Mussolini and Marquis de Sade

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-'nauseating|: effective' combination It more than ironic that film which uses sadism as a metaphor for bourgeois power should have been itself mutilated by the bourgeois state censors.

No doubt, judging by what remains, the seven or so minutes removed are horrifying; however, as a study precisely of sexual violence and human degradation, the impact of "Salo" is diminished by the removal of a series of climactic passages. (The film is actually appearing somewhat ambiguously at a small club in Soho).

In bourgeois society human relationships are transformed into relations between things.

This reification and fetishisation, stemming from the capitalist mode of production, inevitably affects all aspects of social life.

Subtler expression

As regards sexuality, the person reduced to a sexual object stares out from the gutter press and the pornshop windows, and reification finds subtler expression in the marriage contract and the bourgeois family.

Pasolini, in "Salo" , has taken sadism as a clear and extreme sexual expression of the humanturned object, and has used it as a metaphor for fascist power Historically, Salo was the name of the puppet state set up for Mussolini in Nazi-occupied northern Italy in 1943.

It was the fascist brutality and murderous violence of this shortlived "republic" that prompted Pasolini to use it as the setting for a cinematic adaptation of the Marquis de Sacie's novel '120 Days of Sodom"

Four obviously 'cultured' men representing in the film the force of the bourgeois state) -a banker, a judge, a bishop and a duke-establish a regime of orgiastic sadism in a luxurious mansion in Salo.

Fascist soldiers

With the aid of local collaborators, young men dressed as fascist soldiers, and four women procuresses, they select 16 virginal boys and girls for their orgies.

'Normal" heterosexual relationships are forbidden in the household, and the victims are forced to submit to the increasingly inhuman and degrading demands of the sadist dictators.

They are reduced to being the mere receptacies of sadist lust and vehicles for the assertion of the sadists' power.

The sterility of the sexual relationships is stressed by the need of the sadists to be sexually aroused for the orgies by erotic stories told by the procuresses.

Pure sadism cannot have a willing victim, nor can it avoid its ultimate expression: gratification at the violent death of the object.

Tortured So, after they have been raped, forced to eat shit, and mutilated, the victims are tortured to death, the sexual overlords taking turns at being inventor, accomplice, executor and voyeur of the tortures.

The overt political dimension of "Salo" is slightconveyed through the presence of the blackshirts, Mussolini's voice heard, once on the radio, and the contemporary setting.

More importantly it depends on the audience's prior awareness that sadism and fascism are to be somehow equated, or at least shown to be mutuaily illuminating.

And some correspondences are apparent: the powerlust of the protagonists, the role of collaborators and rifles, the victims driven by fear into denunciations of one another.

What is especially noticeable as lacking in a film made by a 'Marxist' (Pasolini was member of the Italian CP until he was expelled for his homosexuality) is any response by the 'victim' class.

Certainly the victims retain some dignity in the face of the indignities heaped upon them (in contradistinction to the treachery and easy acquiescence of the collaborators), but at no stage is this translated into solidarity aimed at revolt.

Rather, the continued cruelty leads: to disintegration and betrayal.

As for the collaborators, the final scene of the film shows them to be apparentiy untouched by what they have participated in, as they contemplate their future lives once this episode is over.

The one instance of revolt that is shown occurs when one of the soldiers is caught making illicit love (clearly distinguished from the sadistic orgies) with a black woman servant.

He is immediately shot for this human warmth and for his "normal" sexuality, and faces Enrique Alvares reviews "Salo", directed by Piet Pasolini and showing at the Compton Cinema Club, London.

sadism; but because straight heterosexuality is banned by the sadists whose starting point is sodomy, and because it is suggested as a real, human relationship, not only is sadism indicted, but 'normal' heterosexuality is implied to be the only possible form of nonreified sexuality.

(There was a similar reactionary effect when sections of the left in Germany attempted to blacken the Nazi image by associating. Nazism with homosexuality-an association which inevitably worked both ways).

Again, the bourgeois family is associated with healthy human relationships-if only because it is clearly pointed out that the sadistic regime has violated the family, which remains a source of moral strength to the victims.

Suspect

These criticisms of the film would be less valid if "Salo" was presented simply as a portrayal of sadism. But, claiming as it does a directly political dimension, all its political and philosophical implications become clearer and more significant.

The whole project, though, of exploring the 'psychology' of fascist power through examining a small world of Sodom, is suspect.

While sadism and fetishised sexual relations generally are no doubt a feature of class society, they do not relate to class struggle in capitalism in the same way as does a socio-political development like fascism-even a puppet state like Mussolini's Salo which was obliged to rely so much on physical coercion and terror.

Mass psychology

Sadism has a politics as well as a psychology; and fascism has a 'psychology' too. But it is a mass psychology, a political, social, class-based psychology.

"Salo" shows no attempt at a class analysis of either fascism or sadism.

It might also be claimed that it is little more than an intellectual's game to attempt to understand fascism through a metaphor.

•The workers and peasants of Italy do not need to see Pasolini's film of sadistic rituals to understand the brutality of Mussolini.

But it is here, it seems to me, that "Salo" can make its strongest claims-at least on those who have no memory of fascist atrocities.

Through the explicit sexuality of the metaphor-to which everybody can at. least partially and at times relate-the audience is led into a direct involvement in a way. which could not be achieved in a documentary "Salo"

Credibility mounts

Just as in the preparatory period prior to fascism, large sections of society are prepared to condone attacks on bourgeois democratic rights in gratitude that consequently the trains are running on time, so in this film it is unlikely that most viewers will not respond to some degree erotically to the earlier scenes, despite the atmosphere of coercion.

Yet as the film continues, the violence and cruelty mounts up to peaks of sickening horror which retrospectively indict the viewer for his earlier limited acquiescence.

As a political film "Salo" achieves little, because of both the very nature of the project and the film's failure to offer any political perspective beyond horror at what has passed.

Its pessimism shows no definitive (revolutionary) conclusion the sadistic regime; the final tableau suggests only a 'natural' return to normality after the climaxwith the possibility of yet another cycle of collaboration, persecution, cruelty and murder.

Pasolini himself gave

totally un Marxist explanation of social and sexual powerrelationships: "what we call the class struggle", he has said, is one form of social stratification based on the power 'instincts' of 'human nature' According to this unhistorical understanding it is fascism that would be the metaphor and the symptom-for some mystical human instinct of domination and submission. Thi This is a view which all revolutionaries must reject.

But as a portrayal and indictment of human brutality, "Salo" is extremely, nauseatingly, effective.

It is a superbly made film; though mauled by the censors, with excellent acting performances; probably gratifying to sadists, and only slightly less worth seeing if you're look. ing for a masochistic night outit hurts.

SECOND LIMITEI EDITION