#pasolini — Public Fediverse posts

MARTYRS (2008) Pascal’s Wager

The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins. Soren Kierkegaard

I watched this a couple of years ago along with a few other films loosely classed as part of the French New Extremity. While it left a strong impression it didn’t seem very different from others like Calvaire (2004) and À l’intérieur (2007). However, on a recent rewatch, and perhaps because I remembered the basic plot, I was able to appreciate the artistry more since a first watch is rather overwhelming and baffling. It also seems even more relevant in today’s world to understand the film through the lens of pessimism which Pascal Laugier was talking about in this interview:

I was going through a difficult time in my life. I was in a very sombre, pessimistic mood. Our epoch is not very glorious. There are no utopias, ideologies have collapsed and our faith in the future with them. I realise it’s not very original to say this, but I really believe that the Western world is sick. Individual anxieties are at their highest, everyone lives in a constant low-level fear, it feels like we’re going to crash into a wall, there’s something very deathly in our current society. Horror cinema allowed me to express this in a very direct way. Martyrs is almost a work of prospective fiction that shows a dying world, almost like a pre-apocalypse. It’s a world where evil triumphed a long time ago, where consciences have died out under the reign of money and where people spend their time hurting one another. It’s a metaphor, of course, but the film describes things that are not that far from what we’re experiencing today.

MARTYRS: INTERVIEW WITH PASCAL LAUGIER | Electric Sheep

Almost 20 years on and that bleak outlook seems to be increasingly shared by many people as the signs of decay proliferate. Rewatching the film I saw it as less concerned with creating metaphors for existing realities, in the manner of Pasolini’s Salò (1975), where sadistic perversion is intended to represent aspects of a warped society, and more concerned with evoking an atmosphere of pervasive fear and anxiety stalking the individual psyche. Salò is considered to be a shocking and subversive masterpiece and has undoubtedly influenced numerous directors by its formal composition and themes of institutional corruption, but I have to confess that I found it to be horribly dated, crippled by its heavy-handed Marxist messaging, and just incredibly tedious. Martyrs is often placed near to it on a list of the most disturbing/shocking films but I think they’re very different in their intentions. Salò could have been custom-made for a clique of French intellectuals like Michel Foucault and Pierre Klossowski for whom De Sade and Nietzsche are foundational texts. Martyrs is closer to something pieced together by a little-known director from witness statements and police documents in the aftermath.

In contrast to Pasolini’s distanced and emotionless scenes of cruelty, Laugier seems to aspire at times to a depiction of suffering from within the victim. From the opening scene of a battered and blood-stained young girl fleeing from some yet unknown terror the film intentionally throws the viewer into unpredictable territory. The ongoing shifts from tenderness to gruesome horror and back again also destabilise us in a reflection of the sudden jolts of life. The story of Lucie and her friendship with Anna at the orphanage is briefly outlined before ending with the shocking appearance of the apparition that stalks Lucie. The film then leaps forward 15 years and a scene of another young girl being chased turns out to be merely a sister and brother horsing around. Another brief sketch of the domestic situation, with a father and mother engaging in good-humoured family banter, is abruptly shifted into that of a home-invasion when the father is blasted with a shotgun after answering the doorbell.

The young girl who fired the shotgun goes on to kill the mother and children in quick succession and we gradually piece together that this is Lucie and the parents were involved in her earlier captivity. I think this jumble of shocking incidents is again intended to convey the sudden cruel twists of life.  We are thrown into a situation which continues to unfold in exhilarating and bewildering ways until we are as disconcerted as the victims. Laugier’s attempt to discharge all the negative feelings besetting him resulted in the creation of a scenario that evokes the chaotic abyss which lies under the surface of social life, normally held at bay by the daily routines and diversions. All the unpleasant and disturbing realities which sometimes invade our complacency are gathered together and concentrated here: self-harm, isolation, despair, suicide, murder, to name just a few. I see very strong parallels with another work of art from 1919, created in response to the civilisational fracture of WWI.

The Night by Max Beckman has always fascinated me with it’s grim cartoonish style and skewed perspective. It also contains echoes of the home-invasion and  torture seen in Martyrs. It’s noteworthy that Beckman’s style changed from an idyllic late impressionism to this angular and distorted form only after a nervous breakdown while serving as a medical orderly in the trenches of WWI. There’s the same sense here, as in Martyrs, and in Laugier himself, of a darkness erupting in spectacular violence within a domestic setting. Of course, there’s always the question of how much of this sense of imminent disaster and collapse is a reflection of the society and how much it may be simply a projection of the artist’s own internal disorder.

This question of subjectivity also arises with the figure of the deformed woman who continually assaults Lucie. In reality this is an hallucination stemming from Lucie’s ‘survivor guilt’, i.e. the failure to rescue another captive during her own escape. Yet this phantom has been the driving force behind her pursuit of the perpetrators for at least a few years or possibly longer. It’s remarkable how the film manages to evoke the damaged psyche of Lucie through brief shots of her hostile guarded stares and the tentative friendship with Anna in the orphanage. The vulnerability and night-time terrors of children are deftly sketched out and when we jump ahead in time we see the cuts on her body, as if growing up has been like struggling through barbed wire. Anna is shown to be quite different, not sullen and alienated like Lucie but playing a supportive role and better able to navigate in the outside world.

When the attacks continue even after she has killed everyone, Lucie has the stark realisation that the torment isn’t going to end and her only release will be in death so she cuts her own throat. We have also seen her realise just before this that Anna never believed her and was instead with her partly through friendship but also because of a sexual attraction which is not reciprocated by Lucie at all. There’s an extreme use of violence and blood-soaked hysteria in the first half that is quite unique and impactful because there is a tremendous pathos interwoven with the excesses. Even the scenes of Lucie fighting with her inner demon and the lacerations of flesh have a kind of grotesque beauty like a Grünewald painting of the Crucifixion. It is after she turns away from Anna’s friendship that she embraces her tormentor in a moment of trembling hope for reconciliation which is shattered to pieces when the violence resumes once more.

There’s an interesting remark by the director regarding the relationship between the two girls:

What gave me the strength to tell this story, to spend two years of my life in such a dark world, was the love story between Anna and Lucie. It was what connected me viscerally to the film. It’s a love that is not shared. Anna loves Lucie unconditionally and this love will kill her. That’s something very real that we all experience: to fall in love with the wrong person, the one who, without consciously wanting to, will destroy you. Just because they are what they are. Anna loves in an absolute manner, and in that sense, she is a sort of modern saint.

There are interpretations of the film as being about a host of social ills but I would argue any correspondences are all part of ‘the darkness of our world’ which Laugier spoke of above and which he articulates through this film. The innumerable examples of pain and suffering witnessed in the news of that period will have left traces on the film as much as his own particular anxieties. As in The Night painting by Beckman it isn’t necessary to identify which specific events or characters of that period inspired the various figures. While both works have their roots in personal suffering and a particular period, their impact lies in the impersonal artistic containment of a terrifying condition. I’ve always admired the ability of some artists to perform that strange alchemy which can transform base realities into objects of beauty, to acknowledge the malignant aspects of existence yet to somehow transmit a glimpse of another realm existing alongside. This detachment which sometimes occurs in artistic creation and enables uncommon insights has an odd similarity with the dissociative states linked to trauma as well as the records of mystical experiences. Strangely enough, it’s a perversion of this same admiration which drives the cult to perform their insane experiments.

Although Laugier has cited Eli Roth’s Hostel as an inspiration for this work, I don’t think Martyrs is comparable in its effect to that film or to a film like Saw. I’ve never had any desire to watch scenes of mutilation, amputation, ingenious torture devices and so forth, which are intended to provoke a visceral thrill of disgust in the audience. While watching this film I never had any feeling that the director was pandering to the gore-hounds or pushing at the limits of screen violence in some kind of cynical manipulation. The lingering shots of graphic violence in the first half of Martyrs are acts of self-harm by Lucie and evoke the severity of her traumatised condition. Even the beatings which Anna endures and the eventual flaying of her skin are secondary to the focus on the nature of suffering. It’s clear that the film functioned as a kind of personal catharsis for a director with no ideological axe to grind, in contrast to Pasolini’s Salò where we have to endure interjections of philosophical nihilism. Saw and Hostel struck me as basically action-adventures with additional gory bits, whereas there are moments of tenderness and melancholy in Martyrs which make it very distinct and very difficult to categorise.

Laugier has strongly objected to this film being included in the genres of New Extremity and Torture Porn which are really just handy labels for critics and distributers. Although films like Hostel can be generously interpreted as revealing a fear of civilisational breakdown or the decay of Western hegemony there’s always the presence of the box-office refusal to countenance a pessimistic conclusion as opposed to an upbeat one, hence the revenge and triumph of the victimised. This is blatant in the U.S. remake of Martyrs in 2015 which is truly painful to watch and leaves the viewer in a state of acute depression regarding the future of film. Laugier himself commented on it:

I tried to watch it but only got through 20 minutes. It was like watching my mother get raped! Then I stopped. Life is too short. In the American system, a movie like Martyrs is just not possible – they saw my movie and then turned it into something completely uninteresting.

When Anna discovers that Lucie was telling the truth about her tormenters being this normal-seeming bourgeois family and that the house is in fact built over a veritable torture chamber, the film can be interpreted as shifting from the story of a traumatised girl lashing out at imaginary enemies to the wider themes of institutional abuse or societal corruption, which I think is a mistaken reading. Having rescued a captive woman in an echo of the action which Lucie failed to perform so many years ago, she appears to be vindicating and making amends for her friend after death. But once again the film suddenly lurches to another plane when this woman is shot dead by the arriving members of the secret society behind the torture.

This is followed by the only exposition of the purpose behind the cult and it’s really quite short, delivered by a character known only as Mademoiselle:

It’s easy to create a victim. Very easy. Lock someone up in a dark place, they start to suffer. Feed that suffering. Methodically, systematic. And cold. And keep it going. The subject goes through different stages. After a while the trauma, that little crack that happens so easily, makes it see things that aren’t there.

The girl you found. Sarah Dutreuil. She saw insects. Cockroaches, everywhere. They were crawling over her. She had rather have chopped off her arm than to go through that. People don’t want to suffer anymore. The world has come to a point that there are only victims left. Martyrs are rare. A martyr, that’s something else. A martyr is an exceptional being. It survives suffering, the lacking of everything. We burden it with all the evil of the world, and he transcends himself. Do you understand that? He changes shape.

It’s noticeable that none of the martyrs shown to Anna are in any sense religious, in fact it’s explicitly stated that they don’t believe in God.

It’s possible to interpret this as a shadowy parallel to a modern society run along rational lines which has dispensed with the need for religious mystification. The sect is involved in the mechanical production of pain much like scientists experimenting on animals, except these people are technicians of human torture. The re-purposing of human pain to utilitarian ends is implicitly referencing multiple institutions of power and the production of knowledge. The clinical/custodial setting where young women are fine-tuned by suffering to become receptors of the after world is an apparent inversion of the institutions intended to alleviate or eradicate suffering. Yet those same secular institutions which medicate, legislate, analyse and categorise are also involved in the production of knowledge albeit for different ends. The secret society can be seen therefore as a generalised image of power and control conjured up by Laugier. The members obviously have wealth and status like the four libertines in Salò. The subjects of their experiments can be seen as any human being handed over to the inescapable processes of social engineering, and the torturers are merely employees performing their roles dispassionately and efficiently, in line with a philosophy and ideology created by others.

But it seems very evident to me that the aim of the director is not social critique or analysis of the state apparatus. A narrow socio-political interpretation misses the point because what is broached in the film is a metaphysical area. It’s Laugier’s attempt to externalise, even exorcise, an ontological malaise, or a sickness unto death to use Kierkegaard’s terminology. Unlike Pasolini, Laugier has no ideology to frame the events through and offers no implicit remedy for the situation in some imagined future re-ordering of society. Nor does he suggest any spiritual solution, although he has cited his Catholicism as being an influence upon his vision:

For me, the martyr represents the one who, having no other choice but to suffer, manages to do something with this pain. Of course it’s an extreme projection, entirely disenchanted, of what I was telling you about today’s world. Since we don’t believe in anything, since the world is increasingly divided between winners and losers, what is left to the losers but to do something with their pain? Deep down, it’s what the film is about.

There’s a difference between someone who feels overwhelming despair and bitter disillusionment at the core of their being and the one for whom pessimism is merely an intellectual impasse or a speculative excursion. It seems to me that Laugier, judging by his remarks, was sinking into a pit of despair, with the ground shifting under his feet, and the questions that arose regarding suffering were utterly sincere and urgent like a grappling hook thrown into the darkness. This same desperate search for deliverance is performed so convincingly by the actress who plays Lucie (Mylène Jampanoï) and the same struggle with pain and final surrender is enacted by Anna (Morjana Alaoui) with equal intensity. The same questions regarding the purpose of suffering gave rise to the idea of a shadowy cult for whom suffering is a means to an end. The whole scenario is a kind of dramatization of his own crisis, his attempt to do something with his own pain. This is what gives the film it’s strange compelling quality and marks it out as unique.

The close-ups of Anna’s bruised face and shaved head and her internal dialogue with Lucie as she reaches the limits of her endurance are surely inspired by Carl Dreyer’s 1928 work about a more famous martyr: The Passion of Joan of Arc. There’s a remarkable quality to the scene which once again shifts the film onto another deeper plane. Dreyer’s film is almost a century old but it still has a powerful impact because of it’s intense focus on the faces of the actors and the subjective perspective of Joan. Likewise in this moment we are witnesses to both the external conditions of Anna’s situation and the internal struggles that play upon her features. It evokes our pity but also recalls our own negotiations with pain and fear, self-doubt and self-pity, the inner struggle to manage or endure afflictions, the testing of our own character by misfortune. This is what it means to do something with one’s pain, to accept it as a shaping force, a modifying experience or in the case of an artist to modulate an inarticulate anguish into a meaningful form. This is also part of the distinction Mademoiselle makes between those who are victims and those who are martyrs. Because there is no longer a religious or ideological frame within which to place the role of suffering there are only victims of meaningless pain.

The film is a personal reaction to the darkness of our world. And I like the paradox within horror film: take the worst of the human condition and transform it into art, into beauty. It’s the only genre that offers this kind of dialectic and I have always found this idea very moving – to create emotion with the saddest, most depressing things in existence. I’ve always felt that horror was a melancholy genre.

I’m not certain but in one of the most moving scenes we have either a remembered or imaginary dialogue between Anna and Lucie concerning fear and it seems to be Anna remembering her advice to Lucie in times past. There’s a strange truth within the advice to ‘let yourself go’ in order to overcome the fear and pain. There’s a certain lucidity that arises when a person comes to the end of their struggles and ‘gives up’. It’s very difficult to achieve or express but it isn’t exactly a surrender, it’s closer to a detachment and acceptance which allows an inner aspect of the self to emerge. It is very likely that Laugier underwent such an experience of lucidity and this work is a fictionalised expression of it. It’s an idea that can be found in many religious writings and it’s impossible, in the West at least, to avoid the association of Anna’s situation with the Christian martyrdoms of the past. It should be noted though that Laugier appends a definition of the word Martyr to the closing credits emphasising that the original Greek term meant simply ‘witness’ and only later became associated with the persecution of Christians.

Laugier himself stated his intentions quite clearly:

I really wanted to give answers to the audience for the amount of violence I was putting them through. Believe it or not, I didn’t make the film to shock or create any kind of scandal. I wrote the film in a very sincere state of mind. I was feeling pain and I wanted the audience to share the pain as part of a very honest process. I was thinking I am going to make the audience share the real experience of pain and violence as a way of communion. It was a very Catholic process. I have a very Catholic mind. Let’s share together what’s worst in life, the very worst of the human condition, and maybe we can reach another state after the screening.

It’s difficult to avoid comparisons to the Martyrs’ Relics of Saint Catherine of Alexandra and Saint Bartholomew in the image of the circular instrument where Anna’s skin is flayed.

The wheel of St Catherine of Alexandria. St Catherine, by tradition a noblewoman of Alexandria martyred under Maximinus around 305, was sentenced to be broken on a spiked wheel; the wheel shattered at her invocation and she was instead beheaded. Fragments of the wheel are claimed at multiple sites; the most secure provenance is at the Monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai (where her body was, in tradition, carried by angels and where the monastery has stood as her custodian since the 6th century). The Catherine wheel became a heraldic symbol of her victory and a regular medieval iconographic attribute,

St Bartholomew’s skin. St Bartholomew the Apostle was, by tradition, flayed alive in Armenia for converting King Polymius to Christianity. His skin is venerated as a relic at the Basilica of San Bartolomeo all’Isola in Rome; his bones are venerated at the Cathedral of Benevento. Michelangelo painted Bartholomew in the Sistine Chapel’s Last Judgement (1541) holding his own flayed skin; the face on the skin is a self-portrait of Michelangelo himself, who included his own image as the flayed skin held by the apostle to whom suffering had been the means of triumph.

The Martyrs’ Instruments — The Gridiron, the Wheel, the Eyes, the Chains | The Watcher’s Defence

There’s certainly aspects of Catholicism that strikes the modern mind as morbid and superstitious but there is also a similarity with secular horror films where the protagonist experiences torments and/or supernatural forces.

The closing scenes are of Anna attaining the martyred state and conveying what she saw to Mademoiselle who is expected to relay the words to the members of the cult.

Miss…they are waiting.
I’m coming, Etienne.
So there IS something?
Of course.
Was it clear?
Very clear.
And precise?
There was no room for interpretation, Etienne.
Thank you, Miss.
Etienne?
Miss?
Could you imagine what comes after death?
Are you OK?
Could you?

No.

Keep doubting, Etienne.

At this point she shoots herself so neither the cult nor the audience learn what Anna told her. The ending has generated a lot of speculation but it seems to be in keeping with the sudden shifts so prevalent in the narrative and circles back to the opening gunshot which kicked off the plot. It refuses to give closure to the audience which echoes the advice to keep doubting. It also seems in line with the director’s desire to make the audience feel pain, in the sense that there is no release from troubling questions via a feel-good ending or a definite answer. It may be the case that Laugier himself found no consoling answer to his pessimistic outlook and chose to live with an open wound than not to live at all, or to take refuge in ready-made ideological/religious answers. In which case the film represents an honest portrayal of his experience. I think the cult is a kind of plot device to explore the meaning of suffering rather than a completely worked out idea. There’s something faintly comical in the appearance of Mademoiselle with her turban and tinted glasses resembling a fairground fortune teller more than the leader of a sinister cult. There’s also a kind of absurd aspect to the sect itself which for 17 years has been spending a great deal of time and money and breaking all kinds of laws in pursuit of definite knowledge concerning life after death. It has echoes of the Inquisition and Guantanamo Bay where torture is used to extract a confession, but in this case it’s hard to see what practical use could be made of it. It’s likely intended to convey the dangers of fanaticism in any realm and the rationalisation of inhuman impulses and destructive actions.

While the film doesn’t reach the height of Beckman’s The Night in terms of a radical new vision it does deepen the horror genre significantly by using it to explore the meaning of suffering in a desacralized realm. It also contains a host of images and situations which could serve as metaphors for multiple existing realities but are instead presented as the only reality available to the victims. It’s a very pure and very sincere film intended to communicate the experience of pain directly to the audience. What they choose to do with the pain is up to them.

https://youtu.be/LY1lCIDBK4k?si=MeDzmfvSc6jaw6MM

Il titolo prima dei fatti. Sempre.
Italia guardona: la caccia a Pier Paolo Pasolini.

👉 Storia completa qui https://wp.me/pey833-am5

#Pasolini #LoSpecchio #LeOre #IlBorghese #DolceVita #StoriaItaliana #ItaliaGuardona

Vabbè non si può tacere

Guardatevi "Itaca- Il ritorno" di Uberto #Pasolini

Su #RaiPlay finché c'è.

Fate il confronto.

#Odissea

Vabbè non si può tacere

Guardatevi "Itaca- Il ritorno" di Uberto #Pasolini

Su #RaiPlay finché c'è.

Fate il confronto.

#Odissea

Celestini: “Sono antifascista per Costituzione”.

L’artista parla di letteratura, memoria, lavoro e sindacato a partire dal suo ultimo libro: "Pasolini. Una vita, anzi due".

@spettacoli & @cultura

https://www.collettiva.it/rubriche/collettiva-talk/sono-antifascista-per-costituzione-ascanio-celestini-pasolini-h9vpf1wi

#Cultura #Libri #Spettacolo #Sindacato #Antifascismo #Costituzione #Celestini #AscanioCelestini #Pasolini #PierPaoloPasolini

Celestini: “Sono antifascista per Costituzione”.

L’artista parla di letteratura, memoria, lavoro e sindacato a partire dal suo ultimo libro: "Pasolini. Una vita, anzi due".

@spettacoli & @cultura

https://www.collettiva.it/rubriche/collettiva-talk/sono-antifascista-per-costituzione-ascanio-celestini-pasolini-h9vpf1wi

#Cultura #Libri #Spettacolo #Sindacato #Antifascismo #Costituzione #Celestini #AscanioCelestini #Pasolini #PierPaoloPasolini

Not #SalDaVinci, but... there is some resemblance, isn't there?
#esc #esc2026 #eurovision #music #Italia #movies #Pasolini

Not #SalDaVinci, but... there is some resemblance, isn't there?
#esc #esc2026 #eurovision #music #Italia #movies #Pasolini

Cinema, fascismo, Pasolini

https://andream94.wordpress.com/2026/04/08/cinema-fascismo-pasolini/

Cinema, fascismo, Pasolini

https://andream94.wordpress.com/2026/04/08/cinema-fascismo-pasolini/

The legacy of Pasolini and Warhol in modern LLMs: they still shake us with a kiss to a rubber ducky. I was looking for a carefree meme, I found the Elsewhere. 🛢️🦆

#TrumpMeme #Pasolini #Warhol #LLMArt #Satire #AIGenerated

The legacy of Pasolini and Warhol in modern LLMs: they still shake us with a kiss to a rubber ducky. I was looking for a carefree meme, I found the Elsewhere. 🛢️🦆

#TrumpMeme #Pasolini #Warhol #LLMArt #Satire #AIGenerated

🗓 Aquest dijous, 5 de març, a les 19.30 h, presento la meva #traducció en #català d'«Els Turcs al Friül», obra de teatre en #furlà de Pier Paolo #Pasolini, editada per Lleonard Muntaner, a la llibreria Jàssera de Barcelona (C. de les Sitges, 8). #furlan #friul

ho nostalgia della gente povera e vera che si batteva per abbattere quel padrone senza diventare quel padrone.
si intende che rimpiango la rivoluzione pura e diretta della gente oppressa che ha il solo scopo di farsi libera e padrona di se stessa. #pasolini

"In questo intreccio tra malavita privata e malavita pubblica, tra libidine violenta e #guerra, sembra di vedere la Salò di #Pasolini: il vero volto di un #fascismo inteso come abuso permanente."

#Trump #USA #Venezuela #Occidente #7gennaio

https://volerelaluna.it/in-primo-piano/2026/01/07/trump-si-comporta-come-un-boss-mafioso-e-loccidente-gli-assomiglia/

"In questo intreccio tra malavita privata e malavita pubblica, tra libidine violenta e #guerra, sembra di vedere la Salò di #Pasolini: il vero volto di un #fascismo inteso come abuso permanente."

#Trump #USA #Venezuela #Occidente #7gennaio

https://volerelaluna.it/in-primo-piano/2026/01/07/trump-si-comporta-come-un-boss-mafioso-e-loccidente-gli-assomiglia/

Si è conclusa a #Bari la tre giorni dedicata al ripristino del murale in memoria di Pier Paolo #Pasolini, nel sottopassaggio di via Duca degli Abruzzi. Un intervento fortemente voluto e realizzato dai volontari di #Retake, che hanno scelto di chiudere l’anno con un gesto concreto di cura urbana e memoria collettiva, nell’anno del cinquantesimo anniversario della scomparsa dell’intellettuale. #cultura

Si è conclusa a #Bari la tre giorni dedicata al ripristino del murale in memoria di Pier Paolo #Pasolini, nel sottopassaggio di via Duca degli Abruzzi. Un intervento fortemente voluto e realizzato dai volontari di #Retake, che hanno scelto di chiudere l’anno con un gesto concreto di cura urbana e memoria collettiva, nell’anno del cinquantesimo anniversario della scomparsa dell’intellettuale. #cultura

At the age of 24, I saw on three consecutive days Alejandro Jodorowsky's Santa Sangre, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò, and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange.

Curiously, of the three, Santa Sangre lingers the most in my memory. In contrast, I hardly remember A Clockwork Orange. However, Salò remains the most profoundly disturbing movie I have ever watched.

‘You have to be ready to see it’: Abel Ferrara and Catherine Breillat on why Pasolini’s Salò is a gift that keeps giving

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notorious film is now 50 years old, and its cavalcade of shocking cruelty and violence still leaves a stark impact on its viewers. Film-makers explain why Pasolini ‘was a saint to us’

by Sam Moore
The Guardian
December 22, 2025

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/dec/22/pasolini-salo-abel-ferrara-catherine-breillat

At the age of 24, I saw on three consecutive days Alejandro Jodorowsky's Santa Sangre, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò, and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange.

Curiously, of the three, Santa Sangre lingers the most in my memory. In contrast, I hardly remember A Clockwork Orange. However, Salò remains the most profoundly disturbing movie I have ever watched.

‘You have to be ready to see it’: Abel Ferrara and Catherine Breillat on why Pasolini’s Salò is a gift that keeps giving

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notorious film is now 50 years old, and its cavalcade of shocking cruelty and violence still leaves a stark impact on its viewers. Film-makers explain why Pasolini ‘was a saint to us’

by Sam Moore
The Guardian
December 22, 2025

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/dec/22/pasolini-salo-abel-ferrara-catherine-breillat

Today's poem:

Baths of Caracalla
- by Pier Paolo Pasolini

https://www.tumblr.com/ukdamo/801813761177649152/baths-of-caracalla?source=share

#Pasolini #poetry #homoeroticism #cruising #archaeology #rome #caracalla

#Pasolini und immer noch viele Rätsel, Mord vor 50 Jahren

https://orf.at/stories/3410062/

#2novembre a 50 anni dalla morte di Pier Paolo #Pasolini #PPP proponiamo un articolo di Maria Claudia Petrin su #AltreModernità.

L'autrice analizza il campo tematico dell’identità sdoppiata, centrale nei testi degli anni Quaranta e Cinquanta, orientati alla descrizione del processo di conoscenza del sé e delle consapevolezze maturate rispetto al rapporto con la madre e al proprio orientamento sessuale.

⬇️ https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/AMonline/article/view/29217?mtm_campaign=mastodon

@cultura

#cultura
#Pasolini: a 50 anni dall'uccisione, il delitto che continua a interrogare l'Italia
https://www.rainews.it/articoli/2025/11/pasolini-50-anni-senza-il-poeta-il-delitto-che-continua-a-interrogare-litalia-83fcb694-a34c-4080-b386-a0c0386aba59.html

🕸glané sur le net🕸 Le jour des défunts, Pasolini, Jackson Pollock et le bleu de manganèse, entre autres...: Jour des défunts. Pier-Paolo Pasolini. Jackson Pollock. Mississippi John Hurt. Et aussi : l'éphéméride du jour. -- file.png, A LA UNE #JourDesDéfunts #Pasolini #JacksonPollock #Art

Le jour des défunts, Pasolini,...

Olivia Laing on Pasolini

"Some deaths are so suggestive that they become emblematic of a subject, the deceiving lens through which an entire life is forever after read...what if this reputational as well as actual murder was designed to drown out – contaminate, confuse – the warnings he’d been issuing with increasing ferocity in the final years of his short life?"

#pasolini #fascism #authoritarianism #cinema

https://www.theguardian.com/profile/olivialaing

La sera del 1° novembre 1975 Pasolini mangiava una bistecca e parlava del futuro. Poche ore dopo era morto. Aveva appena previsto l'avvento del fascismo: non quello che tutti vedono ovunque, per isteria. Quello vero, molto più pericoloso di quello con le camicie nere. Cinquant'anni dopo, viviamo esattamente nel mondo che lui aveva descritto: lo aveva visto fin troppo bene. E forse lo hanno zittito proprio per questo.

https://www.futuroprossimo.it/2025/11/50-anni-senza-pasolini-il-futuro-che-vide-si-e-avverato-tutto

#futuroprossimo #pasolini #capitalismo #futuro

#Pasolini #Salò

"Watching Pier Paolo Pasolini’s *Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom*
today is as extreme and at times unbearable an experience as it was 50 years ago, when it marked its troubled premiere. Its scenes of forced sex, bodily sadism, coprophagy, humiliation, and mutilation, filmed in magnificent settings and with exquisitely beautiful formal apparatus, generate the same horror, the same moral repugnance. But above all, the field in which the film extends its relevance with greatest authority is the political, which is the what most interested its director. What *Salò* enunciates — a study of the violence that underlies the exercise of power in capitalist societies — has not lost one iota of its potency and validity. Perhaps that message was the veiled motive behind the initial attacks on the movie by extremist groups, while a furious rush to ban its screening — including a prison sentence for its producer — was unleashed in the courts: there were no longer any means to enforce the court’s conviction against Pasolini, the director, since he had been murdered shortly before the film’s release. A death that is still considered, incidentally, one of the most high-profile cases in Italy’s recent history, and which for many is linked to the prophetic message of *Salò* itself."

https://english.elpais.com/culture/2025-08-21/aberrant-and-repulsive-images-against-fascism-50-years-since-pasolinis-scandalous-masterpiece-salo.html

#31marzo

Per l’anniversario della nascita di Johann Sebastian #Bach, 31 marzo 1685, proponiamo un’analisi di “...tra la Carne e il Cielo”, un'opera di Azio Corghi su libretto di Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis. L'ispirazione dell'opera è il saggio Studi sullo stile di Bach di Pier Paolo #Pasolini, un'analisi critica delle sonate per #violino di Bach. Mazzocut-Mis riutilizza le parole di Pasolini nel libretto, mentre la musica è una variazione di Corghi sulle sonate di Bach.

⬇️ https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/itinera/article/view/14918?mtm_campaign=mastodon

Che razza di urlo è il mio? Buon compleanno caro Pier Paolo Pasolini

Buon compleanno caro Pier Paolo

Ogni anno cerco un modo originale per augurare a Pier Paolo Pasolini, buon compleanno. Quest’anno il poeta avrebbe compiuto ben 103 anni. E sono certa che, se non fosse stato ammazzato, quest’anno avrebbe spento ben 103 candeline.

Cer

https://www.magozine.it/che-razza-di-urlo-e-il-mio-buon-compleanno-caro-pier-paolo-pasolini/

#ArteECultura #FilosofieEPsicologia #Pasolini

Omaggio a Pier Paolo Pasolini a quasi mezzo secolo dalla sua scomparsa

A quasi mezzo secolo dalla morte – per amor della precisione quarantanove anni – di Pier Paolo Pasolini, ho voluto ricordalo, rendergli omaggio in un modo diverso, forse strano, tanto quanto –spero – originale. Superbamente mi piace pensare alla “sua” maniera. È nato così questo racc

https://www.magozine.it/omaggio-a-pier-paolo-pasolini-a-quasi-mezzo-secolo-dalla-sua-scomparsa/

#ArteECultura #Pasolini #Racconto

@dangillmor

Recommend read: Pierpaolo Pasolini, The Fascism of the Antifascists.

#fascism

#Pasolini