Pasolini Uncut! (Salo Or The 120 Days Of Sodom (DVD))

Member Name: Brett Bligh

Product:	Salo Or The 120 Days Of Sodom (DVD)
Date:	21/08/01 (5190 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: The film is completely uncut, presented in its original theatrical exhibition ratio, and with its original Italian-language soundtrack and removable subtitles.

Disadvantages: The print is not anamorphic, colours sometimes appear bleached, the range of extras is not massive (although this was, of course, probably to be expected).

Pier Paulo Pasolini was a director never afraid to court controversy. As a young man during World War II he experienced first-hand the horrors of the Republic of Salò, a corner of Italy in which Mussolini fought his last stand, and this film combines the source matter of the Marquis de Sade’s ‘120 Days of Sodom’ with these experiences and a structure based around Dante’s ‘Inferno’ to provide a compelling examination of depravity and the seemingly arbitrary distinctions which define that term.

As the text of the DVD release attests, this film, whose full title is ‘Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma’, has been widely banned right up until the present day — in Australia, for example, the rare decision was taken in 1998 to RE-ban the film after it had been un-banned in 1993, and the film still causes controversy even in the US, where even recently a bookshop was prosecuted as a result of the film’s video release. The BBFC, however, who have been softening their previously Draconian stance as of late, recently allowed the film an ‘18’ certificate, and now the British Film Institute have released the film on DVD, fully uncut.


THE FILM
Salò is split into four sections. The first, ‘Ante Inferno’ (ante in this case used in the same way as in ‘antechamber’, to mean, roughly, “before”), sees a group of adolescents kidnapped and brought for examination before a group of Libertines, who choose the ones with no physical blemishes and discuss amongst themselves their plans for the future.

The second section, ‘Circle of Manias’, features the start of events proper, as the group of youngsters are brought before the Libertines in the chateau and the rules of what is about to occur are explained to them. Then the storytellers begin their work, and the Libertines’ experiment begins.

In the third section, ‘The Circ
le of Shit’, the Libertines become particularly excited by a tale told by one of the storytellers involving the stool of one of her clients and decide to modify their rules in order to take this into account. The young objects of the experiment are banned from defecating for the day, so that they may all do so at the correct time and hence provide the unconventional nourishment for the daily evening banquet.

The fourth section, ‘The Circle of Blood’, sees the Libertines’ experiment reach its closure as the four watch their young victims being tortured to death, their perversity now having reached its climactic voyeuristic stage.


THE DISC

· Distributor: MGM Distribution in association with the British Film Institute [BFIVD510].
This is one of the latest in a series of DVDs released by the BFI, other volumes including Akira Kurosawa’s ‘Seven Samurai’ and ‘Yojimbo’, Lotte Reiniger’s ‘The Adventures of Prince Achmed’ and fellow Pasolini films ‘The Decameron’ and ‘The Arabian Nights’. The other volumes that I own are not co-distributed by MGM and so I would suspect that part of the copyright in this film is actually owned by this company.

· Rating: 18.
To be honest, I was surprised that the BBFC gave this film a certificate at all, and it is hence no riddle as to why this film received this certificate. Whilst it is certainly true that many people under the age of 18 who have had access to the Internet for a while have probably seen material equal to this or worse, Salò is still not family viewing and I would agree that it should not be seen by minors. Thankfully, the BBFC have refrained from actually cutting this film in any way, and are hence operating within their remit of classification rather than straying over the line into the field of censorship; of this I have no objection, especially in this case.

· Region: 2
(PAL encoding).
Region 2 is intended for Europe (including the UK) and Japan, whilst PAL is a system used by the UK and Australia, among others. Essentially, this disc will play on any region 2, multi-region or region-free player which is compatible with PAL playback — if you bought your player in the UK there should be no worries whatsoever.

· Type and case: DVD5 with white laminated cardboard case case.
DVD5s are the lowest capacity DVD disc of 12cm diameter, and feature a single data layer on one side of the disc which can store 4.37 gig of data approximately.

The white cardboard case is rather an attractive and stylish design in my opinion, containing no front cover illustration. Instead, the title and director are displayed in a simple black font along with the BFI symbol in the top-right corner and the BBFC certificate in the left. I actually managed to affect something of an intellectual air as I approached the HMV Meadowhall counter with this disc in my grubby mitts — who would have suspected I was buying a film involving sh/t-eating?

· Running time: feature 112 minutes approx.
This is the full, uncensored version of the film; the discrepancy between the cinema running time and that of the DVD is because of the 4% speedup associated with PAL transfer (caused by the fact that film pulls through 24 frames per second whilst PAL operates at 25).

· Picture format: 1.85:1 letterbox widescreen.
The print on the disc is presented in the film’s original theatrical exhibition ratio of 1.85:1. The quality is not excellent by DVD standards, but when one considers the nature of the film this is understandable and the quality is certainly not atrocious. It is not easy to give a precise account of the quality of the print simply because the quality is so variable throughout. In some scenes the colour is vibrant and convincing, whilst in others is appears washed out and faded. The director has made much u
se of natural light in exterior scenes and these appear slightly darker than is traditional nowadays, but of course there is always the possibility that this is an artistic decision rather than a fault of the DVD transfer. To be honest, though, the visual quality is probably better than I was expecting, and when the BFI state on the reverse of the packaging that “bfi video titles are mastered from the finest quality materials available” I would have little reason to doubt them.

The one aspect of the print of which I most certainly do disapprove is the non-anamorphic presentation. The BFI make great play on their website of how they bravely submitted the film for classification to the BBFC, and they have obviously put considerable thought into this DVD release. Precisely why, however, the producers could not have taken that one step further and enhanced the print for 16:9 televisions is a little beyond me … especially considering that this release would seem to be directly targeted at the somewhat anorak-ish film collector — a group highly likely to be possessed of a widescreen TV — in both its content and presentation. The fact that the print is non-anamorphic is the sole reason I decided upon a three-star rating for this disc despite regarding the release as solid on the whole, so great a disappointment was this.

· Audio: Dolby Digital stereo, Italian.
The soundtrack here is the original Italian soundtrack, produced by complete post-dubbing as was the European tradition at the time. Voices are not completely naturalistic at all times, and the soundtrack’s aural depth is relatively poor by modern standards. This, however, actually adds to the detached aura deliberately and calculatedly exuded by the film, and is of course no fault of the DVD transfer which is being completely faithful to the original theatrical film.

· Subtitles: English, removable.
Since the film is presented in Italian the remo
vable subtitles are essential for English-speakers. I do not recall any transcription errors within the subtitles, and the text is well-presented, however the subtitles are positioned slightly lower on the screen than I would have preferred, falling below the edge of the screen when I zoomed into the print using my television’s default “16:9 zoom” mode — which I would, of course, not have had to do were the print anamorphic (not that I would keep bringing that up) — thus necessitating further annoying experimentation to find the most suitable screen mode.

· Extras: Director’s Foreword, Biography, Poster Gallery, Weblink, Also Available.

The Director’s Foreword is a short passage written by Pier Paulo Pasolini in which he gives a brief overview of what he was attempting to achieve with the film, and particularly of the film’s avowed faithfulness to de Sade’s original novel despite the changed setting. It is presented as a sequences of text screens which change automatically and which are accompanied by a narration by Nickolas Grace.

The Biography of Pier Paulo Pasolini is presented as a series of still text screens through which the user proceeds by selecting a ‘next’ option on the screen. The biography is not lengthy, but it is interesting and well researched with a wide variety of subjects covered, including the director’s uneasy relationship with the Vatican, his expulsion from the Communist Party and his eventual murder very shortly after the completion of Salò.

Rather than the usual still images, the Poster Gallery on this disc is actually a 50-seconf video montage, featuring a rather small number of posters for the film, taken from different countries, gradually being zoomed into and out of. Ultimately, I found the experience rather pointless, but for the sake of completeness a Poster Gallery is always a welcome addition to a DVD release, even if it is un
conventionally presented.

The Weblink will, of course, only work when the disc is played in the DVD-ROM drive of a computer with an Internet connection. The website linked to is www.bfi.org.uk/salo, a page which actually features an array of interesting information about the film and its path to British video release.

The Also Available section is a still text page advertisement for other BFI DVD and VHS releases of Pasolini films. DVD releases advertised for Summer 2001 are ‘The Decameron’, ‘The Canterbury Tales’ and ‘The Arabian Nights’; at the time of writing only the first two of these had actually been released to my knowledge.

· Menus: the menus are static and simply designed, being based around stills from the film itself; they are, however, functional, error-free and perfectly adequate for the task at hand. One good point, however, is that the menus are presented in 1.85:1 aspect ratio — I may not like having to fiddle around with the settings to find the best TV mode to watch the film in due to the non-anamorphic presentation, but at least I do not have to change that setting again every time I go back to the menu screens!


CONCLUSION
Salò is essentially a film about the way in which perversity can so alter the very perception of other human beings in an individual that those others are seen merely as objects and the crimes committed against those others as amusing laboratory experiments which take no account of the recipient and are utterly detached. As Pasolini himself alludes in his foreword, de Sade’s characters are essentially SS men in civilian clothing, and The 120 Days of Sodom is almost a damnation of the atrocities committed by the Nazis and their fascist allies written before it even happened. The Marquis de Sade saw the potential in humanity for what most would describe as utter evil, and any who doubted him in his own time would doubtless have been force
d to withdraw their objections had they lived to see what humanity was to accomplish in the early 20th century.

The works of Dante and de Sade are not very familiar to me, and although several more of Pasolini’s films on DVD should by now be on their way to me through the post this is the first film of his I have actually seen, and so I do not feel particularly qualified to critique the major themes of the works of any of these individuals (other reviews in other Dooyoo sections will no doubt provide this information for the curious reader). What was obvious to me, however, from just one viewing of the film was that the utter horror of what we see is not so much in the actions we witness, but in the attitudes of those who watch. Due to the deliberate portrayal of the characters, we find it difficult to feel sympathy for virtually any of the victims — this goes some way towards putting us on a par with the film’s Libertine hosts, hence making the viewer carry some of the guilt associated with the crimes portrayed. This, I believe, is the film’s true controversy, and this DVD, despite its undoubted faults such as non-anamorphic presentation, is a worthy medium through which to enter the fray.

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