Arquivo

By transposing the lessons of "The 120 Days of Sodom", by Marquis de Sade, to the last days of the fascist dictatorship in Italy, Pasolini made what is considered his most violent, atrocious, and repulsive film. In a villa in northern Italy, four lords (representatives of the four powers: the nobility, the church, the judiciary, and economic power) gather with four old prostitutes to subject boys and girls in the prime of their youth to all kinds of violence. In that closed space of the mansion and for 120 consecutive days, the four lords will indiscriminately dispose of the bodies and lives of the young people. Divided into four groups (the victims, the soldiers, the collaborators, and the servants), they will have to subject themselves to all kinds of mistreatment and torture. No sex associated with joy will be permitted. Blood, feces, and semen will be the most constant elements in the daily life of those young people. For them, death will be welcome as a day of sunshine. Pasolini did not see the film`s premiere at the Paris festival on November 22, 1975. He was brutally murdered twenty days earlier, on November 2, in an ambush on the beach of Ostia, near Rome.