s generation, including Antonio Gramsci. The blend of Marxism and idealist philosophy, often overlaid by Catholicism, was particular to Italy.
Pasolini studied art history under Roberto Longhi, one of Italy’s great art historians, at the University of Bologna in the early 1940s. Many of the images in his films, either by content or by framing and setting, are refashioned from Italian Renaissance and baroque paintings. His thesis at the university was on the symbolist-decadent poet Giovanni Pascoli. Pasolini’s films cite directly from painting, poetry, music, and sometimes, though less frequently, the cinema (Chaplin, Rossellini).
Often the citations are structured as analogies between the low in everyday life (whores, pimps, libertines) and the high and sacred, either pictorial or from music and literature, as in Salò, for example, where the libertines are associated with sacred music, the avant-garde of the thirties (Léger), the neoclassical (their villa, where victims are gathered, incarcerated, and murdered), Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (the banquet of shit), and most obviously the Marquis de Sade and the Inferno of Dante Alighieri. The libertines quote Nietzsche; Pasolini quotes Bataille and Barthes. In The Decameron, Pasolini assumed the role of Giotto; in The Gospel According to Matthew, Italian intellectuals played the apostles, Pasolini’s mother, the mother of Christ.
25Aug08
“In the trilogy, I evoked the ghosts of characters from my earlier, realist films. Not to denounce them, obviously, but out of such a violent love for ‘lost time’ that it came out not as a condemnation of one particular human condition but of everything in the present day . . . We are now irreversibly inside that present; we have adapted to it.”
With these words, written by Pier Paolo Pasolini in a commentary for Corriere della sera in March 1975, as he worked on Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom, the filmmaker expressed his aversion for the present while simultaneously suggesting the impossibility of escaping it, and thus the need to confront it. In the years between 1970 and 1973, during which he made The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and Arabian Nights, the writer-director voiced growing concern about where the world was heading, about this new society in which he could no longer see even the features of the Italy of proletarians, peasants, and lumpen proletarians that he loved so deeply and that figures so prominently in his poetry, stories, and films. A rapid and scorching process had transformed Italy from a country based on an agricultural economy to an industrialized, neocapitalist one. A secular peasant culture had been marginalized by the triumph of consumerism, and in the span of no more than a decade, the original cultural characteristics and diverse physiognomy of the popular and lumpen proletarian layers had vanished. What came in their place, especially visible in the younger generation, were the lifestyle and habits of the Italian petty bourgeoisie, “the most ignorant in all of Europe,” as Pasolini called them in La ricotta. The whole process was accelerated through the ruinous and leveling effect of Italian television. Pervasive as capillaries, television was the main agent of decline, he wrote in 1966, “the concrete expression of the petty-bourgeois nature of the Italian state . . . The repository of every vulgarity, and of the hatred for reality.”
Pasolini saw all this as cultural genocide. “Genocide is this adaptation to the power of Italian consumerism,” he stated in 1974. “This power is violently tearing away at ancient ways of life, at the age-old values that are really at the source of Italian culture as a whole. It is imposing its own models and values and destroying in the process a way of life."
25Aug08
The title card that appears in the opening credits of Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom, Pasolini’s “Recommended Bibliography,” seems to signal to the viewer that the filmmaker’s intentions can’t be fully understood without a familiarity with a written body of philosophical texts on the source author, Sade, by Pierre Klossowski, Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, and Maurice Blanchot.
This would be an unusual special pleading indeed, that what we’re about to see is a film of high seriousness and not simply a procession of repulsive, possibly pornographic sequences staged for a movie, if we were to give the list too much importance. It’s more likely, however, to read as a jesting deflation of the horrors to follow, which have their pitch-black comic angle. Few people ever attended a theatrical screening of Salò without some advance idea of what they were going to see. And the spectacle of joyless lubricity and dehumanizing cruelty and carnage visualized by Pasolini could not be further from the dry, dense, sometimes obscurantist and circular arguments to be found in the printed pages of his bibliographic sources.
Audiences of Salò have generally found this title card hilarious, in part because of prior knowledge that Pasolini was a filmmaker who also wrote voluminous, highly theoretical explanations of his own filmic intentions, and partly because the music playing over the credits is an orchestral rendering of “These Foolish Things,” a deeply sentimental 1940s tune that somewhat preemptively encapsulates the film as a chronicle of direly perverse romanticism. The title card, the war during which the film takes place, the selections of victims, the three circles of escalating sadomasochism into which Salò is divided, may all be summarized as the spectacular paraphernalia of human folly—“these foolish things” by which history is so overwhelmingly dominated. And so the film, including its intellectual references, comprises a bleak satire, not only of the perversities it depicts but of the depiction itself and its futility in imparting any “morally improving” lessons.
25Aug08
Is the true measure of a film’s greatness its unforgettability? Conjured up in darkened rooms that mimic the intimate circumstances of our normally private dreams and fantasies, vast in scale and impact, the images of celluloid are of course notoriously memorable—but still, there are some films from which not just individual images but a whole way of seeing remains lodged in the mind. In this category, Pasolini’s infamous Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom has a very particular place.
The film is probably most famous for being more unseen than seen. Vilified, censored, banned, denied commercial distribution, long unavailable, it lives more in reputation and rumor than in memory. I was first exposed to it four years after its release in 1975, when I was enticed to a one-off midweek matinee screening at a small university-town art-house cinema by publicity that hinted it might contain erotic images of explicit homosexuality—something of which, as a horny first-year undergraduate in the porn-free wilderness of the conservative English midlands, I was in pretty desperate need. That strange afternoon probably altered forever my sense of what the possibilities might be of sitting in the dark and watching a movie; like most people seeing the film for the first time, I had never encountered anything that extreme. I wept, I retched, I involuntarily covered my face with my hands; but I left exhilarated.
25Aug08
It’s always the same when I tackle Pasolini—the first encounter escapes me. Pasolini doesn’t come at you head-on; it’s more like embroidery, which can seem simple, unrelentingly repetitive. So it went the first time I saw Salò. Of course, there’s that cold preamble; the roundup without pity or explanation is magnificent, but that kind of magnificence is nothing more than a chilling jolt to our conscience.
Then comes the long intestinal progress. The body, the heart of the matter, is full of excrement. Yet that’s not where horror resides; that aversion—the repulsion for shit—was instilled in us from earliest childhood, so the long progress is familiar and repetitive, like our daily progress, I believed, already tired of what seemed a simplistic, somewhat childish provocation. So I thought, keeping a safe distance. But, of course, that’s exactly what’s at stake: the roots of good and evil in the virgin soil we all begin with, that soil made fertile, yes, fertile, by excrement. But then nothing—or rather “something”—pushes us, the previously distant audience, to watch with that hasty secretion of pleasure and horror. We do not watch with the victim’s dry mouth of confusion but with the avid wet mouth that suckles at the primal pleasure of torture, taking refuge behind the screen of an ineffective confinement, that of denial.
25Aug08
The year before he made Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom, Pasolini hinted at the scandalous contours his last film would assume. In the course of a 1974 debate, he declared that now, as never before, “artists must create, critics defend, and democratic people support . . . works so extreme that they become unacceptable even to the broadest minds of the new State.” In large part, of course, Pasolini’s demand for “extreme” works was fueled by his conviction that only such “unacceptable” art could resist being consumed by the hated world of neocapitalism that was fast destroying all he had known and loved. But it is also true that, long before he uttered these sentiments, he had written essays, made films, and taken stands that were deeply polemical if not always unacceptable. In short, decades before he became Italy’s most notorious public intellectual—famous for taking one unpopular or “heretical” stand after another—he had displayed the ever constant desire, as he said, to “break the rules.” There was never any doubt in his mind that, as he once declared, “the real Marxist must not be a good Marxist. His function is to put orthodoxy and codified certainties into crisis. His duty is to break the rules.”
In terms of his cinema, the cries of outrage that greeted many of his films, to say nothing of the frequent bans and censorship they encountered, revealed his talent for breaking the rules. Even his first feature, Accattone (1961)—which depicted the life and death of a young pimp living on the ragged outskirts of Rome—provoked right-wing disturbances and sharply divided critical opinion. While critics on the right were disturbed by the “amoral,” “decadent,” and “depraved” nature of Pasolini’s protagonist—as well, perhaps, as Pasolini’s evident attraction to the young men he portrayed—those on the left felt that the director’s poetic, death-haunted, fatalistic, and often Catholic-inflected vision subverted any Marxist impetus for social change or social justice. Toward the end of the 1960s, Teorema (1968)—a film in which a handsome, “divine” stranger sleeps with the four members of a bourgeois family (mother, father, son, and daughter)—seemed to deliberately court controversy. Not only did it conflate homosexuality and heterosexuality but, also, it shadowed both with the hint of incest, insofar as the stranger acts as a son in the family. Temporarily banned for obscenity and apparently deemed an “inadmissible” film by the pope himself, Teorema was denounced as a homosexual fantasy and a film on the difficulty of being a homosexual. In the course of the early 1970s, the films of the so-called “Trilogy of Life”—that is, The Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972), and Arabian Nights (1974)—shocked the public with an explicit depiction of sexuality never before seen in mainstream Italian films.
18Aug08
One of the most awarded films in Japanese history, Twenty-Four Eyes was already a nostalgia piece when Keisuke Kinoshita directed it in 1954. For a Japanese audience just three years out of the Allied occupation following the heartrending devastation of World War II, this quietly moving story, based on a book by Sakae Tsuboi and spanning two decades in the lives of an island schoolteacher and her first twelve elementary school pupils, was seen as a celebration of the positive family values and scenic beauty that defeat and privation could not destroy. After years of propaganda and stifling censorship, it was rejuvenating for viewers to watch innocent children play, laugh, sing, cry, and grow up through the eyes of a fresh-faced, smart, and affectionate young teacher, played by the beautiful and indomitable Hideko Takamine. Twenty-Four Eyes was undoubtedly a woman’s film, honoring the endurance and self-sacrifice of mothers and daughters trying to preserve their families, and providing a cathartic cry, or “three-handkerchief” moviegoing experience. It lives on, however, not as a melodramatic tearjerker but as a meticulously detailed portrait of what are perceived as the best qualities in the Japanese character: humility, perseverance, honesty, love of children, love of nature, and love of peace.
Kinoshita, a classic case of a movie-crazy kid who ran away from home to get into the business, had already been making films for over a decade, following a long internship as a cinematographer, when he took up Tsuboi’s book. Master of many genres, he and his team had since the war made a number of hugely successful tragedies, love stories, and period films, as well as a pair of zany comedies starring Takamine as “Carmen,” an artiste stripper with country roots. What Kinoshita had not been good at, in the eyes of the wartime military government, was promoting the army suicide corps (the kamikazes). In his first films, he couldn’t help showing mothers who were distraught instead of proud that their sons were going off to die for their country, as in 1944’s Army. In the new freedom of the postwar era, the best-selling book Twenty-Four Eyes gave Kinoshita the screenwriter ample material to come out in the open with his pro-family, antiwar views; by this time he was an established director, and Shochiku Company would acquire the rights he wanted. Watching Twenty-Four Eyes, everyone could empathize and openly acknowledge the pain they had suffered silently through the war, and with Takamine’s Miss Oishi they could rejoice in having survived to reunite with loved ones.
18Aug08
The fantasy-enriched, near operatic Technicolor dramas for which director-writer-producer collaborators Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger are perhaps best known—such as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947), and The Red Shoes (1948)—sit in luxuriant contrast to The Small Back Room (1949), their piquant black-and-white adaptation of a novel by Nigel Balchin. The Small Back Room is a modest-scale psychological drama about an explosives expert with a “tin leg” and a drink problem who harbors a great deal of bitterness. In the above-mentioned other films, the Archers (as Powell and Pressburger called themselves) usually preferred a narrative tone of derring-do and wry amusement, from under which deeper emotions would swell to the surface. They rarely set out to generate the kind of gritty, downbeat poetics that make The Small Back Room such a darkly glittering triumph.
But then, The Small Back Room was born out of disappointment: Powell and Pressburger made the film straight after their British studio, the Rank Organisation, had dropped them, believing (erroneously) that The Red Shoes would make no money. This sent the partners back into the welcoming arms of Hungarian producer-impresario Alexander Korda, who had brought them together in the late 1930s, and who had lately revived his London Films production house. An enthusiastic Powell had first mooted an adaptation of The Small Back Room in 1945, but Pressburger was initially less sure, thinking it “a brittle, cold story.” He sent Powell a telegram that read: “I regard it not Archers but your own baby.” At that time Pressburger was about to direct a solo project, The Miracle in St. Anthony’s Lane, but for various reasons it didn’t come off. When they returned to London Films three years later and found that Korda happened to own the rights to Balchin’s novel, Pressburger was persuaded to give it a chance.
11Aug08
Every Guy Maddin movie creates the illusion of a secret history. His willfully primitive cut-rate spectacles seem like artifacts, reanimated bits of cultural detritus, but also like hauntings, the return of the cinematic repressed. From the start, Maddin’s sensibility was both fully formed and proudly anomalous. He emerged in the mid-1980s, a cult filmmaker from the icy prairies of Winnipeg flaunting an absurd fluency in the vernacular of early motion pictures. In the first decade of his career, he made a series of joyously strange and often very funny melodramas that reintroduced to the medium the handmade enchantment of Georges Méliès and the dreamlike gloom of German expressionism.
The second, more prolific phase of Maddin’s career, beginning roughly in 2000, has, if anything, been even more unlikely. His mannerist style, always in danger of seeming hermetic, has simultaneously intensified and opened up, even as his focus has turned inward. Increasingly he comes across less as a fusty antiquarian than a mad scientist, applying shock paddles to dead cinematic languages. The ghosts populating his movies are no longer just those of departed filmmakers (from Jean Vigo to Jack Smith)—they come from the author’s own life. Maddin’s films have always been intensely personal; now they are often nakedly revealing, at once travestying and transcending the contemporary vogue for memoir. A master fabulist who specialized in adult fairy tales, he has found an even richer métier in mythic autobiography.
Brand upon the Brain!, Maddin’s eighth feature, is the middle film in what he calls “my ‘Me Trilogy,’” wedged between the self-flagellating confessional Cowards Bend the Knee (2003) and the psychogeographic docu-fantasia My Winnipeg (2007). All three films unfold from the perspective of a character named Guy Maddin, drawn with a potent combination of narcissism and self-loathing. In Brand upon the Brain!, written with his regular coconspirator George Toles, the director’s fevered imaginings take on a particular poignancy, tailored as they are to the hormonal delirium of adolescence and the roiling swamp of childhood memory.
