AT THE FESTIVAL OF DANGEROUS IDEAS - Read Jane Mills introduction to the screening of SALO OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy, 1975)

Editor's Note: Jane Mills wishes to note the superb contribution to discussion of Salo by Professor Catherine Lumby when the film screened at the Randwick Ritz as part of an earlier extensive season of Pasolini's films supported by Cinema Reborn. 

                                                            ***********************************

Introduction to Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 days of Sodom (1975) by Associate Professor Jane Mills at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Dendy Cinema, 29 August 2026

 

I know of no work of art  as shocking as Pasolini’s Salò.

Murder, torture, sexual abuse are all depicted.

Most shocking of all is the depiction of absolute power and its abuse:

Abuse by for libertines -- an aristocrat, a bishop,  a magistrate and a high financier, representing the State, the Church, the Law and Big Business. Their power underpinned by  a network of informers and collaborators.  Their victims reduced to commodities, owned and disposed at whim. 
[Were Pasolini making the film today, would he,  I wonder, have included a media magnate?]

 

Salò is  shocking –and dangerous –  not only because of what it tells but how it tells. So many dangerous ideas inform how  it was made. 

·       Pasolini uses the classic writings of the Marquis de Sade and Dante to create a dark allegory to critique fascism, capitalist consumerism, and absolute power.

·       His sets display elegant art deco décor and avant garde artwork – art that the Nazis banned as decadent— to highlight the ugly brutality of the libertines.

·       The film’s creative cinematography positions audiences not as the victims (which might invite us to empathise with them), but as the abusers,- thereby making us, the audience, collaborators.

These are dangerous ideas, pushing filmmaking ideas to their limits. 

 

But even more dangerous than Pasolini’s  ideas opposing fascism and neoliberal consumerist economics, are these ideas themselves. De Sade’s sadomasochism shows how power reduces the human body to a commodity. Neo-capitalist consumerism requires the brutal destruction, enslavement, and extermination of indigenous and traditional societies – i.e. what Pasolini called “anthropological genocide.” 

 

These dangerous ideas aren’t  why  the film was persistently banned in Australia. But before outlining the Australian history of censoring Salò, let’s remind purselves that in 1966,  the Roman Catholic Church abolished its Index of Forbidden Books and Films.  It shifted its philosophy from enforced institutional censorship to trusting the mature moral conscience of individual believers.

Not so Australian governments. Our Film Classification Board might state: “adults should be able to read, hear, see and play what they want.”  But on this, it doesn’t deliver.

The film was released in 1975 – three days after Pasolini was tortured and murdered.  In 1976 Australia banned it.  A year later. No one could buy, sell, import, exhibit or see it – it offended, was obscene.

In 1993, it was unbanned. The classifiers deemed it: “a serious work of art pursuing a serious political purpose.” The sky didn’t fall in, but in the mid ’90s, “reason began to slumber, and monsters gathered.”  A revised classification code now ordained artistic merit was no longer permissible as a major defense. 

And in 1998, Salò was re-banned.

In 2010 it was unbanned. Salò received a R18+ rating.  Which should mean anyone over the age of 18 can see it.  More on this later.

 

The censors’ language justifying the bans often makes no sense. 

1.         You should know the Classification Board does NOT ban or censor, it only “classifies.” However, one of the categories is RC, meaning ‘Refused Classification.’  This means it can’t be sold, hired, advertised, distributed, or shown publicly without potentially incurring a fine of up to $825,000 and/or 10 years’ imprisonment.

I’m no English language scholar. But I can spot a euphemism when I see one. And as George Orwell wrote:  “political language has to consist largely of euphemism…and sheer cloudy vagueness to make brutal actions sound acceptable.”

2.         Obscene supposedly  means “to cause or give offence.”  To offend means: “saying or doing something rude, upsetting or embarrassing.”  It also means: “to go against a law, duty, or standard.”

·       Hopefully, fascism does go against our laws. 

·       I also hope it  goes against the moral standard to which most Australians adhere.

But this is an entirely circular argument: You “offend” by going against a law, duty or standard by going against a law, duty or standard. And Logic 101  teaches that using the conclusion of an argument as its own premise, is a logical fallacy. More evidence, I suggest, of what happens when reason slumbers. 

 

3.         As to the “revolting fetishes” of which you're about to see plenty.

Are audiences –are you– really going to rush home afterwards to eat poo and ask your partner to wee on you?  And if you do?  I should care –let alone mind? 

(Pasolini’s recipe incidentally: melted Swiss chocolate, condensed milk, broken biscuits and marmalade. And a mixture of weak tea and apple juice for the pee.)

 

4.         Then there’s  “artistic intent”: I am completely certain Pasolini had no intention of ‘offending.’  His intentions were to shock, disgust, revolt  Or, as he put it: “to awaken a slumbering society and remind audiences of past horrors.”

These horrors were Salò, the puppet Nazi state that ruled most of Italy from September 1943 to April 1945. Pasolini applies “obscenity” metaphorically to the absence of the rule of law under fascism. 

 

5.         As for the film’s offensive “cruelty with high impact”? Can the impact for seeing it even approach the actual impact during the 17 months of Salò?

·       The 9,000 Jews and 30,000 political opponents, partisans and workers arrested and deported? 

·       90% of whom who died in Nazi extermination camps?

·       The 70,000 civilians and resistance members killed in reprisal massacres by German and Italian Republic forces?

 

6.         Lastly, that R18+ ruling: Adults can now only see Salò as a home video package, containing contextualizing material – such as essays and documentaries. (Don’t get me wrong, the documentaries and essays with the Criterion BluRay  are excellent.) But this patronizing attitude sincerely offends me. Since when has adult education been mandatory in Australia? 

Similarly Cinema Screenings are permitted at festivals only if contextualizing critical analysis is provided. I, ladies and Gtntlement, am your mandatory adult education! This ruling contributes yet more “cloudy vagueness”  aiming make censoring actions censorship acceptable.

~~~<<>>~~~

When I saw Salò again recently (for the third time), the film awakened me not just to past horrors but to present horrors.

The film’s arguably comic ‘beautiful bum contest’, evoked television reality shows where contestants willingly participate in their own commodification.  And the film’s absurdist weddings reminded me of ‘Married at First Sight.’

They’re perfect examples of Pasolini’s notion of anthropological genocide which he defined as “a form of destruction that homogenizes society and destroys authentic human relationships by turning the human body itself into a marketable commodity.”

And how could I not think of:

·       the absence of the rule of law in today’s internment camps and occupied territories, 

·       current leaders remaining in power despite arrest warrants for committing genocide and other war crimes?   

·       a President actively renaming art centres and campaigning to disable the International Criminal Court? 

To my amazement, for the first time, I also saw some tenderness and protest, even some hope.  

Now, this is NOT  what Pasolini intended.  He intended to shock us from our complacent, complicit slumbers while powerholders abuse with impunity. 

I recently likened Salò’s relationship with Australian Classification Board to game of ping pong. I regret making this comparison. Censorship is not a game. 

Salò awakens audiences to the dangerous idea that in a world fearful of ideas, the biggest threat to democracy is not the portrayal of violence and evil, but the silencing of those who express dangerous ideas like accountability, freedom, equality.

This is a film that’s unwatchable and must be watched.

On Leonardo Sciascia - Rod Bishop reviews A SICILIAN MAN: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy’s Soul

A SICILIAN MAN: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy’s Soul, by Caroline Moorehead, Chatto and Windus, 2026  

The great Sicilian author Leonardo Sciascia dedicated most of his life to exposing the Mafia and the widespread corruption he saw in Italian institutions. 

Remarkably, he lived long enough to publish 14 books and copious essays, with many of his works adapted for the screen. These included 11 feature films and 7 feature length television programs.

Lifelong friends with Pasolini, there were also unrealized film collaborations with Roberto Rossellini, Sergio Leone and Michaelangelo Antonioni.

In this impressively researched biography, Caroline Moorehead gives a detailed account of the rise of the Mafia after WW2. She includes the scandalous friars at the Capuchin monastery in the central Sicilian town of Mazzarino. 

In 1956, shots were fired in the monastery and Brother Agrippino emerged wounded from his room, a victim of mistaken-friar-identity. A letter soon arrived threatening to destroy an entire monastery and kill all its friars unless two million lire was paid in ransom. 

A local landowner was then murdered in his Fiat 600 after ignoring dire warnings from an older friar during confession in church.

The local police uncovered:

“…a web of corruption and extortion, organized by friars during confession and carried out by Mafia enforcers, with local people obliged to hand over large sums of money to the monastery’s gardener. In the monastery itself, were found stashes of cash, guns and vast quantities of delicious food. The friars, who had taken vows of poverty, had set up bank accounts all over Sicily and were making loans at extortionate rates. They had become millionaires.”

A Mafia-run criminal covenant no less; the friars a microcosm of the Mafia’s re-emergence in Sicilian life after WW2. Kept under some control during Mussolini’s Fascist dictatorship, the Mafia stayed underground until the end of the war. 

Moorehouse writes of the Allied invasion of Sicily; and Charles Poletti, a former governor of New York who was parachuted into Palermo and tasked with the preparations for rebuilding and restoring democracy in a liberated Sicily and the rest of Italy.

Despite Poletti’s fluency in Italian (including Sicilian and Neapolitan dialects) he had an interpreter and driver named Vito Genovese, who had been a Mafia Don in New York, but was now back in his Italian homeland with the Allied troops.

Genovese had donated $4 million to Mussolini’s fascist party, but switched sides with the Allied invasion and offered his services to the US Army.

He was a close friend - since childhood - with the notorious Mafia drug lord Lucky Luciano, a Sicilian regarded as the single most important figure in the creation of the American Mafia. 

Mafia boss Genovese, as an interpreter to Colonel Charles Poletti was able to offer him advice: who better to govern than the proven anti-fascists, the men who had been imprisoned as mafiosi by the Fascists in the late 1920s? 

The Mafia were subsequently appointed to government, mayoral and high administrative positions by the apparently politically naïve Allies, who couldn’t leave Sicily fast enough. 

“The Mafia was now back in business. The Allies had profoundly, disastrously, misunderstood the reality of Sicily…not surprisingly, the first thing the Mafia did was to organize a vast black market…and the Mafia grew very rich”. 

The Mafia black markets supplied 70% of Sicily’s food supply. Genovese established one of these black markets, and he with Poletti, are two significant figures in Francesco Rosi’s Lucky Luciano (1973), a crime drama that clearly places the blame for the rise of the Mafia after WW2 at the feet of the Americans. 

Vito Genovese can be seen posing in US army uniform in a photograph with the notorious black market bandit leader Salvatore Giuliano. Among those murdered by Giuliano’s bandit gang between the Allied invasion in 1943 and his death in1950, were 87 Carabinieri and 33 Polizia (see also Salvatore Giuliano, dir, Francesco Rosi, 1962).

 

Leonardo Sciascia

Leonardo Sciascia was born in the impoverished Sulphur mining town of Racalmuto (‘a dead village’) in 1921, with no electricity or water, and grew up with Mussolini in power. 

From an early age his view of a Sicily as corrupted by Fascists, the Mafia, the Catholic Church, the carabinieri, and later the Christian Democrats, was fully formed. He witnessed the Mafia spread all over Italy and by the late 1970s, his fame as an anti-Mafia author was known nationwide. Fellow author Gesualdo Bufalino said: “Sciascia became spokesman for the collective conscience of Italy.” 

He did more than any other writer to reveal and expose the Mafia and the corrupt politics endemic to Italy.  

Sciascia’s novels, stories and screenplays become notable additions to Italian cinema, and its growing sub-genre of Mafia gangster films. 

They include: To Each His Own aka We Still Kill the Old Way, dir. Elio Petri (1967); The Day of the Owl, aka Mafia and aka The Mafia Makes the Law, dir. Damiano Damiani (1968); A Matter of Conscience, dir. Giovanni Grimaldi (1970); Bronte, chronicle of a massacre, dir. Florestano Vancini (1972); Illustrious Corpses, dir. Francesco Rosi (1976); One Way or Another, dir. Elio Petri (1976); A Sold Life, dir. Aldo Florio (1976); The Moro Affair, dir. Giuseppe Ferrara (1986); Open Doors, dir. Gianni Amelio (1990); A Simple Story, dir. Emidio Greco (1991) and The Council of Egypt, dir. Emidio Greco (2002).

There were seven feature length films for television – The Man I Killed, Board Game, Western di cose Nostre, Grand Hotel des Palmes and remakes of The Day of the Owl, The Council of Egypt and To Each His Own.

Recently, a collection of writings on the cinema by Sciascia was published in Italian as Questo non è un racconto (This is not a story).

Included are 17 pages from 1972 by Sciascia titled Per Sergio Leone. It’s an unrealized treatment for a film on Italo-American hoodlums in prohibition-era New York City, and with recognizable similarities to Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984).

There are seven writer credits on the Leone film, including Harry Grey’s autobiographical novel The Hoods, but Sciascia is not included.

Although these 17 pages are not mentioned in A Sicilian Man, Caroline Moorehead refers to an acrimonious lunch in Palermo between Leone and Sciascia over a film collaboration. It seems Sciascia, abandoning lunch, left the table first with Leone following soon after.

Among other projects mentioned in Questo non è un racconto is a 62-page script for Rossellini’s Viva I’ltalia! later titled Garibaldi (1960), but without a credit for Sciascia. Also, a never realized project with Michelangelo Antonioni, Patire o morire (To Suffer or to Die).

Although quite different men, Sciascia was a long-term friend of Pier Paolo Pasolini and helped him to set up Officina, a new magazine in Bologna. Pasolini, who believed “the intellectual courage to tell the truth and political reality are incompatible in Italy”, told Sciascia that his book Todo Modo (One Way or Another) was the best metaphor he had ever read for thirty years of Christian Democrat rule and Mafiosi power.

The two men saw themselves as fighting side by side against the Christian Democrats, and the spread of corruption and Mafia power. They also mourned the lost dialects and the peasant worlds of their youth. After Pasolini’s murder, Sciascia said: “Now he is no longer there, I realise that I have to speak louder.”

Sciascia wasn’t necessarily enamored by the cinema: “The truth of literature and the fiction of the cinema work on two untranslatable planes.” He did praise Francesco Rosi’s adaptation of Illustrious Corpses (Cadaveri excellenti) and thought it penetrated the “agitated labyrinth of our daily existence”. In that film, magistrates, judges, police and reformers are gunned down by a vengeful Mafia. Sciascia felt Rosi had kept faith with his view of venal leaders and discredited institutions.

But he suffered through his friend Pasolini’s final film Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom: “It’s terrible, terrible…one should never make such despairing films.” 

From the Archive: On HUMAN CAPITAL (Paolo Virzi, Italy, 2013) - Part Two - Tom Ryan talks to director Paolo Virzi, about his screen adaptation of Stephen Amidon's novel.

Paolo Virzi

In a  previous post Tom Ryan spoke to novelist Stephen Amidon  about the adaptation of his novel "Human Capital". In this, the second part of Tom's consideration of the 2013 Italian film Il capitale umano/Human Capital, Tom talks to the film’s director and co-writer, Paolo Virzi. 

***************************************

Interview with Paolo Virzi

“Behind the story of the film is our national crisis.”

 

TR: What first drew you to Stephen Amidon’s novel?

 

Paolo Virzi: I realised that it was telling a story that had to do with the globalisation of the financial world and with the conflicts between generations and the influence of familial relationships in this huge suburb of privilege that is our part of the world. So I thought the book was amazing for the way it deals with the wellness-without-happiness that defines the Western world.

It was suggested to me by an Italian novelist, Niccolo Ammaniti. At the time, I was working on a theatrical production and his wife was in the cast. I was reading Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full [1998] and Niccolo said to me, ‘Why don’t you read Human Capital? It’s by a younger novelist with the same skill at representing the discomfort of the new upper class.’ I found it not only did this but also twisted the upper class, the middle-class and the ‘miserable’ together.

 

What you say points to the political edge in all of the film of yours that I’ve seen: for example, Caterina in the City. Social context always seems to be important to them. Is it your view that it’s not worth telling a story unless you do it through the eye of social politics?

 

Let’s say that many of us in the Italian film industry have this nasty habit of infusing our big-screen entertainments with the Big Troubles the world faces. It’s an old habit. I didn’t invent this. It’s something I love in the classical Italian movies. I believe that filmmaking should build something entertaining, but I think the emotion becomes stronger if it prompts you to think about the world you live in. 

I don’t like filmmakers who shout at us, who spell out their points of view explicitly in the dialogue. I like to hide the issues inside so that the viewer can enjoy the movie. But if he likes to explore the meaning of that, there’s another gift waiting for him.

It’s not only there in the work of filmmakers like Francesco Rosi and Elio Petri, which is more obviously oriented towards political commentary, but also in the commedia all’Italiana of Mario Monicelli, Dino Risi and Pietro Germi. They always have something to say about Italian society, something you can consider social commentary. 

I have always liked to do this in my movies. We are now on the border of our downfall, so it’s a moment of anxiety, of concern for the future. So, when Human Capital fell into my hands, I had been looking for something to evoke this anxiety, this discomfort, but in an entertaining way. 

I feel that it is my first duty as a filmmaker to make sure that audiences enjoy themselves. But if you give them something more and if they are adult that is good, especially if they don’t have to pay extra for the ticket.

 

Did you have conversations with Stephen Amidon about the book? Was he involved in your planning?

 

Well, we exchanged opinions by mail. We didn’t meet until the movie was done, last November, when I was directing the last edition of the Torino Film Festival and he was a jury member. I told him of my admiration for his work and he was surprised that someone wanted to make an Italian movie from his story, which is set in Connecticut. But he was very generous with us. He was enthusiastic about our script and this gave us a lot of courage. Now we have become friends and are putting together a story for a new movie.

 

[Spoiler alert for the next question and answer]

 

How did he respond to the changes you’ve made to the plotting of the story and the characters? For example, the Luca character doesn’t die at the end. Why did you change that?

 

The novel contains a huge amount of material, enough for a television mini-series. There are more characters, more points of view and more back-stories than we could deal with. We needed to tell our story in one hour and 50 minutes and to come up with the sharpest structure that we could.

With Luca, I liked the idea that there was only one dead character we needed to deal with and it allowed us to focus on a single issue of “human capital”, the terms of settlement with the family for his death. Luca is punished by the prison sentence he receives. The man who dies is unknown to us. We barely know his name; we just see him for a few minutes, then he is in a coma, then he is dead.

And one more thing, maybe: there’s an old rule that, if a young character, or a boy, or a kid dies in your story, you are blackmailing the audience. I also liked the idea that the last shot of the movie was an exchange of glances between two people who are part of a new generation of Italians and I’m hoping that they’re going to turn the page. 

 

The novel ends with the two women providing us with a glimmer of hope through their relationship, some kind of hope.

 

Some kind, yes. Because in this story, there are no heroes. The victims are guilty. There is no innocence. If Serena and Luca had been able to hide his responsibility, they would have sent the innocent Massimiliano to jail. So, while you’re pushed to empathise with them, they’re making mistakes and doing the wrong thing too. 

Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, Fabrizio Bruni

This is a group of characters who all make big mistakes. Even a good woman like Roberta, the psychiatrist, who is a generous person but is also implicated for her failure to understand her husband or what is happening. 

This is a story in which you can’t divide the good and the evil. Of course, the two fathers especially… The social climber seems even more horrible than the hedge-fund guy, but you can see his point of view. He’s struggling for his family. 

I like to see the way all of the characters have their reasons, which was helped by the way the story was broken up into chapters, each enabling us to see what’s happening through the experiences of different characters.

 

The book has the death in Chapter 10; you move it to the start. Why?

 

I think it’s an old technique. You start with a noir atmosphere, with a dark atmosphere; you present a critical event; and then you examine how each character’s destiny is connected to that moment.

 

In that context, it’s also haunting to watch this character reappear in each of the stories, walking around as a waiter at the presentation ceremony, and then being carried in on a stretcher as Dino and his wife leave the hospital late at night. 

 

Yes. You’re following different stories but there is an alarm underneath. Did you enjoy that.

 

Yes. I think it worked very well.

 

Did you read the book after watching the film?

 

Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, Human Capital

Yes, after. And then I looked at the movie again.

 

I don’t think we betrayed the spirit of the book. The deep issues that the book contains is what I fell in love with. That is why my friend Stephen is happy. He also confessed to me that, if he had read the script before he published the novel, he would have made some of the changes that we did. This is a slow-burning thriller.

 

I was interested in the way you make the adult characters, especially the male ones, much harder-edged and less sympathetic than they are in the novel. Even Luca’s uncle becomes sympathetic in the novel.

 

It’s true. The uncle became a very small character in our movie although 

he was very important in the novel. For us, he’s just a two-scenes 

character. And in the novel, Carla [Carrie] is less pathetic and her 

situation is more dramatic. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi gives the character 

a range of faces including the ridiculous sides of this upper-class 

woman. And Dino [Drew] is more désagréable…

 

Disagreeable.

 

Yes. That was me speaking French. I imagine that in Australia you speak every language because you are such a melting-pot of the rest of the world.

 

We eat a lot of food from around the world, especially Italian, but we don’t speak languages as well as we should. We’re a long way away.

 

[Laughs]

 

The Dino character in Australia, and in America too, would be described as a “doofus”. Is that a word you know?

 

No. Can you write it down for me, because I’m going to be pitching the story in the USA. It means he’s a social climber?

 

It does, but it refers more to how pathetic he is. He’s a loser. Much more of a hopeless case than the character in the novel, who’s more of an Everyman. I’m not a doofus… at least, I don’t think I am … but I could have been the character in the novel. [mutual laughter]

Why did you choose Brianza as the setting?

 

Well, it’s the richest area of our country and near the big-business centre of Milan, where we have our stock market. Milano is our New York, our Wall Street. Brianza has a special social and political meaning for us. Because of Berlusconi’s connections with the area, it also suggests something about our recent controversies.

The novel is set in 2000 and the stock market fall that takes place at the end happens immediately after September 11. We moved the chronology to 2010 where in Italy something very specific occurred: in June, our president Berlusconi was saying a crisis doesn’t exist and the restaurants were full. In November and December, it happened that our national debt was attacked by the hedge-fund raiders, we were on the brink of economic collapse, the Prime Minister was forced to resign, and the European banks took control of our country. 

So behind the story of the film is our national crisis. When Carla says – it’s a line that isn’t in the book – “You bet on the downfall of our country and you won,” and her husband answers, “We won,” it refers to what was happening to our country at that moment of history.

During the development of the screenplay, I wanted to know more about the issues that the story raises, so I called on the help of friends who know much more about these things than I do. We are still on the border of a downfall, but some things have changed and we have a new government. But we don’t know yet what will happen.

 

It is indeed a savage irony at the end that these characters’ financial survival happens because of the downfall of the national economy.

 

For certain groups of investors, it was like this. They don’t bet on the quality of a product or a brand. They “play short”. It’s a term they use: to bet on a downfall. It’s what happened with Greece.

 

Apparently, some politicians were angry and outspoken at the film’s depiction of the region. Were they serious, or did you have to pay them to give you the free publicity?

 

[Laughs] I would have preferred to speak to them about the story, but I was obliged to respond to these miserable wretches who were just looking for a stage to perform on. Of course, the movie is not against the people of the North. That would be weird: I couldn’t make a movie against a population. 

The right-wing political and media attack against the movie happened before anybody had seen it. We are a weird country; we’re always divided and always have been. I’m considered as a left-wing filmmaker who provokes knee-jerk reactions. It is very funny, really, but I wasn’t happy because I’m interested in dealing with serious matters and not stupid things like this. 

 

I understand that the film is to be remade in the US? And perhaps as a miniseries in the UK? And in Korea and India?

 

Nothing is set yet. I can’t say much at this stage. There is interest in a remake from a famous New York production company…

 

Which you will be involved in?

 

Only as a supporter. I will not direct that. They have a very good name in mind as a director. And there is interest from Fox International for a South Korean remake, which is very, very weird to me. 

 

It demonstrates what you discovered, that it’s a universal story.

 

Yes, yes. The story could be set around London, or Paris, or Brussels, or maybe even Melbourne.