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Forty-nine years ago, audiences witnessed what would become one of cinema’s most notorious and divisive works: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. Released just three weeks after the Italian auteur’s brutal murder on 2 November 1975, this uncompromising adaptation of the Marquis de Sade’s 1785 novel transposed the aristocratic debauchery of pre-revolutionary France to the dying days of Mussolini’s republic. The film remains banned in multiple countries, its unflinching portrayal of fascist brutality through sexual violence continuing to challenge viewers and censors alike.
The film depicts four wealthy fascist libertines who kidnap 18 teenagers in the Italian Social Republic of 1944-45, subjecting them to 120 days of escalating physical, psychological, and sexual torture within a secluded villa. Structured around Dante’s Inferno—with sections titled Anteinferno, Circle of Manias, Circle of Excrement, and Circle of Blood—Pasolini crafted an allegory that equates fascism with the ultimate commodification and destruction of human bodies.
The circumstances surrounding Pasolini’s death add a disturbing postscript to his final work. On the night of 1-2 November 1975, the 53-year-old director was killed after an encounter with 17-year-old rent boy Giuseppe “Pino” Pelosi in Ostia, on Rome’s outskirts. According to Pelosi’s initial confession, at 11:30pm they drove to Ostia where Pasolini allegedly “asked something I did not want”—to sodomise him with a wooden stick. When Pelosi refused, a struggle ensued that ended with the young man beating Pasolini to death with two pieces of a table and the director’s own car.
Yet forensic evidence has long suggested a more complex truth. As detailed in Abel Ferrara’s investigation for the Venice Film Festival, evidence indicates “Pasolini was the victim of an attack carried out by more than one person”. The Guardian’s 2014 examination of the case reveals multiple witnesses saw several people at the murder scene, and Pelosi himself later recanted his confession, claiming he was threatened by unnamed others to take sole responsibility.
Pasolini’s choice of source material was equally provocative. The Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom, written on a scroll in the Bastille and thought lost for over a century, represents perhaps literature’s most extreme exploration of power and cruelty. Though banned in Britain during the 1950s, the text has since achieved the unlikely status of a Penguin Classic—a journey from contraband to canon that mirrors broader shifts in cultural attitudes towards transgressive art.
The influence of both Pasolini’s film and de Sade’s text extends deep into underground music culture. Industrial pioneers Coil made this connection explicit with their debut album Scatology (1984), whose cover art—featuring buttocks within a cross—directly referenced the Penguin Classics edition of de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. This visual homage signalled the group’s engagement with transgressive literature and its exploration of bodily taboos as political metaphor. Meanwhile, Swans founder Michael Gira‘s pre-music fanzine No advertised screenings of Salò, demonstrating how Pasolini’s vision circulated through the American underground even before these artists began their sonic explorations of power and extremity.
Film critic Roberto Chiesi noted that Salò functions as “a Sadean chronicle of the historical moment in which it was made”, reflecting the political violence of 1970s Italy as much as the fascist era it depicts. The film’s reception split critics between those who saw it as essential political art and those who condemned it as exploitative.
Pasolini himself defended the work as necessary, stating in his final interviews that consumer capitalism had achieved what fascism could not: the total colonisation of bodies and desires. This perspective transforms Salò from mere provocation into a desperate warning about modern forms of control.
The enduring controversy surrounding Salò raises fundamental questions about artistic representation of evil. Can depicting atrocity serve as critique, or does it risk recreating the very dehumanisation it claims to condemn? The film’s formal rigour—its static shots, theatrical staging, and emotional distance—suggests Pasolini sought to avoid any possibility of titillation, yet the extremity of its content continues to overshadow critical analysis.
The mystery of Pasolini’s death adds another layer to the film’s legacy. Whether killed in a cruising encounter gone wrong or assassinated for his political views—he was a prominent communist intellectual who antagonised both left and right—his violent end eerily echoes the themes of power, sexuality, and death that dominate his final work.
Nearly five decades later, Salò remains unique in cinema: a work that refuses comfort, explanation, or redemption. Its vision of fascism as the logical endpoint of treating humans as objects speaks to contemporary anxieties about surveillance, control, and the commodification of intimacy. The film stands as both Pasolini’s artistic testament and, perhaps, a premonition of his own fate—a brutal intersection of politics, sexuality, and violence that continues to disturb and provoke.
The Criterion Collection’s recent 4K restoration ensures this challenging work remains accessible for those willing to confront its uncompromising vision, while various international cinematheques continue to programme retrospectives examining Pasolini’s complete oeuvre and the circumstances of his death.
For those seeking to understand Pasolini’s radical cinema, BFI Southbank regularly screens his work alongside contextual discussions. The Criterion edition of Salò includes extensive commentary on both the film and the director’s murder. Abel Ferrara’s film Pasolini (2014) offers a dramatised investigation into the director’s final days, while Mark Kermode’s writings provide accessible entry points to this most difficult of films. The Marquis de Sade’s source text remains available in the Penguin Classics edition for those curious about the literary origins of Pasolini’s apocalyptic vision.
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