Introduction to Salo's Story

Introduction to Salo's Story | Appreciation | Reflection

1975 color movie 1 17 minutes

Italian European Union Film Company/France United American Film Company jointly produced.

Director: pier pasolini (based on Marquis de Sade's novel "One Hundred and Twenty Days in Sodom") Photography: Sandro Battaglia Giancarlo Granatelli Main Actors: Paul Bonaseri (as Duke) Giorgio Catati (as Bishop) Uberto Quintavale (as Judge) Aldo Valletti (as President).

abstract

At the end of World War II, Salo City, the capital of Mussolini's "social republic". Lake Salou is as calm as a mirror. Looking from the rows of trees, it is a scene of tranquility and happiness. In the conference room of a requisitioned luxury building, four middle-aged people (bishop, judge, president and duke) are signing a "Constitution". The terrorist regime was thus confirmed. Roads were blocked and rounded up everywhere. Mothers were crying, and boys and girls were scared to hide everywhere. The young victims who were rounded up were taken to this building. At this time, the first paragraph of Dante's three-stage narrative circle (namely, crazy circle, excrement circle and bloodthirsty circle)-crazy circle began. In the "carnival hall" of the building, four powerful "assistants" and four middle-aged people with lingering charm tried their best to stir up the lust of boys and girls: one played a provocative tune on the piano, and the other three took turns telling their personal experiences of how to have fun with those customers. At first, they also needed powerful people to give them advice. A "lady" was told at the beginning, "You shouldn't omit details." So she described all kinds of "details" with relish. In the story of the blonde, a teenager was dragged to the next room by an impatient power figure, but then he came out alone and said that the teenager didn't like him. The blonde offered her service, but she was turned down. Powerful people say, "I can wait." Another "lady" then gave a group of frightened girls a lesson on flirting with men. A girl was ordered to perform for a male mannequin. A girl present got a fright and cut her throat.

The ending of Crazy Circle shows a grotesque wedding scene. The bride and groom were forced to lie between a bunch of lilies. They were ordered to arrive at the scene. Although the two young people were frightened under duress, they also had real warm moments. They were about to * * * when a powerful man rushed forward and stopped them-"This flower is for us."

When another "lady" tells her story, those powerful people are discussing the "aesthetics" of violence. One of them defecated on the floor on the spot, forcing the registered victim who dared to disobey orders to kneel like a dog and eat steaming feces. Seeing this, two teenagers collapsed at the same time; One started * * *, and the other was lying on the floor scribbling some words with his fingers.

At the beginning of Dung Circle, a "lady" is sitting in front of the dresser, and a bomber whizzes past her head. She came to the carnival hall and told the story of how she killed her mother. "I sent her to another world. I have never felt this unspeakable pleasure. " There was a girl named Ava, whose mother died tragically in the round-up to protect her. After hearing the story of killing her mother, she was in unbearable pain. She knelt in front of this powerful man and cried, "I beg you to respect my sadness." Kill me. "When she was forced to eat a spoonful of feces, the bomber was flying over the building." It is puzzling that she should be so hesitant in the face of such delicious food, "said a powerful person." Another powerful person periodically reacts to this unbearable excitement and hides in the next room.

After this scene, the terrorist regime stipulated the feces management regulations. Each dormitory has several bedpans, and it is stipulated that everyone must defecate here, and it is absolutely forbidden to do anything. The next day, at a "banquet" for all the victims, a steamer full of excrement was served. At the same time, Mussolini made an impassioned voice and boasted about the "glorious" performance of the fascist youth league. Ava's nerves were about to collapse, and another girl whispered to her, "Pray to the Virgin Mary." The lady went on telling the story of her killing her mother.

Subsequently, a juvenile "ugly election" competition was held. Powerful people announced that the winner would be shot. They looked at the victim's body and discussed the "fun" of abnormal sexual behavior. "Abuse and abuse don't have a taste. Can be repeated endlessly. " The winner was held back by a pistol. The trigger was pulled, but it was not loaded. "You fool," said the executor, "what makes you think we will kill you? We will kill you a thousand times. "

Then there is the "bloodthirsty circle". Powerful people dress themselves slowly in the roar of bombers, adjusting earrings and wigs. The victim is waiting in the lobby. A powerful man shouted, "Clap your hands and sing." We want to make you happy before you die. Only a few of you can stay. "The accordion rang. The bishop began to preside over religious ceremonies. Several other powerful people are holding teenagers as brides. The young "bride" who is good at have it both ways is Lu Yiji. She murmured, "My friends are always ready. "At this moment, a teenager told a girl named Glagla that there was a photo of her boyfriend under her pillow. The informer triggered a series of exposure reactions. The frightened Granger announced that Ava and another girl were gay. Ava was caught red-handed, and then she reported that a teenager named Enkio was with a black maid. Enkeo was also caught red-handed. Before he could pay tribute to fascism, he was shot and killed by powerful people in a rage. They will never tolerate this * * * scene that exposes the true feelings of the world. Black girls were also shot at close range.

Finally, the victims were ordered to kill each other. A small group of teenagers shot at the "queens" with machine guns. These "queens" have been taught to be gay. The story told by "ladies" is getting crazier and crazier, when the girls are being dismembered by the juvenile firing squad in the yard. Those powerful people watch through the window with opera binoculars. The pianist suddenly stopped playing, went into her room and jumped out of the window. The sound of the bomb sounded in the distance. A young girl was dragged to the stake, and a lighted candle scorched her lower body. One teenager was flogged to death, the other was burned to pieces by a soldering iron, but those powerful people danced quicksteps. At this time, the two teenagers also danced indoors with the swing music played on the radio. They put on their riding boots and put their guns aside. One of them asked, "What's your girl's name again?" "Margarita," another answered. At this moment, the two teenagers became static modeling pictures, and those futuristic oil paintings hanging on the wall behind them seemed to be their boundaries.

Distinguish and appreciate

"Salo" is a unique phenomenon that caused widespread controversy in Italian films in the 1970s. Because it was the last film of pasolini, a famous writer and director who was brilliant and always found his way out, pasolini died mysteriously at the seaside of ostia soon after the film was finished, which attracted great attention from Italian critics at home and abroad, and made various explanations and comments on the ideological connotation and artistic expression of the film for a long time, which also aroused the research interest of the film director who tried to "combine Marx with Jesus Christ and even Freud". To evaluate this work, we should first briefly review pasolini's film creation.

Pier pasolini (1925- 1975) was a famous writer, poet, political commentator and linguist before 196 1 filmed the first film "The Lost Generation". His book published in the early 1960s laid the foundation for the establishment of film semiotics as a discipline, which was several years earlier than that of French Christian Metz. His first two films, The Lost Generation and Mother Rome (1962), are close to neo-realism in subject matter, and also touch on social contradictions and the sufferings of the lower classes in Italy, but they are completely different in style: they are extremely sensitive to all deformed and ugly things, as if they were completely imprisoned in a despicable and cruel atmosphere. An Italian critic once pointed out that his films "filtered" the aesthetics of neo-realism. Pasolini is familiar with the mentality of rogue proletarians in big cities, and his focus is on these, which is different from the lives of workers, farmers, craftsmen and middle and small intellectuals depicted in most new realistic films. Pasolini deeply sympathizes with the rogue proletarians who are at the bottom of society and have not lost their human dignity. In his mind, it seems that the whole world is full of evil, and his hero is doomed to destruction. He didn't even bring "the hope of two cents" to the audience. However, The Lost Generation and Mother Rome are two works with great artistic power and harsh truth. Since then, pasolini has never made a film reflecting the contemporary theme of everyday life in Rome.

The following film Matthew (1964) marked that pasolini began to explore in another direction. The charred land, the shepherd's shabby hut and the stone palace of King Elode in the film are shocking because of their primitive barbarism. In this world where people are sweating for the land and evil things have long been commonplace, Jesus Christ stands tall and tries to correct this world full of prejudice, blood and fear. However, this Jesus is not a preacher of love and tolerance and an angel of God in the Gospels, but an ordinary man. Pasolini's Jesus is firm, fearless and uncompromising, calling on people to act boldly and fight resolutely. This is a lonely revolutionary, trying to arouse the rebellious spirit in the hearts of ignorant and devastated slaves.

In the second half of 1960s, pasolini made new changes in his own creation, both in theme and style exploration. For example, Big Birds and Birds (1966) is a bizarre avant-garde film, with complex and contradictory philosophical content and full of pessimism and despair. It shows that pasolini's political stance is contradictory, and it was obviously influenced by the non-* * doctrine theory popular among some intellectuals in western Europe at that time. Since then, pasolini has been infatuated with Freudianism for a long time, and even his anti-fascist film Pigsty (1969) has been mixed with this aspect. In two adapted films, King Oedipus (1967) and Medea (1969), which appeared almost at the same time as the pigsty, he used orthodox Freudianism as his psychoanalysis exercise without showing independent artistic significance. This shows that his creation is in trouble.

However, at this time, pasolini took a new sharp turn in his own creation. From 1970 to 1973, decameron, Canterbury Tales and Arabian Nights were adapted from the original works of Boccaccio, Chaucer and Arabic mythology respectively. This is the first batch of films in pasolini that have been widely distributed commercially in western countries, bringing huge income to film investors and distributors. In these films, pasolini broke away from the avant-garde style he once loved, and showed his pursuit of the authenticity of daily life. He tried to find a new "local flavor" style close to ordinary people's lives. Through the interior, costumes, installations and role types, pasolini carefully reproduced the life scenes of the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. At the same time, these films are full of * * * scenes depicted in nude naturalistic style. Pasolini believes that these scenes are the embodiment of "freedom of human nature" and "liberation of human nature", which is in sharp contrast with the hypocrisy and formality that are so common in bourgeois society. 1974 in response to many western journalists' criticism that he deviated from the ideological and political position held by his early films, he said that his last three films (the above-mentioned "trilogy of life") were "the most thoughtful films he has ever made, but they were not clearly shown, but were deeply hidden". "I showed the audience the whole world, the feudal world, in which lust played an extremely profound and fanatical role in dominating everything. In this world, no one-even the last poor person-lacks self-esteem. I want to push the world out and say: you can compare it, I want to show it to you, I want to tell you, I want to remind you. "

1975, pasolini released Salo.

Salo, also known as Salo, or One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, is based on18th century French writer Thaad's novel One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom. However, the film shows the most notorious historical fact of Mussolini system. In the last 65,438+08 months of World War II, the Republic of Sharo was the last bastion of fascism. During this reign of terror, 72,000 people were slaughtered, 40,000 people were amputated, and about the same number were sent to concentration camps. In Machabotto alone, 2,000 villagers were killed and a large number of women and teenagers were raped or * * *. Salo is not an episode that the Italian people are willing to remember in modern Italian history. However, triggered by a cold inspiration, pasolini combined the facts and characters of this historical atrocity with a lot of pornographic content in Sade's novels. This novel was written by Thad in prison with great speed; This is a list of a series of abnormal sexual behaviors, from copulation with animals to copulation with corpses. When pasolini adapted One Hundred and Twenty Days in Sodom, he removed the most unsightly part of Sadr's sexual atrocities. He moved 18 written by Thad from the end of the 20th century to the middle of the 20th century, and moved the fictional place Sodoma to Salo's puppet Republic, which made his films have obvious political nature. Pasolini's brother was killed in 1944 when he resisted Mussolini's republic. He chose this period of history for a clear purpose.

Western critics believe that Salo is pasolini's most complete film. According to the structure of Dante's Divine Comedy, the film is divided into preface (which he calls "anti-hell") and three "narrative circles". The four powerful figures (bishop, judge, president, duke) are all taken from Thad's characters. They are not individual figures, but represent the four pillars supporting the reactionary regime-theocracy, legal power, political power and feudal forces. In a sense, they are monsters abstracted from class psychological analysis, showing various childish diseases and their erotic consolidation. Pasolini tried to show the complete degeneration of fascism in politics, society, culture and morality through these characters and their actions. In Italian films, there are many works that analyze the spiritual essence of the fascist and Nazi systems from a sexual point of view, which can be found in Bertau Luzi's "Man Drifting with the Flow" and 1900, as well as cavani's "Night Watch". However, the image provided by Salo is more concentrated, and the form it takes is more cruel and more pleasing to people.

Under the influence of those powerful people, human dignity has been brutally trampled on. Boys and girls not only became tools for them to vent at any time, but also developed into homosexuals through their instigation and their "assistants", and finally reached the point of telling on each other and killing each other. People become inhuman. In the "carnival hall" which belongs to the nature of hell, any real expression of human warmth is not allowed, and sexual behavior should also be a manifestation of sexual abnormality and madness. Even the extremely abnormal means of eliminating fear (young victims) and expelling excitement (powerful people) have been adopted. The only scene in the film that shows ordinary people, with the ending of the hero and heroine being shot immediately, shows that the representatives of the fascist system will never tolerate such human feelings. Salo is not only different from the trilogy of life in which natural people are immersed in * * * and enjoy the joy of life, but also different from the description of naked bed lens in western general commercial films to arouse people's lust. All the sexual descriptions here are abnormal, deformed and disgusting.

The ingenious but equally disgusting idea of "dung circle" is a continuation of pasolini's consistent protest against the capitalist "consumer society". As the most direct product of "consumer society", feces must be "consumed" by people themselves. Therefore, the feces of big people must be eaten by innocent and helpless little people; The excrement of a villain is "delicious" only if the villain enjoys it himself. Pasolini has written a lot of philosophical papers and political comments attacking the ills of capitalist society as a "consumer society", but he doesn't understand the profound roots of social ills and the internal causes of the disparity between the rich and the poor. He wrote an article entitled "Long live poverty! The political article shows his extremely chaotic and contradictory thoughts. " On the one hand, he called for "to make our culture no longer a poor culture, but a capitalist culture", and even shouted the slogan "Long live the capitalist struggle required by real life", on the other hand, he shouted "Let's go back to the past! Long live poverty! "

Pasolini has said many times that he thinks Marx's theory is absolutely correct, but he calls himself a heretical Marxist, not an ordinary Marxist. Marx and Jesus Christ stand side by side in his consciousness, and no one interferes with anyone. This is clearly seen in his film Matthew. Many of his films are also obviously dependent on Freudianism and its latest branch "Left Freudianism". Marcuse, the representative of this school, once claimed that the capitalist system could be "disintegrated" through the inversion of * * * with the so-called "critical potential" and the rebellion of intellectuals and molecules divorced from the working class. This "theory" obviously influenced many of pasolini's later films, including Salo.

However, at the end of his life, pasolini firmly stated that although he had different opinions with Italy's tactics on many issues in the past, he now stood with Italy * * * because he thought that Italy * * * was the main force in the struggle against the revival of neo-fascism, which he hated. In a telegram sent to a radical rally in Florence a few days before his death, he announced that he would attend the rally, but not as a radical, but as a Marxist, he would vote for * * *, and he trusted the new generation of * * * members. Shortly after his sudden death, the Italian newspaper Tuanjie published a series of articles, which seemed to summarize the artist's life and creation full of complex contradictions. Some articles call pasolini "one of the most outstanding representatives of national culture and social thought", and point out that the contradictions in his creation reflect the contradictions in the historical stage experienced by Italy. The editorial of Tuanjiebao even pointed out: "In his personality, in his exploration, in his creation and in his various activities, all tragic things happened at the same time, which led to his personal tragedy, his tragedy of survival and his tragedy of death. This is an interrelated causal chain. "

There are different opinions about the cause of pasolini's death. According to a western critic, he was killed with a stick by a boy of 17 years old. The boy couldn't bear to pester him that he was gay. Studying pasolini's life and works is not groundless. When antonioni, a famous director, learned the news of pasolini's death, he was deeply saddened by the huge losses suffered by Italian films. At the same time, he thought it necessary to point out that pasolini's death should be written into his own creative background. "This is the highest tragedy that he foresaw and studied in many ways." This is probably what antonioni suggested.

But one thing is certain. Pasolini's creation clearly shows that when a talented artist is in an environment bound by formal philosophical creeds, and the spiritual liberation of mankind should first be through the realistic struggle of social and political liberation, he can't clearly see how difficult his creative path is and how important it is for him to have a complete world outlook.

Salo, an extremely cold film, is also a very rare phenomenon in film history. It can provide an image example for us to study and analyze the profound ideological crisis and complex contradictory mentality of western film artists.