‘Aberrant and repulsive images’ against fascism: 50 years since Pasolini’s scandalous masterpiece, ‘Salò’

‘Aberrant and repulsive images’ against fascism: 50 years since Pasolini’s scandalous masterpiece, ‘Salò’

Watching Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom today is as extreme and at times unbearable an experience as it was 50 years ago, when it marked its troubled premiere. Its scenes of forced sex, bodily sadism, coprophagy, humiliation, and mutilation, filmed in magnificent settings and with exquisitely beautiful formal apparatus, generate the same horror, the same moral repugnance. But above all, the field in which the film extends i…