Pier Paolo Pasolini

Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom

Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom

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.

Share

Film Info

  • Italy
  • 1976
  • 116 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.85:1
  • Italian
  • Spine #17

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

  • New, restored high-definition digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • "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: Essays by Roberto Chiesi and Naomi Greene, and essays by Neil Bartlett, Breillat, Sam Rohdie, and Gary Indiana, and excerpts from Gideon Bachmann’s on-set diary

New cover by Rodrigo Corral

Purchase Options

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

  • New, restored high-definition digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • "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: Essays by Roberto Chiesi and Naomi Greene, and essays by Neil Bartlett, Breillat, Sam Rohdie, and Gary Indiana, and excerpts from Gideon Bachmann’s on-set diary

New cover by Rodrigo Corral

Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom
Cast
Paolo Bonacelli
Duke
Giorgio Cataldi
Bishop
Umberto P. Quintavalle
Magistrate
Aldo Valletti
President
Caterina Boratto
Signora Castelli
Elsa De Giorgi
Signora Maggi
Hélène Surgère
Signora Vaccari
Sonia Saviange
Pianist
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

Related Films

Current

Salò: The Written Movie
Salò: The Written Movie

The spectacle of joyless lubricity and dehumanizing cruelty and carnage visualized by Pier Paolo Pasolini could not be further from the dry, dense, and circular arguments to be found in the printed pages of his bibliographic sources.



By Gary Indiana

Essays — Oct 5, 2011
Salò: A Cinema of Poetry
Salò: A Cinema of Poetry

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s landmark film intermingles the sacred and profane, associating libertines with holy music, the avant-garde of the thirties, and neoclassical and biblical references.

By Sam Rohdie

Essays — Oct 5, 2011
Salò: I, Monster
Salò: I, Monster

Director Catherine Breillat writes about the primal pleasures of watching Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notorious film.



By Catherine Breillat

Essays — Oct 5, 2011
Salò: The Present as Hell
Salò: The Present as Hell

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s work demonstrates an aversion for the present while simultaneously suggesting the impossibility of escaping it, and thus the need to confront it.

By Roberto Chiesi

Essays — Oct 5, 2011
Watching Salò
Watching Salò

Vilified, censored, banned, denied commercial distribution, and long unavailable, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s infamous film lives more in reputation and rumor than in memory.

By Neal Bartlett

Essays — Oct 5, 2011
Salò: Breaking the Rules
Salò: Breaking the Rules

No film better illustrates Pier Paolo Pasolini’s challenge to conventional representations, to the social and cultural consensus, than his 1976 masterwork.

By Naomi Greene

Essays — Oct 5, 2011
Salò
Salò
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 man…

By John Powers

Essays — Jul 22, 1998

Explore

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Writer, Director

Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ability to simultaneously embrace conflicting philosophies—he was both a Catholic and a Marxist; a modern-minded, openly gay man who looked to the distant past for inspiration and comfort; a staunch leftist who at one point in the late sixties infamously spoke out against left-wing student protests (sympathizing instead with the working-class police)—was matched by the multifariousness of his professional life, as a filmmaker, poet, journalist, novelist, playwright, painter, actor, and all-around intellectual public figure. What he is best known for, however, is undoubtedly his subversive body of film work. He was a student of the written word, and among his earliest movie jobs was writing additional dialogue for Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957). Soon he was directing his first film, Accattone (1961), a tale of street crime whose style and content greatly influenced the debut feature of his friend Bernardo Bertolucci, La commare secca (1962), for which Pasolini also supplied the original story. The outspoken and always political Pasolini’s films became increasingly scandalous—even, to some minds, blasphemous—from the gritty reimagining of the Christ story The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) to the bawdy medieval tales in his Trilogy of Life (1971–1974). Tragically, Pasolini was found brutally murdered weeks before the release of his final work, the grotesque, Marquis de Sade–derived Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), still one of the world’s most controversial films.

More Pier Paolo Pasolini