""NIGHT AND FOG and SALO are the two films that everybody should see, who wants to become a citizen."" "Roll camera!" "Action!" "Last days of shooting in Cinecittà" "Efisio, take a step forward!" "Claudio!" "Go in!" "All right." ""Salò" yesterday and today" "How do we do the close-up?" " It is better fastened like this." "Much better." "I don't understand why." "Last time I had it perfectly fastened." "So, Valletti, you know what you have to do, don't you?" "You come over here, then you undress, throw the dressing gown down here, light the candle and come forward with the candle to right here." "You light it there since over there everybody is naked ..." "I think, this makes a bad impression." "In the next scene you will see what you'll do." "A piece of luck." "You will see." "You can't imagine that!" " A piece of luck." "Yes." "No, you take off the dressing gown!" " Here?" "You take it off, throw it over the chair, light the candle and go slowly over there with the burning candle, and when you are there you pretend to burn Tonino's penis." "When you are this close." "Only when you are this close to his penis." "And then I say "stop"." "Attention!" "So, exactly like we just did, right?" "I'm doing one more wide shot." "At "Action" you wail and scream, and you hold him fast, right?" "And Valletti lights the candle, right?" "Attention!" "Giorgio, move a little more to the left." "Move a little bit closer to Umberto, a little bit more, there we are!" "Tonino, you look towards the camera, right?" "You look right into here." "Understood?" "At "Action" you yell and cry and, as far as possible, look into the camera." "But you don't, you just hold him fast." "Attention, roll camera!" "Action!" "Scream!" "Look into the camera!" "Look into the camera!" "Scream, scream!" "No, Valletti!" "I told you, only when I say "Valletti"." "Number." "You have to grab him tighter." "We will do it like this." "Who can do that better, with more malice?" "You!" "You restrain his head, so that he moves less and stays more like this, so that I can see his eyes, right?" "Attention, go!" "Camera ... and please stay serious, Tonino." "Look into the camera." "Go on, scream." "Don't laugh." "Open your eyes!" "Open your eyes wider!" "Open your eyes wider!" ""Money has corrupted everything," "I want to hide."" "I offered the film to Sergio Citti." "I worked with him on the screenplay." "My contribution the the screenplay was the Dantesque structure, which is already there with De Sade." "The division into circles of hell creates a kind of verticality, a regularity with Dantesque character." "But during our work on the screenplay Citti lost interest, since he came up with a new film idea." "But I got more and more enthused, especially when" "I had the revelation to transfer De Sade to the Salò of 1944." "The idea for a film is never born out of a chain of thoughts, except if they are intercepted by an idea, like the one with De Sade." "I had this flash of inspiration when I decided to transfer the "120 Days of Sodom"" "to the spring of 1944." "Suddenly I saw the fascistic choreography in front of me." "The formal pattern, the image, I have of a film," "I can't explain it through words." "Either you understand it or you don't." "When I decide to make a film I do that because" "I had a revelation as to how the formal look of the film should be." "That is the synthesis of the film." "Sadomasochism is an ancient human phenomenon." "It existed in De Sade's time and does today but that isn't my topic." "It is also my topic but the sex in my film actually stands for the relationship between power and those that are subdued by it." "All that sex, the sadomasochism at De Sade definitely has the function to show what power does to the human body." "The human body is reduced to a thing, to a commodity." "Thereby the other's personality is destroyed." "It is not only a film about power, but about the anarchy of power, for nothing is more anarchic than the power." "Power does as it pleases, and that is completely arbitrary, or it follows economic requirements that have nothing to do with logic." "Besides the anarchy of power it also deals with the inexistence of history." "Our culture contemplates history from a Eurocentric perspective." "Western rationalism, empiricism on the one hand, Marxism on the other." "This film shall show the inexistence of this history." "I'm not talking about today." "It is meant as a metaphor for the relationship between power and those who are subdued by power." "This apllies to all eras." "Of course, the impetus was mainly my aversion to the power of today which manipulates the body in a dreadful manner and doesn't take second place to the manipulations of Himmler or Hitler." "Eat." "Eat it!" "Eat!" "Manipulation of consciousness, the worst, in fact." "To achieve this new, alienating and wrong values are established." "The values of consumersim which compensate what Marx called "genocide"" "of once very much alive and true cultures." "Rome, for instance, was destroyed like this." "Today, Rome's citizens are just carcasses." "Biologically they are alive, but can't deliberate between the old values of their folk culture and the new, enforced, narrow-minded values of consumerism." "Eat it!" "Eat." "Eat!" "These thoughts are all contained within the film." "But I don't know whether an average viewer will notice it." "Perhaps not even the critcs." "But it were these very dynamics that drove me to make the film." "Eva?" "I can't." "Give the Madonna a small offering." "The human being is a conformist." "It is a human's key feature to arrange himself with any kind of power and way of living." "Sorry, we are following orders." "This is a social ability of humans." "Perhaps the human is by nature narcissistic, rebellious, individualistic." "But society turns him into a conformist and he bows down to necessities of society." "That is an indivdual thing which sometimes can effect certain social categories." "But in no society whatsoever will humans ever be free." "There is nothing to hope for." "The gentlemen know, that their instructions are law to us." "Of what importance is technique to the film?" ""It is a myth."" "That what I usually do all the time has extreme consequences." "For example I extensively use shot - reverse shot, put close-up versus close-up, forgo the action in the background, as well as persons entering or leaving the frame and most of all tracking shots." "That is typical of all my films." "In this film everything serves clarity and the greatest possible radicalness." "When I shoot I do nothing but gathering material." "I choose a certain place and, without changing anything there," "I gather material, depending on the light or whatever is there." "It is the same when I take a boy who has never been in front of a camera," "I film him for a long time, gathering material." "That means that I have a lot of work with editing afterwards, to dispose of useless material and filter out the true, which flashed up in his loook, his smile during shooting." "It is different with this film, this time I didn't gather material to edit it afterwards." "This is a film that's being edited during the shoot." "Therefore the actors have to be more professional." "In this film there are four or five actually professional actors." "But I also treat the laymen that I discovered in the streets like true actors." "I demand of them a professional performance." "They mustn't omit a word, have to be in character and so on." "At first I discuss with the actors whether they completely know their lines, after that I naturally leave them a lot of room for imrpovisations." "But all in all everything here is better planned than usually." "So, now, Umberto ..." "Valletti, when it starts you walk over to the table over there on which the candle lies." "You light it and then walk slowly, so as not to extinguish it over to Tonino." "Und you hold fast Tonino by his arms and legs." "Understood?" "You, Valletti, when you are in front of Tonino, kneel down as if, you wanted to burn him, right?" "Some people are always unhappy and regret each morning what they have done the night before." "With Pasolini there was always a reason to be shocked, no matter what we did." "He never told us anything beforehand." "That was why each day brought surprises." "He expected of us to be natural." "When we were to do something horrible or something interesting, we were all horrified or interested, for usually he only told us very shortly in advance, what we should do." "It goes without saying that he is very intelligent, just like his manner to tell you something, to explain." "He is very calm, very friendly, and he expects one to be intelligent enough to understand him." "I started the shooting with the first narrative." "I had to walk down a broad staircase." "There was no roof overhead, since we were in an old Palazzo." "I was freezing in my big cleavage." "I thought, if I fall down now, I'll never be able to get up again." "I was born in a boarding school, where my mother was a servant." "The set was indeed peculiar, uncommon." "For there were about 40 actors who were around all the time." "There were four cameras, at least during my scenes." "I don't know what it was like at the smaller scenes." "But he needed numerous rolls of film, from which he edited the film." "Even the sound was only added during editing, so it is truly a film that was created during editing." "It was a very special atmosphere, since they were all juveniles." "They were between 14 and 18 years old." "It was a bit like in a boarding school." "The most difficult thing during the horrible scenes was to stop them from laughing." "One or other of the boys always made a remark in Roman dialect which would crack up all the others." "That is why the shooting was merry, paradoxically, youthfully exuberant." "It was very weird." "When I saw the finished film" "I wondered how we could have created something so terrible without realising it." "It was a shock." "I was aghast when I saw the film." "During the work on the subtitles" "I got familiar with the film." "When I watched it time and again for the French dubbing" "I noticed the humour of the film, which was there in spite of everything." "However, it is not the meaning, not the scene itself that is humorous, but the behaviour of the actors." "For they never behave the way the tragedy would demand." "They act between indifference and prosaicness." "Efisio!" "Efisio!" "To me!" "Come to me, Efisio." "Now!" "When I read the script I found it politically ... right and agreed to act in the film, because ..." "Presidential elections April 2002" "Perhaps since April 21 one is more receptive to this problem." "But in 1975" "I saw the fascists in Bologna march by in uniform, with the fascist salute." "And the people stood at the roadside and applauded." "That was very frightening." "There also was a Belgian fascist movement which was very active at the time." "The shock we felt after April 21 was felt just the same back then." "One asked oneself:" "if they are still that present, won't it start again?" "This fear still remains." "To him this was the film he had to make at this moment in time." "It was a film that pilloried something and that had to be made back then." "Pier Paolo rejoiced in telling the unvarnished truth." "Still, Pier Paolo has indeen worked very hard for this, he was very adamant." "And then, when he had finished the film, despite all he cruelty and hardness he had employed during shooting, a wonderful film emerged." "Wonderful in its style." "After all, I watched it from the perspective of an impressed spectator." "It impressed me very much when I saw the final cut, even though I was present during the shooting." "To finally see it on the screen was a very strong impression, very tough, too, but beautiful as a whole for "Salò" remains a masterpiece." "No, no, not this!" "This flower is reserved for us!" "All were afraid of the film." "We received hate mail, there was police protection on location." "One roll of film was stolen." "And finally his assassination." "Pasolini died early in November." "We were about to start with the French dubbing of the film." "With Michel Piccoli and the others, all of them well-known people." "We had prepared the dubbing." "Jean-Claude Biette then directed the dubbing, for when we wanted to start on Monday he wasn't there." "He died during the night from Saturday on Sunday, following the Friday on which he had finished the preparations." "The subtitled version had been completed." "The dubbing was then done during the following week." "The beginning of all greatness on earth has always been entire and long-lastingly saturated by blood." "And furthermore, my friends, if my memory doesn't deceive me ..." "Yes, that is it:" ""Without bloodshed there is no ..." "There is no forgiveness without bloodshed." Baudelaire." "With Pasolini everything always went very fast." "He didn't hold long speeches." "He thought, since the text was by De Sade, it was legitimate to have the film spoken in French." "Even though he initially had to do an Italian version because it was an Italian film." "Thus it was initially directed to Italians." "But from the moment it would be shown abroad he wanted it in French." "This murder ... put fear into all the powers that be." "To the powerful in film as well as to the ones in politics." "The film was banned in Italy." "In France it was first shown at an event that took place at the time, the "Festival de Paris"." "Many directors from Italy attended about ten to twenty, to introduce the film to the press, to talk about this murder, about the film, about the ban in Italy and about why this film had been made, and ... they were prohibited to speak." "It was rather ... horrible to witness that." "For suddenly that which the film was about was mirrored by what happened there." "It was alarming." "Eat, my sweet bride." "You need strength for the night of love ahead of us." "And now the film is being reissued, and the article I read in the magazin "Aden"," "this article really spoke to me." "I believe it is by a woman, and this woman says that the new fascism is the dictatorship of consumerism." "And indeed one can interpret this film in this fashion." "Given the time gone by one can indeed see it differently as today's society is concerned." "Pasolini picks consumerism society to pieces and wants to dispose of it because it is a "new fascism"." "He abhors this society, therefore his film has to be horrible." "After Pier Paolo had made this trilogy he realised that the world of which he told in these three films ..." "I think he realised that the world was changing, in a way that ... that life wasn't like in a fairy tale but was changing radically." "Not for the better, though, but for the worse, as this consumer-orientated world was coming on, this world with its varied forms of expression, with its corrupt culture, in which ideology was about to vanish." "It was a row of things that were negatively perceivable." "After Pier Paolo had shown all these beautiful things in this trilogy, he saw this development and wanted "Salò" to be a turnabout." "Pier Paolos last film is a film, that in a way disclaims ..." "Not in a negative sense, but disclaiming in the sense that something has been lost." "From the narratives he had filmed years before in which a completely different way to perceive life had been shown." "And this way was not good, not beautiful, not happy." "Pier Paolo did let off a little bit of steam with "Salò", which is beautifully made, impressive, very ... shocking." "It was a turnabout which was connected to changes of life that took place at that time, 1975." "He deliberately made it very gruesome." "Which meant:" "Now I'll show you the way life is and how I see it." "And he directed "Salò" in a way, that it was a bit ..." "As if to tell all these hypocrites quite directly:" ""Now I'll show you that today's film is like this ..."" "Not like the people deserve it, but that this world has somehow adapted to the changed ways of life." "Carlo!" "Do like this with your fingers." "Can you say:" ""I can't eat the ragout"?" "I can't eat the ragout." " Then eat the shit." "I know:" "The more often one watches it, the more one overcomes the shock and perceives the film as extraordinarily stimulating," "in order to get aware of how to deal with horror." "For that, though, one has to accept that films show the essential things of life." "Anybody can do that." "It is a matter of openness and acceptance." "Above all, Pasolini was a man who tried to understand his era, with open eyes and without fear of harming his reputation." "Therefore this man, in a sense, was more than an artist, more than a great writer." "He was a human being who tried to live a dignified life in his era." "To whom is this film addressed?" "Genrally to everyone, to the other I."