You Are Now Leaving Salò

I've always called myself a glutton for punishment and I really lived up to it this past semester. I signed up for the Italian Cinema class because the professor is one of my favorites. The one big project of the class was with pick a film, not viewed for class, and put together an annotated bibliography on it. As a Grad student, I had to go further and write the first draft of a paper based on said bibliography. My main intersection with Italian cinema is their horror scene but it was only covered very briefly (though I had the opportunity to give an impromptu mini-lecture on Dario Argento), I decided to pick a film that would present a real challenge for me. I've always like a good challenge which is where my procrastination comes from. I tend to wonder, "how long can I wait to do this before it becomes humanly impossible?" Well, I obviously waited too long on the bibliography since it wound up being crazy late. On the upside I learned a word in Italian, "eccolo." It means, "here it is."

Obviously, the film I chose was Pier Paolo Pasolini's final effort before his murder, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). When I first saw the film back in February it was to check off and mark the 666th film I'd seen from the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die book with which I am obsessed. Seven months had passed and I had to see the movie again before I could really proceed with any work. I wrote an entry here about it and I think my disturbed state comes through so the prospect of a second viewing was daunting at best.

Since misery loves company, I decided to sit my good friend Tyler down and make him watch it as well. As I see it, Salò is a very important film regardless of its reputation and content. Luckily, the Criterion Collection had re-released the film in a two-disc special edition so the quality was outstanding. I think it's a tribute in part to how good of friends Tyler and I are that he'd sit down to this movie that I talked about only with a shudder and watch it without knowing a single thing about it. I offered him a shot before we watched the film. All I told him was to remember the word "manga."

Tyler and I have been friends since early high school and have spent hours upon hours watching the most extreme horror films we could get our hands on. He's a man with a strong constitution, I mean he's married for god's sake (actually, his wife is wonderfully sweet and I adore her). In all the years we've been watching and talking about horror films, I've never seen him that bothered by a movie. I kept hearing him shift in his seat and mutter "oh, god" or "what the fuck?" throughout the film, especially when the title card reading Girone della Merda came up with the "Circle of Shit" subtitle. That issued an "oh, shit" from him. I'll admit I got a kind of sick glee from subjecting Tyler to Salò but I had to sit through it as well.

After the film, he was visible shaken and still can’t stand hearing anything in reference to it. The worst was yet to come for me. I knew that I wanted to write something regarding the politics of the film. The Criterion re-release included a nice booklet with half a dozen new articles about the film and a reprinted on set article by Pasolini's friend Giedon Bachmann. These and a handful of other articles were my sources of information for writing my paper.

What I didn't expect was to become so wrapped up in the research process. The more I read, the deeper my interest in the film became to the point where most of my conversations somehow got back around tothe work I was doing on Salò. I had appreciated the film's artistry after my first viewing but following all the researching and note taking I couldn't get the images out of my head.

I had to take at least a week off from research and from Salò in general to clear my mind. After this sort of cinematic detox period, I was ready to come back to my percolating paper, this time with the feeling that Pasolini's very conscious and literary use of structure was, for me, the key to understand the political allegory. Writing the paper was thankfully smooth and uneventful, my little TV next to me jumping between this scene and that shot. As I said in my blog entry for Salò, the visceral effect of the film is achieved from the overall culmination of the images as they pile up on each other. Viewing the film again in the fragmented form I require to write a paper proved that the "punch" of the film was taken out because a given scene or shot had no context.

So, what's the point of this quasi-editorial? I felt the need to purge Salò from my system, if only for the time being. It has become one of my favorite movies in the past month but one that I could only watch maybe once or twice per year. It is truly haunting but I think that's really a mark of its power and greatness. I see Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom as sort of the black sheep of the international film canon but its place there is firm.