Queer punk filmmaker Bruce Labruce is one of the best people to talk to about Pier Paolo Pasolini’s shocking high-art meeting-exploitation classics “Saló, or 120 days by Sodom” because the Canadian director himself is one that has stretched pornography and art films.
They include his 2024 Depraved Family Affair “The visitor,“Himself a quasi-revoke of Pasolini’s” theoreta “, starring Recently deceased Terence stamp As a handsome stranger that arises the life of an upper class Milanese family by fucking them all, physically and spiritually. Pasolini’s “Saló” is also filled with graphic sex acts – but packed in one of the most visually arresting films of all time, with shots carefully blocked and adorned like moving, gilded tables.
Coprophagy is also a factor in the “visitor”, and is one of the many still-shaking elements in “Saló”, for which Pasolini’s criticism of Italian fascism in the Second World War is most notorious. Indiewire was labeling Labruce about “Saló” as the director has long been fascinated by Pasolini’s contradictory nature – his atheism, his Catholisism, his homosexuality and how it is all bound in works that both embrace and abhor the social order.
Pasolini was an iconoclast until his death, which has inspired many conspiracy theories, Labruce claims, because so many people wanted Pasolini dead for his art and his views. Labruce – whose “gerontophilia” 2013 explored a kind of reverse pederra relationship and is a film It would have fit comfortably in Pasolinis Oeuvre – also thinks that the character of Pasolini’s last moments and viscery in his murder is a bit “fishy.”
The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Indieview: Pasolini was an artist of enormous contradictions. He was a gay catholic who was also an atheist. He was also a communist. What do you do as an artist who has overflowed art film and pornography?
Bruce Labruce: He embraced both Highbrow culture and lowbow culture at the same time. He was not so interested in anything in between, the bourgeoisie and the petite bourgeois, but he liked the intellectual, philosophical class that is educated and is philosophers and poets. Then the people who are uneducated and his type of Spinozan idea are that the uneducated are closer to animals and God, really, because they are not spoiled by knowledge.
When did you first see the movie? I don’t know the release or censorship there. It came to the US censored.
It was banned in Canada. I grew up in Ontario, I went to school in Toronto and we had a notoriously hard censorship board. Many of the 70s and 80s films were banned directly, such as “Saló.” I think it was completely forbidden; They didn’t even release that with cuts. There were a whole lot of films that they released with cuts, such as “The Tin Drum” and Marco Bellocchio’s “The Devil Is A Woman” and Bertolucci’s “Luna” and “Sweet Movie.” All the huge 70s horny classics that are perverse classics were all censored. I guess I saw “Saló” when I was still a movie student, but probably just on a VHS or something.
Last day I took on the Blu-ray criterion in the movie, and it automatically played the English DUB, which makes it something fun in a way, with this type of transatlantic accenter overlapping the Italian. Wouldn’t you say there’s something fun about the movie, as awful as it is?
I think there is a camp element in Pasolini’s film that is somewhat intentional, but the camp is difficult in that way. For example, Silvana Mangano in “Theoreta”, after she fucks two boys in a ditch, and she sits in her car and just starts screaming in her car with her big hair and her makeup. It’s camp. You can’t avoid it. I think “Saló” is more intentional camp, such as the wedding sequence and especially the three older fascists who are in move and are very over-the-top, theater and perverse. It’s not so much “fun haha”, it’s “fun perverse.” Even the bullshit, you can find some kind of humor in it, but the overall consequences of the film, the criticism of fascism and decadence and moral bankruptcy in the ruling class and the fascists are inevitable to shrink.
It is obviously not a sexy movie, but there are naked twinks here. What are your thoughts on the consequences of the film’s sexualizing look?
When I Remade “Theorem” as “The Visitor,” or Reimagined It, My Idea Was To Make It Extremely Pornography, Because My Theory is Pasolini was Moving in a More Pornographic Direction with his final trilogy of film … Word, like Something Being Pornographic Meaning Offensively Grotesque, Like When You Say “That’s Real Estate Porn” or Whatever; This is like high art porn or type of fascist porn. I also made a movie, “Skin Flick”, about neo -Nazi Hudheads, which was a porn, and I thought of “Saló” at the same time. They have explicit sex in the film, so it is a type of scrubbing composition.
Do you feel that “Saló” is chairman of our current times? The book was set in the 1700s; The film is in the 1940s fascist Italy. There are archetypes you can find in people with power today.
Yes, but it is also timeless, you can say. It criticizes the corruption of autocracia and the ruling classes that exceed the time. They have been around since the Middle Ages and continue today.
Have you been to the murder scene that is now a park that remembers Pasolini?
I haven’t. My intimacy coordinator on the “visitor” was born in Ostia. She knows a lot about Pasolini, his death and conspiracy. I learned it from her, and of course I have seen death photos, but I have not done terror tourism.
Where do you land on conspiracy of everything?
The thing about Pasolini is that there were so many people who wanted him dead. The Catholic mafia wanted him dead. The business community was upset by “Petrolio”, his last unfinished novel, where the protagonist was an oil industry’s CEO and it was partly a criticism of the oil industry. He threatened to make a movie about it too. There were so many people who wanted to see him dead that it seemed as if his death was a little too comfortable, and the fact that it happened immediately after his most controversial film before it was even released. It seems a little fishy. And the fact that he knew Ostia so well and had hundreds of experiences like it before, and it had never happened before.
So who knows? Wasn’t it suspected that he was driven so many times? It was such a overdue and such a strange spectacle, almost like sending a message.
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