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A Secret Handshake
It is the kind of story that feels like a secret handshake, you do not casually bring up Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom in conversation, you mention it only when you have found someone who was there, someone who remembers the strange, unmarked cultural currents of the 1970s, your memory of seeing it in Los Angeles, unadvertised in the Los Angeles Times but promoted in the Herald Examiner, at a theater on Beverly Boulevard, captures the exact atmosphere of the film’s underground arrival in America, it was a whisper campaign for a cinematic bomb.
From Paris to the Eros Theatre
For the record, the timeline is a crucial part of this story, you did not see it in the 1960s, Salò had its world premiere in Paris on November 23, 1975, three weeks after its director Pier Paolo Pasolini was brutally murdered, its brief theatrical run in Italy began January 10, 1976, before it was banned there later that month, in the United States it finally saw release on October 3, 1977, so your memory of the screening aligns perfectly with the late 1970s, not the sixties, more intriguing is where you saw it, the theater on Beverly Boulevard which you recall as once being called the Eros Theatre is a key piece of evidence, by 1969 that building had shifted to screening adult movies and it officially re?opened as the Eros Theatre on February 11, 1970, it was a venue for the esoteric, the forbidden, and the extreme, exactly the kind of place that would book a print of Pasolini’s final, unclassifiable masterpiece, the Los Angeles Times likely would not touch it, but the more alternative Herald Examiner would have run a small ad in its back pages, directing the brave to a specific time and a dark theater.
An Anatomy of Pure Power
The story of Salò itself is an anatomy of pure power, it is a 1975 political art horror film that loosely adapts the Marquis de Sade’s 1785 novel but transposes its horrors to the final days of Mussolini’s fascist Republic of Salò from 1943 to 1945, in a remote mansion four powerful libertines—a duke, a bishop, a magistrate, and a president—imprison eighteen young men and women, they are stripped of their identities and subjected to 120 days of escalating, systematized torture, humiliation, and murder, this is not a movie in the traditional sense, it is a thesis, a trap, a mirror held up to the face of absolute power, for Pasolini the unspeakable content was the only adequate form for his argument, the film is broken into circles inspired by Dante’s Inferno, the Anteinferno, the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Shit, with the final, devastating circle reserved for the ultimate dehumanization, as Pasolini stated he aimed to create a profoundly enigmatic work where not being understood or even being misunderstood is an intrinsic dimension of the work.
Banned in Over One Hundred Countries
The controversies surrounding Salò amount to the most significant censorship battle in modern cinema history, it remains banned in several countries to this day, in Italy it was immediately rejected by film censors, permission was briefly granted in December 1975 a month after Pasolini’s death, but just weeks later in January 1976 the permissions were withdrawn, in the United Kingdom it did not receive certification until late 2000 when it was finally passed uncut, in Australia the board first banned the film in 1976, it was briefly unbanned in 1993 before being rebanned again in 1998, a move critics decried as a victory for the conservative Christian right, possessing a copy was a criminal offense, Germany banned it in 1976 though a heavily censored version was eventually released, and reports at the time claimed Salò was banned in over one hundred countries including India, New Zealand, Ireland, Finland, and Malaysia.
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pasolini’s Prophecy: Consumerism as Fascism
The political significance of the film is often misunderstood, if you strip away the horrific imagery the beating heart of Salò is a furious, Marxist political tract, Pasolini was not a sadist, he was a moralist who believed that consumerism is a fascism worse than the classical one, he saw the post?war economic boom not as progress but as a new, insidious form of totalitarianism that destroyed authentic Italian culture, the atrocities in Salò are metaphors, the libertines represent all systems of absolute power—fascism, capitalism, political corruption, authoritarianism—that commodify human beings and consume them for pleasure, it is a damning critique of how modern society dehumanizes and exploits its most vulnerable members in the name of progress, as the Harvard Film Archive notes the film launches a ruthless and wide?ranging attack on modernity as a whole, drawing equivalences between Sadean sexual license, Italian fascism, and consumer capitalism.
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom Pier Paolo Pasolini
Why It Still Matters in 2026
Half a century later has Salò lost its power to shock? On its fiftieth anniversary in 2025 the consensus was a resounding no, it remains as extreme and at times unbearable an experience as it was fifty years ago, its themes feel more urgent than ever, the film has been called prophetic, anticipating the moral rot of an unimaginable scandal like the Epstein case where a network of the wealthy and powerful operated with impunity trafficking young victims, we live in an era of normalized cruelty, political propaganda, and rampant consumerism, in Pasolini’s view we are all potential victims of the world’s four libertines, the film leaves audiences no hope except the possibility that staring unflinchingly at the darkest part of the human soul might help us recognize similar patterns of oppression in the world around us.
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom Pier Paolo Pasolini
Where to Watch It Today
Your memory proves that for decades seeing Salò was a feat of determination, but today you can find it streaming in its complete, uncut form on The Criterion Channel, if you have a library card you may also be able to stream it for free through Kanopy which offers The Criterion Collection and other curated independent films with your library membership, the BFI also released an acclaimed Blu?ray and DVD in 2008.
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom Pier Paolo Pasolini
You Never Forget Your First Time
In 2025 filmmaker Catherine Breillat described watching Salò as a kind of ritual, she said you have to be ready to see it, it is like Arthur’s Round Table, it will come to you when you are ready, you were there on Beverly Boulevard, you were ready, Abel Ferrara who also attended an early U.S. screening remembered there being hardly anyone in the audience, he said he was standing with like six people and two or three of those people he still sees, it seems that with Salò you never forget your first time, thank you for sharing the memory of yours.
