The theatre of cruelty and the limits of representation: Sade/Salò

When first released in 1975, Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom, directed by the already-notorious Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, aroused instant controversy. As a framework for its plot, Salò took the infamous 500-page novel by the Marquis de Sade, 120 Days of Sodom. In de Sade’s novel, four libertines, President de Curval, the Duc de Blangis, Durcet and the Bishop of X, sign a contract whose main clause is commitment to breaking as many taboos as they can possibly think of. With sixteen youths, eight girls and eight boys, servants, guards and four procurers and ex-prostitutes, the libertines isolate themselves in a remote chateau to re-enact their every fantasy. Filming Salò, Pasolini’s goal was to remain faithful to Sade’s novel. The characters, events and structure of the story remain the same. The more controversial aspect of the film, however, was Pasolini’s idea of relocating Sade’s novel into the actual historical context of the fascist Republic of Salò. For Pasolini, the gesture of moving Sade to Salò was to draw an actual analogy between the fascism and sadism. For some critics, the parallel between fascism and sadism was unfortunate exactly because it presented fascism, a real and palpable phenomenon, as an abstraction (the way that Sade’s world functions).