I hesitate to say so for fear of being tagged a pervert -- Salò is a beautiful work of visual art and poetry -- even though it features rape, torture, coprophagy (shit eating), mutilation, and murder -- As Richard Brody details in his capsule review for The New Yorker, “The film is essential to have seen but impossible to watch,” Brody adds: “a viewer may find life itself defiled beyond redemption by the simple fact that such things can be shown or even imagined” (as quoted in Slate, Oct 4 2011) -- While Brody may be overly melodramatic, Pasolini achieved his objective -- He got my attention, and that of many others --

In addition to being a filmmaker, Pasolini was a poet, novelist, and a prominent Italian leftist -- Early, he was active in the Italian Communist Party -- Ardently anti-Fascist -- But at the same time irritating to many leftist and Communists for some of his contra-leftist positions -- And openly gay --

"Even those well acquainted with Pasolini's taste for controversy could hardly have expected the extreme nature of Salò, one of the most chilling films in the history of cinema" (Naomi Greene, DVD essay) -- The film is based on the Marquis de Sade's 1785 book, The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage -- Four wealthy Fascist libertines occupy a palace in Salò -- the four men represent power: a duke, a priest, a magistrate, and a businessman/capitalist -- They arrange the kidnapping of sixteen attractive youths, male and female (no doubt meant to represent the Bourgeois), and conduct sadistic orgies over three days -- The film itself is highly stylized, mostly visualization with little characterization -- I did not find the film particularly pornographic -- While sexual organs and explicit activity are in abundance, the stylized tableau scenes seem to have been more intended to stimulate aesthetic or emotional feelings, rather than sexually erotic responses --

Much of original The 120 Days of Sodom was written by the Marquis de Sade while imprisoned in the Bastille during the social turmoil leading to the French Revolution (incidentally, most of the 120 "days" remained unfinished) -- Pasolini set his film in Salò in the waning days of WWII (in several scenes squadrons of war planes can be heard flying overhead) -- The film itself was made in 1975 during the social and political upheaval then occurring in Western societies --Pasolini used but three "days" in his film --

For me, the film is an allegory, a parable, of the fall of Western civilization -- a Dante's Inferno -- There is no redemption or hope -- Perhaps Pasolini was intending sequels, however I did not find any suggestion of this in the various commentaries I read -- By-the-way, Pasolini described the infamous shit banquet as a metaphor for dinner at McDonalds --

This was Pasolini's last film -- He was murdered shortly after it was finished but before it was release --

I am updating these notes on 8 Nov 2016, while watching USA election returns-- Ominously, we are going down the same dangerous path as Italy and Germany did with the Fascists & Nazis of this film -- The parallels between Trumps sexual escapades and the Fascists is especially striking --

By happenstance, my collection includes both DVD and Bluray editions.