Reviews

This as "art" makes for fascinating debate, as it, perhaps more than any other film I've seen, ferociously challenges boundaries from the perspective of the viewer, and in the most pronounced fashion, to the kind of mass audience that it originally aimed to reach. Reflecting on this film recalls a book titled "The Kindly Ones", which falls under the same general discussion. It is a magnum opus of writing - a tour de force of imaginative and articulate literature, rife with beautiful crafted tropes and imagery. The controversy? It depicts in the most vividly brutal way the inexplicably awesome atrocities of Nazi Germany, giving a kind of physicality to the colossal horror we are generally familiar with but alien with respect to true intimacy.

Films like Salo are the kind of art that should exist, but does exist for no audience nonetheless. The production has a virtuosity to its despairing depictions - it is utterly bereft of redeeming qualities by design. It paints an insular picture of a truly nihilistic reality, where children are, as if by some right of passage, brought to an inescapable place to be instructed that the world exists not for them; a world where beauty, esteem, dreams, optimism, hope, love, security is categorically divested, replaced by insufferable psychological and psychical torture, at the hands of an inscrutable demonic abstraction. Pasolini depicts an abyss, a truly believable hell on earth, and not so ironically without gratuitous violence that many other films are assailed for - horror films are child's play compared to this.

With this, I cannot recommend it, but will not deny someone's desire and right to see Salo. Ultimately though in judging it, should man be intimate with the capacity for inhumanity that exists in this world, revealed in infrequent and unannounced times and places in history. Should I know what hell feels like even if others have? I can only say I made the decision to watch the film, so I must temper my revulsion because I thought I wanted to bear witness.

Like the other reviewer who posted a few years back, I have only a vague recollection of this program. While it's true that the show only lasted a few episodes, its content was so original that it has not fallen into oblivion, at least for me personally. The style and execution was unlike anything before or since (to my knowledge); it was to be viewed from a first-person perspective - the actors talked directly to "you", as you played the role of the lead detective trying to solve a murder mystery as the clues were unraveled. By the end of the show, if memory serves, there were choices (or maybe just questions) that required you to determine - well, guess more than anything - whodunnit. Given the complexity of writing clever stories that could workably unfold without giving too much or withholding too much, I figured it wouldn't last. But then again, look at Law and Order, which has lasted for over a decade.