Italy
1975
112 minutes
Color
1.85:1
Italian
17
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notorious final film, 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 1944 Fascist Italy 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.
| The Duke | Paolo Bonacelli |
| The Bishop | Giorgio Cataldi |
| The Magistrate | Umberto P. Quintavalle |
| Durcet | Aldo Valletti |
| Signora Castelli | Caterina Boratto |
| Signora Maggi | Elsa De Giorgi |
| Signora Vaccari | Helene Surgere |
| Pianist | Sonia Saviange |
| Director | Pier Paolo Pasolini |
| Written and directed by | Pier Paolo Pasolini |
| Music | Ennio Morricone |
| Director of photography | Tonino Delli Colli |
| Editing | Nino Baragli |
| Sets | Dante Ferretti |
| Costumes | Danilo Donati |
| Screenplay collaboration | Sergio Citti |
SPECIAL EDITION DOUBLE-DISC SET:
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 for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is one of the most recognizable in movie history) to Italian . . .
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 . . .
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-rated shockers as Last Tango in Paris or In the Realm of the Senses—has not been . . .
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 . . .
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 . . .
“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 . . .
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 . . .
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 . . .
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 . . .
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 corpse), his death struck many as metaphorically apt, and not only because . . .
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