Original subtitles

“Anyone interested in civics must see Night' and Fog and Salo'. ”

Camera.

Action!

MAY 1975 -FINAL DAYS \ OF SHOOTING AT CINECITTA

Efizio, take a step forward.

Claudio, move in.

Stop! Okay-

SALO': YESTERDAY AND TODAY

How will we do it from close up?

A lot better.

Okay, Valletti.

You know what you're to do, right?

You go over there. You get undressed.

You throw the robe on the -

You light the candle

and walk forward holding it.

L'll light the candle. Everyone else is naked.

Don't you have some nasty little role for me?

Wait till you see what you do in the next scene.

Thank goodness.

You can't imagine.

Thank goodness.

No, you take the robe off here.

Take the robe off and toss it on the chair.

You light the candle,

and then, without hurrying, you take it over there.

And when you get near, pretend to burn Tonino's genitals.

Yes, get up close to him like that.

You get close to his genitals,

and that's when l'll call “cut!”

Attention, please!

Just like before, okay?

L'll do one more pan shot.

On “action,” he starts wailing, and the rest of you hold him still.

When I say “Valletti,” you light the candle.

Attention, please!

Giorgio, a little more to the left.

Move a little closer to Umberto. There.

Tonino, look into the camera.

Look right here.

Understand?

On “action,” you scream and cry,

and look as much as you can into the camera.

But not the rest of you. You hold him still.

Attention, please. Camera.

Action!

Start shouting! Look into the camera!

Scream! Scream!

No, Valletti! Start moving when I say “Valletti.”

Hold him down more.

At a certain point you can -

Who could do it the meanest?

Hold his head steady so he can't move it up and down

so I can see his eyes, okay?

Attention, please. Camera.

Be serious, Tonino.

Look into the camera.

Now yell.

Don't laugh.

Open your eyes.

Wider.

Open your eyes wider.

“Money has corrupted everything. I'm going into hiding.”

(Pasolini as quoted by Ninetto Davoli in Libération)

The film had been offered to Sergio Citti,

and I worked with him on the screenplay.

My main contribution

was giving it a Dante-esque structure,

which was probably already de Sade's intention.

That is, I divided the screenplay into circles.

I gave the screenplay a kind of Dante-esque verticality and order.

But while we were working on the screenplay,

Sergio Citti gradually grew disenchanted with it

because he got an idea for another film.

Whereas I fell in love with it bit by bit,

and especially when the flash of inspiration came

to transport de Sade to the Salo of 1944.

The idea for a film is never the product 0f a series 0f thoughts,

or at least it's interrupted by a flash of inspiration,

like what happened in this case with de Sade.

I had this flash of inspiration the moment I decided

to transpose The 120 Days oi Sodom to the spring of 1944.

That's when I saw the choreography of Fascism.

The formal idea,

the flash of inspiration I have of what a film should be,

can't be expressed in words.

You get it or you don't. I can't explain it.

l mean, when I decide to make a film

it's because I have a flash of inspiration

that is the formal idea for the film, the synthesis of the film.

Sadomasochism is an eternal characteristic of man.

It existed during de Sade's time, and it exists now.

But that's not what matters most. That matters too,

but the real meaning of the sex in my film

is as a metaphor for the relationship between power and its subjects.

So all of de Sade's sadomasochism

has a very clear and specific function."

to show what power does to the human body,

how it reduces the human body to a commodity.

lt's basically the annulment of the personality of “the other.”

So it isn't just about power, but what I call the anarchy of power.

Nothing is more anarchic than power.

Power can essentially do what it wants,

and what it wants is completely arbitrary

or dictated by its economic needs that elude common logic.

But besides the anarchy of power,

this film is also about the nonexistence of history.

That is, history as such,

as seen by Eurocentric culture,

by Western rationalism and empiricism as well as Marxism -

the film seeks to show that it doesn't really exist.

I wouldn't say it's for the times we live in now.

I take it as a metaphor of the relationship between power

and those subjected to it.

S0 ifs a valid reality for all times.

Clearly, the motivation came from the fact

that I detest the power in today's world,

which manipulates the body horribly

and rivals Himmler and Hitler in every way.

Eat, eat, eat!

It manipulates the body by transforming it into conscience,

the very worst way,

establishing new values that are alienating and false.

Consumerist values that fulfill what Marx calls

a genocide of vital and real earlier cultures.

For example, it destroyed Rome. Romans no longer exist.

A young Roman no longer exists. He's a corpse of himself

who's still alive biologically

in an imponderable state between the ancient values

of the underlying popular Roman culture

and the new, consumerist, petit bourgeois values forced upon him.

Eat it.

Eat.

These are arguments I'm making to you. lt's all in the film.

I don't know if it will be clear, if the ordinary viewer will notice.

Even a film critic might not notice.

But the dynamic, what motivated me to make the film,

is what I was just saying.

Eva, I can't go on.

Offer it to the Madonna.

Man has always been a conformist.

Man's principle trait is to conform

to whatever power or type of life he's born into.

Sorry, we were ordered to do this.

Ifs a social characteristic 0f man.

Man is, perhaps by his very biology, narcissistic and rebellious,

enamored of his own identity and so on.

But society forces him to conform.

He bows his head once and for all before society's obligations.

This is an individual fact

that sometimes has repercussions even in a certain social environment,

but I don 'z' think there 'll ever be a society where man is free.

We shouldn't hope for anything.

Hope is a horrible thing invented by political parties

to keep their members in line.

You men know that for us your instructions are law.

What is technique in cinema? “lt's a myth.”

(Pasolini in Jean-André Fieschi's Pasolini l'enragé)

lt's what I generally always do,

but taken to extremes.

My obsessive use of shots/reverse shots,

one close-up contrasted with another,

the absence of over-the-shoulder shots,

the complete absence of characters who leave and enter the shot,

and most' of all the absence 0f sequence shots -

all this is typical of my films.

I think in this film it's all taken to its maximum clarity,

its most absolute degree.

When I shoot a film, I'm really just collecting material.

Therefore, I choose a set or a natural location,

and I collect material depending on the light and whatever's there.

I do the same with professional actors.

I put a boy who's never acted before in front of the camera

and keep him there while I collect material.

It means a lot of work in the editing room

to eliminate useless material

and select instead that moment of truth

that flashed in his look or in his smile.

But that doesn't happen in this film,

because this isn't raw material reworked in the editing room.

This film is being edited as I shoot it.

So I need more professionalism from the actors.

Actually, here there are four or five professional actors

in the purest sense of the word.

Others I took off the street, so it's their first time acting,

but I treat them as if they were actors

and demand they act like real, professional actors.

They must deliver their lines as written

and have the right expression throughout.

I make them learn their lines and deliver them exactly.

Of course, I leave ample room for improvisation and freedom.

But in general it's all more planned than usual.

Now, Umberto.

Valletti, when I say “action,”

you go over to the table where the candle is.

You light it,

and making sure that it doesn't go out,

you walk slowly toward Tonino.

The rest of you hold Tonino down by his arms and legs.

Understand?

Valletti, when you're in front of Tonino,

kneel down as if to burn his - Understand?

Some are always unhappy and their entire lives regret,

each morning, their actions of the previous night.

I opened the shooting with the first story.

I came down a long staircase.

The roof above was missing because we were in an old' palazzo.

I was freezing in my low-cut gown.

I thought, “If I fall, I'II never get over it.”

I was practically born in a school where Mother was a servant.

As a film shoot,

it was quite special, very unusual. ACTRESS

There were always about 40 actors on the set.

There were four cameras, at least for my scenes.

I don't know how the more intimate scenes were shot.

He shot enormous amounts of film

and put the film together in the editing room.

Even the sound was added later.

So it really took shape in the editing room.

The mood on the set was quite unique

because of all the teenagers.

They were all between 14 and 18,

so it was like being

in high school.

In the most horrible scenes,

the challenge was to keep them from laughing.

Some kid from Home would make a crack in his Roman dialect,

and everyone would burst out laughing.

So, on the set, paradoxically,

the mood was jovial and immature.

When I saw the film,

I wondered how we'd made something so awful without realizing it.

It' was a shock. The film terrified me.

FILMMAKER AND PASOLINI COLLABORATOR

Later, working on the subtitles, I came to know the film well.

After seeing it over and over while making the French dub,

I became aware of the comic quality that was there despite everything.

Not comic in its message, which isn't funny,

but in the actors' behavior.

They never play it

as a tragedy.

Their acting has an indifferent, everyday quality.

Efizio, do me.

When I read the script, from a political point of view

I agreed with the film.

Demonstration before second round in French presidential elections, April 2002

Perhaps now, after April 21,

we're a bit more aware

of such problems.

NO TO THE NAZI-ONAL FRONT

In 1975, I saw Fascists parading in Boulogne,

in uniform and making Fascist salutes.

People watching from the sidewalk applauded.

That was really scary.

There was also a neo-Fascist movement in Belgium

which was very visible at the time.

What came as a shock on April 21

was something that everyone felt back then.

Everyone said, “lf their presence is that strong...

will they return to power?”

There's always that fear.

For him, the film had to be made at that moment.

It was a denunciation, and it had to be made at that moment.

Pier Paolo enjoyed making these films, ACTOR AND CLOSE COLLABORATOR

because he had to put

a certain raw truthfulness into these films.

I must say that he worked with great determination,

very rigorously.

And when he'd finished it,

this ruthlessness and rigor that he'd put into shooting it

resulted in a wonderful film,

both in how he shot it and how he put it together.

I watched him with the eye, shall we say,

of an impressed onlooker.

I was impressed again when I saw the finished film,

even though I'd watched him make it.

Seeing the final cut on the screen

made a very strong and intense impression.

The total work is beautiful. Salo' is a masterpiece.

That flower is reserved for us.

Everyone was afraid of the film.

We got threatening letters. We had police protection on the set.

Some film was stolen...

and finally, Pasolini was murdered.

He died at the beginning of November.

We were supposed to start the French dub...

with Michel Piccoli

and other big stars.

We set up the French dub...

and Jean-Claude Biette directed it

because Monday morning, Pasolini wasn't there.

He died Saturday night...

after finishing the preparations on Friday.

The subtitled version was done...

and we did the dubbed version the following week.

The principle of all greatness on earth VOICE OF MICHEL PICCOLI

has long been totally bathed in blood.

And still, my friends, if my memory doesn't betray me,

yes, it's so. “Without bloodshed,

there's no pardon.

Without bloodshed.” Baudelaire.

With Pasolini it was always very quick.

He didn't dwell on things.

Since it was inspired by de Sade,

it seemed right to him for the film to be in French,

even if he had to make an Italian version

because it was an Italian film.

Its first audience was Italian,

but once it left Italy,

it was the French version that mattered to him.

His murder frightened

everyone in power...

both in cinema and politics.

FINISHED OFF BY THE WHEELS OF HIS CAR

The film was banned in Italy.

In France, it was shown

at the Paris Film Festival.

Lots of Italian directors came.

I don't know how many. Ten or 20.

They came to give a press conference on the film

and talk about the murder, the film, its ban in Italy,

and why the film was made.

And they weren't allowed to speak.

It was really...

awful to witness that,

because suddenly there was this resonance between the film

and what was going on then.

It was terrifying.

Eat, my dear bride.

You must keep your strength.

You must prepare for our night of love.

It's just been rereleased...

and I read an article in Aden

that really struck me because -

I believe a woman wrote it.

It said that the dictatorship of consumerism is the new Fascism.

And it's true. The film can be seen that way.

In retrospect, we can see the film differently

based on the society we live in today.

“Pasolini sets out to dissect and slay consumerist society

because it is 'a new Fascism.'

He abhors this society, so his film must be abhorrent.”

Making this trilogy,

in the end

Pier Paolo understood that the world he'd described in these three films -

I think he understood that the world was changing,

that it was becoming, let's say -

I mean, it wasn't a fairy-tale.

It was changing radically.

Not for the good, but for the worse,

in the sense that the world of the consumer was taking over,

a world that expressed itself in other ways,

a world of little sophistication.

A certain ideology was disappearing.

A whole series of things were unraveling.

In fact, when he finished this trilogy,

after telling these wonderful stories, understanding all these things,

he wanted to make a change with this film Sale').

It's the last film he made,

and I think it's like he's rejecting -

Not' rejecting in a negative sense,

but like he's lost the desire.

He's lost the three stories that he told us years before.

It's a radically different way

of looking at life.

And it wasn't good.

It wasn't beautiful or happy.

And Pier Paolo gave vent to his feelings by making Salo,

He made a beautiful, striking,

and very shocking film.

Bu!' I! was a different son' 0f turning point,

one tied to the changes in the world

that were taking place at that time, 1975.

And he did it with a certain ruthlessness,

like saying, “I'II show you what life is like, how I see the situation.”

He gave us this portrayal of Salo...

as crude as could be,

as if telling all the hypocrites, “Now I 'II show you.”

It's not that the new cinema is what people deserve to see.

It's what the world can look like

when people's lives are changing.

Do this with your fingers.

And say, “I can't eat rice with my fingers like this.”

I can't eat rice.

Then eat shit.

I know that the more you see it...

and the more the initial shock passes,

the more the film becomes extremely stimulating...

in terms of your awareness...

of horror.

One has to be willing to see in a film

essential aspects of life.

Everyone can do it.

They just need to be open and willing.

Most of all, Pasolini tried to understand his times

with his eyes wide-open, unafraid to take a stand.

So in a way,

he was more than an artist,

more than a great writer.

He was someone trying to live in his time with dignity.

So who is your film's audience?

lt's for everyone. For people like me.