Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom [DVD + Blu-ray] [1975]

Product Description

SALO
A Film by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Banned, censored and reviled the world over since its release, Pasolini's final and most controversial masterpiece is presented here fully uncut and uncensored in a brand new restoration. The content and imagery of Salo is extreme: it retains the power to shock, repel and distress. But it remains a cinematic milestone: culturally significant, politically vital, visually stunning.

Based on a novel by the Marquis de Sade - and taking as it setting the miniature fascist republic which Mussolini established in 1944 in Italy - this is a film about power, corruption, and the degradation of the human body. It is a devastating, angry cry from one of the most controversial auteurs in cinema history

Special features

• Presented in both High Definition and Standard Definition
• Includes both Italian-language and English-language versions
• 'Ostia-The Death of Pasolini' by Coil - the band's 1986 track with a new video accompaniment
• Original Italian trailer
• Open Your Eyes! (2008, 21 mins), Pasolini and his actors at work on the set of Salo
• Walking with Pasolini(2008, 21 mins): documentary featuing Neil Bartlett, David Forgacs, Noam Chomsky and Craig Lapper (DVD only)
• Whoever Says the Truth Shall Die (1981, 58 mins) the classic documentary on the life and death of Pasolini
• Fade to Black (2001, 24 mins): documentary exploring the ongoing relevance and power of Pasolini's masterpiece
• Ostia(1987, 26 mins): a short film about Pasolini starring Derek Jarmen with optional director's commentary
• 32-page booklet with introduction by Sam Rohdie, reviews, BBFC correspondence exploring the film's troubled history, stills and on-set photographs

Italy, France | 1975 | colour | Italian language, with optional English subtitles | 117 minutes | Original aspect ratio 1.85:1

Disc 1: BD25 | 1080p | 24fps | PCM mono audio (48k/24-bit)
Disc 2 and Disc 3: DVD9 | PAL | PCM mono audio (48k/24-bit) + Dolby Digital mono audio (320kbps)

Region 2 PAL DVD
Region B Blu-ray

From Amazon.co.uk

Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom (known in Italian as Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma) provoked howls of outrage and execration on its original release in 1975, and the controversy rages to this day. Until the British Board of Film Classification finally ventured a certificate in 2000, the movie could only be shown at private cinema clubs, and even then in severely mutilated form. The relaxation of the censors' shears allows you to see for yourself what the fuss was about, but be warned--Salò will test the very limits of your endurance. Updating the Marquis de Sade's phantasmagorical novel of the same title from 18th-century France to fascist Italy at the end of World War II, writer-director Pasolini relates a bloodthirsty fable about how absolute power corrupts absolutely. Four upper-class libertines gather in an elegant palazzo to inflict the extremes of sexual perversion and cruelty upon a hand-picked collection of young men and women. Meanwhile, three ageing courtesans enflame the proceedings further by spinning tales of monstrous depravity. The most upsetting aspect of the film is the way Pasolini's coldly voyeuristic camera dehumanises the victims into lumps of random flesh. Though you may feel revulsion at the grisly details, you aren't expected to care much about what happens to either master or slave. In one notorious episode, the subjugated youths are forced to eat their own excrement--a scene almost impossible to watch, even if you know the meal was actually composed of chocolate and orange marmalade. (Pasolini mischievously claimed to be satirising our modern culture of junk food.) Salò is the ultimate vision of apocalypse--and as if in confirmation, the director was himself brutally murdered just before its premiere. You can reject the movie as the work of an evil-minded pornographer, but you won't easily forget it. --Peter Matthews --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.