Appallingly, Australia’s Office of Film and Literature Classification has just banned Pier Paolo Pasolini’s controversial cinema classic, Salo or 12o Days of Sodom (1975) from further screening across the Tasman. I object.

This is an intolerable attack on creative and artistic freedom and should be strongly resisted on both sides of the Tasman. As its name suggests, Salo or 120 Days of Sodom was based on the Marquis de Sade’s original harrowing account of a group of aristocratic libertines who imprison, torture and murder several village teenagers. However, by prefacing this with Salo, the Northern Italian title of the Nazi post-Mussolini fascist puppet Salo Republic, Pasolini forces us to think about what the consequences of absolute sovereign power over life and death mean in the context of fascism.

As with Holocaust victims before their slaughter in the gas chambers, several rural adolescents are made to strip naked, and then subjected to clinical examination, torture, degradation and finally discarded at the end of the movie. Salo  is an unflinching account of what life in Nazi Germany actually meant for that regime’s vulnerable victims, and thus constitutes an anti-fascist masterpiece. Granted, these events never actually happened, but they are plausible enough to have conceivably occurred under Nazi domination. I cannot think of a better fictional account of the true extent of fascist contempt for human rights, human dignity, or any form of individual freedom or collective identity.

In New Zealand, Salo is restricted to film festival audiences over eighteen, and university film and media studies courses, which is as it should be. However, once again, Australia has gone too far in attacking human rights and civil liberties.  It is especially shameful that the latest attack has been allowed to occur under the ostensibly progressive Rudd administration.

Incidentally, if SPCS or any other pro-censorship fanatics try to follow suit and get the Office of Film and Literature Classification here to ban this brilliant and principled if transgressive work, they too must be actually resisted. Yes, Salo is a dreadful spectacle of cruelty, degradation, torture and murder. It occurs in the context of Nazi Germany, and such barbarities were commonplace if hidden in its concentration camps. Salo shines an arclight on the true, lethal meaning of fascism for its victims. We must never allow ourselves to forget that.

Recommended:

Sam Rohdie: The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini: London: BFI: 1995.