Pasolini’s final film is highly provocative and legendary for it’s infamy, and we are proud to present for you this rare opportunity to experience it in the cinema. Warning. It is not for everyone.
Malmö Antifascista and Hypnos Theatre present the newest edition of Cinema Resistenza featuring Pasolini’s legendary film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom
Based on the book 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis De Sade – a work conceived as a revolutionary attack against the four pillars of French society, designed to bring down the old order. Pasolini transposes De Sade’s 18th century allegory to the final days of fascist Italy. Four fascist libertines – a duke, a bishop, a magistrate and a president – round up 9 teenage boys and girls and subject them to 120 days of physical, mental and sexual torture.
“Pasolini has constructed an elaborate allegory that uses 1944-45 fascism in Italy to represent all the ills of the modern world (circa 1975) where corruption and decadence have gained unlimited power. Nothing seen in Salo is intended to be taken literally; viewers are to look at it as an intentionally grim and repulsive physical metaphor for a universal moral and spiritual condition. […] Processing Salo is a difficult experience. […] As a traditional motion picture, Salo is an abject failure, but it never seeks to be just another movie.” (James Bernadelli, critic at Reelviews)’
Let us consider that the horrors we will witness during this screening are done so in the comfort and safety we are so privileged to enjoy. Cruelty, such as it is depicted in this film, is present in our world. We may discuss the film as allegorical, but for past and present and future victims, the experience is everything except an intellectual exercise.