Only John Waters could pull off a New York Film Festival double function of Gaspar Noés abrasive acid “climax” and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s upcoming art meeting exploitation, anti-fascist epic “Saló, or 120 days by Sodom” and at a pop-up-drive-in at the Bronx Zoo, of all places and at the height of Covid-20.
“When I was growing up in Drive-in, you always female when you saw breasts or gore. So I said, ‘Honk when you see art.’ Each time it was an art shot, everyone, “told on the Pope of Junk during a new telephone interview.
So when it comes to “Saló”, Pasolini’s last film was murdered before the Italian filmmaker by a 17-year-old sex worker on a beach in Ostia, Rome, 1975, which must have meant a lot of honor. Shooted by Kinematographer Tonino Delli Colli, it is one of the most visually beautiful films ever made. Galaxy brain cinefiler and critics claim that Pasolini was murdered as part of a conspiracy against his own anti-fascist views; Waters has claimed that the gay 53-year-old filmmaker simply had a bad night, a connection became catastrophic.
“Saló” premiered at the Paris Film Festival in November 1975, the same month as Pasolini’s death, and it took two years for the film to arrive, uncut, on the US land in a limited edition via Zebra that released companies. The word in the city, especially where “Saló” played in New York City, was an outbreak.
Modeled by Dante’s “Inferno” but inspired most directly by Marquis de Sades “120 Days of Sodom”, this grand and disturbing classic is located in a real Italian fascist puppet state in the early 1940s. There, Pasolini depicts four libertists who kidnap a group of teenagers-heavy men and women-and expose them to rape, torture, degradation, brainwashing and, of course and most notorious, crap. (“Saló” is also No. 2 at Indieview’s list of 1970s best movies.)
That shit, on Pasolini’s set, was chocolate, but three years before “Saló”, Waters had divine eating actual dog feces for his riotous and border -utilization dark comedy “Pink Flamingos”, a film as counter -cultural influence as “Saló” would be too. In 2021, Waters released the spoken word “Prayer to Pasolini”, which contains the director who spoke in tongues and paid tribute to one of his cinematic idols and it was recorded in the park outside the Roman airport where Pasolini was killed, a place that has now become a shrine for the director and a pilgrimage for film reasons.
There, Pasolini was run several times by Hustler who cut his car and crushed is said to be the filmmaker’s testicles with a metal bar in the process.
“I was surprised because they, if you go online, say (the park is) locked, but it is not locked. The lock is false. You get there, and it is a beautiful park and really in the middle of nowhere, where he was killed. Who paid for it? Who did it?
He said: “In my stand-up show I do one thing where I say I have to go back to being a puppet, where I started with children’s birthday parties, but I want to do” Saló “with very mature children, rich children.”
Most of the actors, as the Mediterranean Italian Franco Merli, who first discovered for his 1974 “Arabian Nights”, Pasolini, were unknown and non -professional. Some were models, and the physical beauty of his role was a function, not a bug, of Pasolini’s vision, as no one denies the parade of Lithe, naked twinks on the screen and wonderful Italian men and women, almost like facial powder over hidden fullness.
“I read an interview somewhere, I can’t remember where, the Catholic children were minor and naked, eat fake shit, and (one said),” We had the best time to do “Saló.” Each time Pasolini screamed “cut”, we always laughed. “He didn’t do it as anything but an art movie, as all his films were.”
However, there is inherent comedy in “Saló” even though the film is dead seriously, whether a signora pantoming a handjob on a mannequin. Or lines like “show the mass of this impertinent boy”, or one of the four libertines that boast a young boy’s “amazing anal regions.”
“It was very confronted. The statements he makes about fascism and everything is very true, and I think people were just so dazzled by the whole movie. I always thought it was a really, really good movie, and God knows it delivers,” Waters said. “I always said that I created art films for exploitation theaters and exploitation films for art theaters. In some ways this was the same. It was of course shock value – I of course said that people were insane from, and it was really confronting and like no other movie. For me I was just jealous – I said that kind of joke – to the reasons for the reasons for me.
Pasolini was a wild contradiction as an artist, the type that would not survive the black and white, ideological non-negotiations in much of cultural discourse today. He was an atheist and Catholic, a communist and a gay. He was pro-cops but anti-hippies because police officers “were sweeter,” according to Waters. “He liked the trade, and I guess police officers were more like trade than hippies. In particular, he liked boys with pimples,” he said. “I did a piece for a photography called ‘Pasolini’s Finns’, and I went through all his films and shot pimples and then cut them out in a collage of just pimples. He liked Finns.”
Retrospective considerations of political timeliness in classical films can become didactic, but that Pasolini transplanted a book from the late 1700s to the 1940s fascist Italy proves “Saló’s” timelessness and its cold resonance now -especially when you think about Qanon, adrenochrome and conspiracy to be thought to be presumptuous pedy. Shop an oligarchy for another, and the 1940s Saló looks powerful.
“Depending on your policy, there are many elements that would be the same as today right now, it would be even more relevant,” Waters said. “It is still a beautiful movie that Pasolini would be proud of, and it will not be easier to melt in any way, maybe even harder today because of the things it touches. It’s a beautiful movie against fascism.”
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