Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1976) — watch online on iFILM: the final film by Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, completed weeks before his murder in November 1975. Pasolini transplants the Marquis de Sade's eighteenth-century text into northern Italy's dying puppet republic, autumn of 1944 — the last convulsions of a collapsing regime.

Four figures of authority — a bishop, a duke, a magistrate, and a president — abduct eighteen teenagers and seal them inside a country villa. What follows is divided into three chapters — of manias, of filth, and of blood. Pasolini strips the de Sade source down to its political skeleton: the film is not about sex but about power as the total erasure of another human being. Paolo Bonacelli and Caterina Boratto lead a cast of largely non-professional actors.

Banned in Italy, the UK, and several other countries upon release, Salò is now studied in film programs worldwide as a rigorous — and genuinely difficult — interrogation of fascism, complicity, and representation. Stream Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1976) online on iFILM.