240 Years of Sodom
This article contains disturbing images and discusses instances of both fictional and non-fictional harm, including sexual violence.
On November 2nd 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini was abducted and violently murdered around the outskirts of Rome, leaving behind the legacy of one of the most contentious artistic voices of 20th century Italy. Exactly three weeks later on the 23rd, Pasolini’s twenty-first and final film premiered at the Paris Film Festival. Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom follows eighteen teenagers as they are abducted and subjected to sexual depravity by four bourgeois men under the fascist Italian Social Republic (known popularly as the Republic of Salò), a real-life Nazi puppet-state created in Northern Italy that lasted from 1943-1945. The final product is a visceral showcase of violences both physical and psychological; one that most historians consider the most controversial film ever made.
Salò stills courtesy of Produzioni Europee Associate
Born in 1922 Bologna, Pasolini was an openly gay avid Marxist, vocally critiquing the corruption of Italian culture by the forces of Americanization, consumerism, and the petite bourgeoisie. Pasolini began creating art at a young age, writing poems as young as seven and publishing a collection of them on his own dime at twenty. For most of his young adult life, Pasolini moved around Italy, studying literature and publishing more poetry. His first novel Hustlers, the story of a drifting street urchin, was published in 1955 and immediately met with disdain from the Italian government, who sought to censor its depravity, and the Italian Communist Party, who were strongly against Pasolini’s portrayal of the Russian lumpenproletariat as raw, apolitical, and dirty–contrasting their idyllic image of the working class. Pasolini and his publisher were sued for the novel’s putridity, and despite the case’s subsequent dismissal, Pasolini would find from this point forward an unshakable artistic target on his back.
L (Portrait of Pasolini by Giancarlo Botti/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
R (Pasolini voting in a local election/Archivo Luce)
In the years that followed, Pasolini began his own poetry magazine, as well as undertaking the publication of a second novel, one that was this time largely embraced by the PCI. The newfound appraisal from his communist contemporaries granted Pasolini the opportunity to write his own dialogue column in their magazine, where he continued to hone his opposition of all power structures. As Pasolini began to find his footing as an activist, he did so also with his art, beginning to produce screenplays, theatrical works, and more poetry–as well as undertaking a final novel, one which was never completed.
His first authored film (that is, as director and screenwriter), Accatone, was released in 1961. Set among Rome’s impoverished and marginalized postwar communities, the film, like Hustlers, led to significant conservative demand for more censorship of artworks from the government. This time, however, rather than succeeding with tamer works, Pasolini would continue to push boundaries with several more films between Accatone and Salò, including his interpretation of The Gospel According to Matthew and The Trilogy of Life: a series of adaptations of classic literature warped into dark satires, often depicting rabid sex, nudity, and scatology. Stories embodying the gleeful sexual innocence inherent to humanity, the trilogy are largely considered Pasolini’s most popular works, a label that induced a boom of knockoff soft-core pornography seeking the same critical success. This marketization of his own work and thus the objectification of sexuality and bodies on display in the films led Pasolini to disown the trilogy, inherently against the commercialization of sex that the movies induced that they ideologically oppose.
Thus, swarmed by cheap imitations of his still relatively accessible work, Pasolini began on his next film, the first of a new Trilogy of Death. Pushing beyond what even his most loyal audiences were prepared for, Pasolini sought to depict the commodification of bodies he saw corrupting his life’s work, framing these processes through the lenses of the facism and authoritarianism he spent his political career opposing. To tackle this approach, Pasolini would unearth a vile basis–one whose history began nearly a century and a half before he was born.
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The etymology of sadism is a relatively straightforward one, introduced in sexual psychopathology texts in the late 20th century to describe erotic pleasure extracted from intentional violence. The base sad- derives from Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis De Sade (pronounced sahd)–a French nobleman infamous for both his sexually deviant texts and the various personal sex crimes his pornography was based on. Sade was born in Paris in 1740 to a powerful family. At the age of 14, he was sent to a military academy, soon becoming a member of the King’s Foot Guard. Deployed in the Seven Years War, he gained the reputation of a skilled soldier with a habit for gambling and extravagant spending. Repulsed by his son, Sade’s father arranged for Sade to marry the eldest daughter of a Bourgeois family. Sade, however, was deeply in love with another nobleman’s daughter, who after months of courting rejected him outright, leading him to threaten the blame of his venereal diseases on her, before finally relenting to the arranged marriage.
On October 19th, 1763, a prostitute named Jeanne Testard reported to the police that the day prior, Sade had hired her and locked her in a bedroom, before defaming Jesus and Mary, masturbating with a crucifix, pleading for her to beat him with a scourge, and asking her for sodomy, both of which she refused. The King personally jailed Sade for several weeks, before allowing for his release after pleading from Sade’s father and an expression of remorse from Sade himself.
Despite this, over the next several years, Sade engaged in various orgies and other sex crimes, including flagellation and sodomy, leading to various arrests, releases, and manhunts. On 26 August 1778, Sade was jailed in Vincennes prison after a raid of his chateau. In prison, Sade worked on various projects, including plays, letters to his wife, and fictional dialogues, using smuggled and makeshift writing utensils. After his transfer to Bastille in February 1784, Sade used secret materials, including a single, massive scroll, to produce the transcript of a novel about four bourgeois Frenchmen who seek ultimate sexual gratification from imprisoned victims through coprophilia, beastility, pedophilia, and various other contemporarily unfathomable crimes. After inciting a riot on July 2, 1789, Sade was moved again, this time without the chance to retrieve his personal items, which were subsequently kept under seal in his cell. Just twelve days later, the Bastille was stormed, and after learning of the revolution, Sade inferred the manuscript and all his hard work had been lost or destroyed, a devastating artistic setback that he sincerely mourned for the rest of his life.
Unbeknownst to Sade, two days prior to the storming, the scroll was discovered and retrieved by a citizen named Arnoux de Saint-Maximin–whose biography and subsequent motivations for stealing the manuscript remain unknown–before it went on a journey of private ownership for nearly 120 years. Finally published in 1904 by a Berlin sexologist, The 120 Days of Sodom is considered Sade’s first major work, despite its publication nearly one hundred years after his death. Sade’s reputation as a novelist was not particularly favorable, and despite being recognized for its strong opening, 120 Days was largely criticized for lacking philosophical depth to its descriptive depravity.
After its publication, the original scroll went on a separate journey, being purchased in 1929 by Marie-Laure Henriette Anne de Noailles, a direct heir of Sade, and then passed on to her daughter Natalie. Often using the manuscript to entertain and shock guests and friends, Natalie eventually entrusted it to a friend, who smuggled the manuscript into Switzerland in the ‘80s and sold it for around 200,000 2026 USD. After being displayed in Geneva, it was purchased for €7,000,000 in 2014 and held in Paris by a collector, who was subsequently arrested for Ponzi fraud.The French government thus seized the manuscript and intended to auction it off, before––under further inspection––recognizing it as a national treasure. Using tax incentives, the government utilized the help of donors to purchase the scroll for €4.55 million in July 2021. It currently remains in their possession.
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Sitting down to adapt the incomplete novel with his longtime writing partner Sergio Citti, Pasolini sought to reframe the text under Benito Mussolini's fascist regime in the Region of Salò, Italy, repurposing Sade’s arguably vapid suffering as an explicit product of authoritarianism and consumerism. Whether or not that necessarily increases artistic merit remains subject of debate today, and many contemporaries critiqued Pasolini’s decision, leading to his defensive insistence that his film was not an exclusive indictment of Nazism, but rather of all power–a “new power,” representative of no one and caused by a “mutation” of the ruling class… “if we would like to preserve the old terminology—a deadly form of fascism” (Pasolini’s Corsair Writings: June 24, 1974 The Real Fascism, and Therefore the Real Anti-fascism). By providing a substantive backbone to the violence, the film becomes driven by a philosophical hunger to enhance its point via the misery on display. In an interview with Gideon Bachmann during the film’s production, Pasolini recircles Salò’s role as a depiction of commercial objectification: “Marx defines power as the force that merchandises the human being. The exploitation of one man by another is a sadistic relationship. It is not different if the wielder of it is a factory owner or a despot of another sort” (Blackout). Through this reading, at least for Pasolini, Salò’s depiction of sex becomes at its core Marxist. By this “sadistic relationship,” understanding capitalism as gratifying the downward oppressor, Pasolini turns the film’s violences into substantive and damning capitalist metaphor.
When asked if any of Sade is left behind in the film, Pasolini regards that the thematics of the body becoming merchandise are very much there: “My film is planned as a sexual metaphor, which symbolizes, in a visionary way, the relationship between exploiter and exploited. In sadism and in power politics human beings become objects. That similarity is the ideological basis of the film” (Ibid). That is not to say Pasolini is disinterested in the sex itself for its own sake, quite the contrary. While the politics inform the violence, they paradoxically exist in parallel: “I am surely not planning to create an ascetically political, puritanical film. Obviously I am fascinated by these sadistic orgies in themselves, too. So there you have two basic dimensions: the political and the sexual” (Ibid). Using these opposing frameworks, Pasolini reveals a dual dimensionality: for the satire commentary underlying Salò, the sex is a vessel. And yet, for the aesthetics of entertainment, its spectacle is integral: it is both philosophically meaningful and disturbingly indulgent. On the specific use of feces and coprophilia in the film, Pasolini defines it as “mainly this: that the producers, the manufacturers, force the consumer to eat excrement. All these industrial foods are worthless refuse” (Ibid). While Pasolini’s focused Marxism critically negates the vapidity of Sade’s violence, the morbid curiosity of the text—the “fascination with the orgies themselves”–is undeniable. To put the violence on screen is to indulge in it; to invite the audience into the horror is to pique the comorbid interest within us all.
Although completed, Pasolini never got to see the film’s release. In early November 1975, Pasolini was abducted and violently beaten across the body, before being run over several times by his own car. His body was discovered the following morning with multiple broken bones, severe genital trauma, and petrol burns.
As of October 2026, Pasolini’s murder has not been solved.
Bill Hader’s Closet Picks (2011) / Criterion Collection
Immediately, Salò was met with significant international censorship, with accounts varying from twenty to more than one hundred national bans or restrictions upon release. In the States, the first amendment protects against government film censorship, though Salò did struggle to find distribution until a limited release in 1977. The British Board of Film Censors, who must watch and rate each individual film submitted for release in any capacity, rejected Salò when it was submitted in January of 1976. The next year in Soho, London, an unapproved version of the film was illegally aired before the theater was raided by law enforcement. In Australia, the film was likewise banned for indecency before being re-reviewed in 1993, seventeen years after its first submission, and given an R-18+, the equivalent of a U.S. NC-17. Just five years later, however, the board walked back on the decision and banned the film once again, before, in 2010, after several appeal rejections, seeing a resubmission and finally agreeing to an R-18+ for good. In the same year, TIFF named the film number 47 of a vague “100 Essential Films,” as in the time since its release, Salò was garnering more and more recognition as a historical artifact, and to some a neopolitical masterpiece, which saw a massive uptick when Criterion preserved the film in its prestigious Collection in 2008–number 17 of what today comprises a roster of more than 1,300 films. When Bill Hader was invited to the “Closet,” a location with every in-print Criterion film, he selected Salò, commenting “This is a great date movie. My favorite part of this movie is when–” before a ten second description of censored obscenities.
Whether or not Salò is a failure, be it artistic, political, or both, is up to viewer discretion. Unfortunately, but perhaps fittingly, Pasolini is not here to handhold us through any retrospective analysis.
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On an oddly cold mid-April night earlier this year, a friend and I went to see Kristoffer Borgli’s new film The Drama downtown. Afterwards, we came up to campus to grab a late-night dinner. He asked me what I had been writing recently for Double Exposure.
“I’m doing my new one about Salò,” I said, assuming as a cineaste himself he would surely be aware of the film and its legacy. Alas, he asked how to spell that, and used my instructions to google search a Wikipedia summary.
For a moment he read what I can only assume to be a descriptive highlight reel of the film’s putridity, before sitting back and looking up at me with a straight line for a mouth.
“The craziest part,” I started, “the director was murdered right before it came out. Some people think the movie is why.”
He shook his head in disgust. “As he should have been, bro.” He grabbed a chicken finger, voraciously plunging it in sauce. “That shit’s not art.”
Carlos Jimenez is a sophomore at Columbia College studying Film and Psychology. He enjoys writing, running, and fantasy baseball.