Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom
1976 · Pier Paolo Pasolini · Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the camera stay at a measured distance from the worst scenes. (camera)
Tonino Delli Colli favors wide and medium shots that hold libertines and victims in the same frame, refusing the close-up's usual invitation to identify with anyone.
Payoff: The distance keeps handing you the position of a watching observer instead of a participant.
Watch for the named chapters borrowed from Dante's Inferno. (structure)
The film is organized into an Antechamber and three Circles, moving the viewer through a descending, classified structure rather than a rising dramatic arc.
Payoff: You are told from the start that this is a system moving downward on a schedule.
Notice the libertines seated like a tribunal watching a performance. (staging)
Pasolini stages the masters presiding from chairs while women narrate stories from a staircase, arranging bodies into formal tableaux that recall painted compositions.
Payoff: Power here looks like connoisseurship, arranged and admired rather than simply exercised. In the reading: crystal-decomposition. The reading calls this crystal-decomposition: an ordered, refined world staged as it rots from within its own manners.
Listen for Morricone's sparse, gentle piano under harsh scenes. (sound)
The score is used sparingly, a recurring piano motif lending an incongruous gentleness that never matches the severity of what the image shows.
Payoff: The mismatch between refined sound and harsh image is one of the film's sharpest tools.
Watch the four masters speak in flat, bureaucratic tones. (performance)
Paolo Bonacelli and the other leads play their roles with a chilling blandness rather than melodramatic villainy, denying the audience any familiar psychological motive.
Payoff: There is no personality here to explain or excuse, only procedure carried out calmly. In the reading: the gest. The reading calls this a gest: a posture bared as pure display of power instead of a private feeling.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch how far away the camera stays from the worst of what it shows you.