Salò: A Cinema of Poetry
By August 25, 2008
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 Read more »
- Italy
- 1976
- 116 minutes
- Color
- 1.85:1
- Italian
- Spine #17
SYNOPSIS: The notorious final film from Pier Paolo Pasolini, Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom has been called nauseating, shocking, depraved, pornographic . . . It’s also a masterpiece. The controversial poet, novelist, and filmmaker’s transposition of the Marquis de Sade’s eighteenth-century opus of torture and degradation to Fascist Italy in 1944 remains one of the most passionately debated films of all time, a thought-provoking inquiry into the political, social, and sexual dynamics that define the world we live in.
Cast & CreditsOpen
Cast
| Duke | Paolo Bonacelli |
| Bishop | Giorgio Cataldi |
| Magistrate | Umberto P. Quintavalle |
| President | Aldo Valletti |
| Signora Castelli | Caterina Boratto |
| Signora Maggi | Elsa De Giorgi |
| Signora Vaccari | Helene Surgere |
| Pianist | Sonia Saviange |
Credits
| Director | Pier Paolo Pasolini |
| Writer | Pier Paolo Pasolini |
| With collaboration from | Sergio Citti |
| Producer | Alberto Grimaldi |
| Musical coordinator | Ennio Morricone |
| Director of photography | Tonino Delli Colli |
| Editor | Nino Baragli |
| Production design | Dante Ferretti |
| Costume design | Danilo Donati |
Disc Features
- High-definition digital restoration (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
- “Salò”: Yesterday and Today, a thirty-three-minute documentary featuring interviews with director Pier Paolo Pasolini, actor-filmmaker Jean-Claude Biette, and Pasolini friend Nineto Davoli
- Fade to Black, a twenty-three-minute documentary featuring directors Bernardo Bertolucci, Catherine Breillat, and John Maybury, as well as scholar David Forgacs
- The End of “Salò”, a forty-minute documentary about the film’s production
- Video interviews with set designer Dante Ferretti and director and film scholar Jean-Pierre Gorin
- Optional English-dubbed soundtrack
- Theatrical trailer
- PLUS: A booklet featuring essays by Neil Bartlett, Breillat, Naomi Greene, Sam Rohdie, Roberto Chiesi, and Gary Indiana, and excerpts from Gideon Bachmann’s on-set diary
From the CurrentView the Current »
Film Essays
Salò: The Written Movie
By August 25, 2008
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 Read more »
Salò: I, Monster
By August 25, 2008
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 Read more »
Salò: Breaking the Rules
By August 25, 2008
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 Read more »
Salò: The Present as Hell
By August 25, 2008
“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 Read more »
Salò
By July 21, 1998
On November 2, 1975, the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini was found dead—murdered, police said, by a young male prostitute. However lurid its details (the Roman tabloids ran huge front-page photos of the disfigured Read more »
Videos
News
Talking Shop with Criterion Producers
October 13, 2011
Our own Kim Hendrickson and Susan Arosteguy will be in Columbus, Ohio, tonight to discuss movies—and monsters—at the Wexner Center for the Arts.
Ciao, Caterina
September 16, 2010
You may not know the name, but you know the face. Caterina Boratto, known for her indelible performances in such Italian cinema classics as 8½, Juliet of the Spirits, and Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom Read more »
Clippings
Shock Cinema
February 09, 2011
Not all of cinema’s greatest achievements have always been widely embraced. The film writers of Time Out New York have just illustrated this maxim with a sensational article called “The 50 Most Controversial Read more »
Singing Morricone’s Praises
October 23, 2009
The eighty-one-year-old Ennio Morricone has been composing hypnotic music for film since the early 1960s, for projects ranging from spaghetti westerns (his whistling, woodwindy five-note theme Read more »
Pasolini’s Rome
December 02, 2008
Ian Thomson has written a fascinating piece on Pier Paolo Pasolini for the Times Online, on the occasion of the publication of two books on the Italian filmmaker-writer-poet: John David Rhodes’s new study Read more »
Press Notes
Press notes: Laughing Till It Hurts
October 07, 2008
It seems Pier Paolo Pasolini’s infamous Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom hasn’t lost any of its horrifying power. “The 1970s was a hotbed of scandalous art cinema, but Salò—unlike such X Read more »
