SALÒ / THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM

‘The film that has influenced me most in my life’ (Michael Haneke). In the last realm of fascist Italy, the Republic of Salò, four upper-class citizens – schooled in Nietzsche and Baudelaire – stage their rule in the form of cruel rituals as the end of the regime approaches. Entirely faithful to de Sade's literary template, a group of young people are kidnapped, humiliated, tortured and finally murdered. Far from any aestheticisation of violence, human lust for power and destruction are staged in a sober manner. All the compromises Pasolini made during his career seem to have been withdrawn, all utopias obsolete. Radical, shocking, bleak. At the premiere of the wildly controversial film, its creator had already been dead for three weeks.
(Florian Widegger)

Newly restored version from the Cineteca di Bologna