Pierre Paul Pasolini

Author: Dong Bingfeng
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-01-01
Features: Image Gallery. Film is regarded as "a (human) phenomenon of fantasy." "Image" is more focused on human psychological and physiological sensations than "image," and it builds a complete form together with life. Here, "image" replaces the perception and impression of the projector projecting images at the birth of film. "Image" also has a certain presupposed "ideology." Image Gallery is a series of books that systematically organizes the works and creations of contemporary film masters. To be precise, it is a record of texts and images showing respect for the "author" director. This is not an extensive exploration of film history, and this scope may be unfamiliar to people who usually know "film directors." Therefore, the target audience of Image Gallery was not too broad from the beginning. The birth of Image Gallery stems from the passion and sustained enthusiasm of a few people for film. It is hoped that an effective and healthy language environment can be established, forming attention and scrutiny on the "aesthetic value" of film beyond its "entertainment function," and placing it above the conventional "reaction" to watching films. Moreover, in the face of rapidly expanding visual information and the lack of more detailed research materials on film, Image Gallery can simplify and serve as a "reference book" in the process of "understanding" film, which would be a certain value of Image Gallery. On November 2, 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini's battered body was found on the beach outside Rome. His life ended in a night of revelry, ending under the brutal blows of a 17-year-old male prostitute. His death left many mysteries, still a mysterious puzzle to this day. Some suspect it was a planned political assassination, while others lament it as a martyrdom of art and a ritual of culture. Pasolini had hoped that his body would be mixed with white semen and crimson blood, and it came true. Meanwhile, only weeks after completing the film Salo: 120 Days of Sodom (hereinafter referred to as Salo), that chillingly despairing and cold film seemed to be his black will to the world. The death message conveyed in this coincidence is terrifying. But who is more suitable than Pasolini to bring this timeless masterpiece of Sade to the screen? The subtitle of Salo is "The Scoundrels' Club," and both Sade and Pasolini are specimens of "scoundrels" in their respective eras. They both advocated a bodily revolution to dismantle the so-called values of civilization, allowing desires to flow freely and unrestrainedly, but such licentious behavior was hard to be accepted by society. Sade was accused of indecent assault and abuse of multiple women, serving a total of 28 years in prison, while Pasolini was prosecuted 33 times for the content of his works being morally corrupt. They were rebels against the secular world and heretics of the devil. However, Pasolini, who had been deeply influenced by the historical earthquake of World War II and Marxist and Freudian thought, was different from Sade, the decadent aristocrat of the French Revolution. His life and personality were full of contradictions: his father was a Fascist officer, but his mother was a staunch anti-Nazi; he joined the Communist Party in 1947 and was expelled two years later for his homosexuality, but he remained a lifelong leftist deeply influenced by Gramsci; he believed that the sacredness of life did not exist in any religion but in life itself, choosing to break ties with all religions. His sacred and profane juxtaposition to create a disruptive aestheticism provoked condemnation and imprisonment from the Church, yet The Gospel According to Matthew earned him a medal from the Vatican. Essentially, he was the son of a lumpenproletariat, spending his life among thieves, beggars, and prostitutes. He cursed consumerism and the industrial system, yearning for a world in agricultural civilization that was in harmony with nature. Throughout his life, he sought a purity lost in modern society. Therefore, he wrote poems in dialect, recorded the lives of the poor in the lower strata of society in novels, and recreated ancient myths in images. As a poet, playwright, theorist, avant-garde novelist, and erotic journal columnist, film was just one form of artistic expression for Pasolini. In his debut film The Beggars, he loudly declared, "The Day of Judgment has come!" And in his final work Salo, he directly depicted a hellish scene. The 14-year journey in film was like a path of destruction, and the hedonism and passionate celebration of desire in the "Life Trilogy" before Salo seemed to be a final dirge in the twilight. The "Life Trilogy," composed of The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and One Thousand and One Nights, returned to the pre-industrial society of unrestrained desire and vibrant life. The vivid erotic descriptions, the humorous style, and the accessible stories created an unexpectedly high box office for Pasolini. Commercial success, however, made him realize that this form of expression had not unleashed instinctual liberation or a bodily revolution but had instead catered to the exploitative consumption of the body by the masses. Thus, he publicly renounced this type of film: "Even if I wanted to continue making this kind of film, I couldn’t, because I now so detest the bodies and sex organs of young Italian men." He lamented the lack of humanity in the younger generation, lamenting that the "human" in an anthropological sense no longer existed. Salo is a complete reversal. He excluded the joy of desire from the "Life Trilogy" and brutally presented the cruel persecution of the body by anarchic sexual violence. Screenwriter Sergio Citti even suggested that the film should carry the hatred for the victims—i.e., the young Italian men—with them. He expressed his profound hostility to the philosophy of consumption in the most disgusting way possible: consumers produce feces, and then eat/consume their own feces, turning the human body into a self-contained system, a cog in the industrial machine, both producer and consumer, producing/consuming nothing but garbage. Pasolini set the film’s backdrop in the dark and oppressive Salo Republic at the end of Italian Fascism, seeking an inherent consistency between consumerism, Fascism, and sexual violence. For him, this rewriting had a special significance, as his brother was killed in the nearby mountains while fighting in the Partisan movement, and he himself had been arrested by the Fascists there. As the darkest chapter in Italian history, during the Salo regime under the Nazis, 70,000 people were killed, 40,000 had limbs amputated, and countless women and boys were raped or penetrated anally. The film features a ruling class composed of nobles, judiciary, and the clergy, a violent apparatus made up of soldiers, strict laws, and even the betrayal of the ruled, resembling a microcosm of a state. The castle’s geometrically designed sets,, symbolize the rigidity of the power system. Fascist politics and the sexual politics in the film share the same power structure, both objectifying the human body and excessively exercising power. The camera fixedly records all the horrifying events in the castle, as if in silent observation, the documentary-style approach making the visual content even more unsettling. The camera maintains a certain distance from the atrocities or occurs outside the frame, allowing the audience’s imagination to be more terrifying than direct display. When the final massacre in the film is intensified with distance and silence, the of the image reaches its peak. This is not just a historical critique of the Fascist era, but Pasolini’s target is directly aimed at every audience. Gilles Deleuze believed that "in Salo, there is no outside world." The film completely imprisons the audience in a closed world, where death is the only possible form of resistance and escape. The audience can only identify with the four perpetrators, their gaze becoming rigidly bound to the audience’s. Either they appear in the frame, watching the victimized body alongside the audience, or they represent the audience’s gaze through their subjective lens. This strategy resolutely destroys the pleasure of watching, as the audience cannot derive pleasure through their own eyes but are forced to witness evil. The audience can watch, but they cannot enjoy this watching—they are in the same situation as the victims in the film, they can have sex, but they cannot enjoy it. As Roland Barthes pointed out, Pasolini adopted a sadistic strategy, directing his attack at the audience. In the name of Sade, under Pasolini’s merciless gaze, we have nowhere to hide. We are also part of the beastly carnival. Thus, Salo also demonstrates a high degree of self-reflexivity, as it so profoundly reflects on the power dynamics in film narration. Pasolini discovered the power of intertwined fragmented stories through the "Life Trilogy," and Sade’s novel, with its complex yet highly ordered structure, possessed this form of aesthetic beauty that fascinated him. But he ultimately moved from narrative aesthetics to narrative political theory. The prostitutes in the film use storytelling to incite desire, analogous to the director’s obsession with narration. Those who hold narrative power can become sadists, forcing the audience to endure torture, revealing the tyranny of the film narrative mechanism. Perhaps this is also the difference between Sade and Pasolini. The core of Sade’s novel is pleasure, where cruelty, violence, and the desire for death appear as components of sexual pleasure. One of the protagonists in the novel claims that cruelty based on reason "is the true spiritual pleasure, it ignites all passions." Pasolini’s film, however, is primarily about power, death, and decay, rejecting pleasure. For him, this is no longer the standard sadomasochism, sadomasochism based on voluntary consent is a sexual game and does not involve violence that causes physical harm. Clearly, the sadism in Salo goes far beyond the realm of sadomasochism. In Pasolini’s view, this is an indulgence in power and a reign of violence. Everything in the film is related to power, and pleasure in the film is produced in two ways: one is self-pleasure, and more often, it is through the process by which those in power inflict punishment, abuse, and torture, who are often impotent or unable to achieve sexual pleasure through direct means. Pasolini was not as radical in breaking from tradition as Sade; he left the film with an ambiguous ending: two soldiers dance to the melodious tune of a radio, casually talking about their girlfriends. In the aftermath of the inhumane massacre, this moment is so peaceful and warm. You can view it as a trace of Pasolini’s deep compassion and unwillingness to bear witness, giving us a glimmer of hope and life; or you can see it as Pasolini’s final tragic sigh, as the brutal page of history is turned, the executioners still covered in blood, and the gears of life begin to turn once again, like the capitalist industrial machine still running, burying sin quietly, as if nothing had ever happened. Pasolini said, "True cruelty comes from things themselves, the essence of life is terrifying." Sade was within him, as Italo Calvino said, "Sade is within us."