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Pier Paolo Pasolini died, as some directors real and fictional(Kubrick-EYES WIDE SHUT, Richard Mulligan in SOB, and I'm still waiting for it to happen to Michael Winterbottom for 9 SONGS, which was awful) are prone to do, after having done the Grand High Art Porno Epic, an odd ambition but one held by many directors-to make an erotic film that is art. Unlike Kubrick, however, this was no meditation on marriage(and Kubrick's is, oddly affirmative of marriage), but, like EYES WIDE SHUT, is deliberately anti-erotic and analytic. And terrifying.

Pasolini had, up to that point, been known by the affirmative tone of his "Trilogy of Life," film approximations of what he considered their civilizations' most central cultural works, and as a good Marxist chose the most vulgar and funny, and therefore most characteristic of the culture, works of the lower classes, such as THE DECAMERON, CANTERBURY TALES(whose cinematography influenced all medieval films after, starting with THE HOLY GRAIL; one can smell the dirty, hideous stench of the Middle Ages just looking at the film), and ARABIAN NIGHTS(the most beautiful and least "vulgar"). These films are, for all their dramatic and sometimes horrifying moments, are true to their sources in being celebratory of sex and bodies, as affirmative of life itself. (One odd thing that does crop up, though, is that when sex occurs, Pasolini reveals he thinks straight folk do it without moving.)

In fact, Pasolini developed a loathing of straight people, as political disfavor(Pasolini was quite active as a political speaker, writer and poet-indeed, was better known for his poetry in Italy than his films) and enemies began to make him more fearful, culminating, after the release of SALO, with his assassination by a young man who pretended he had killed him in self-defense when Pasolini came on to him(as Pasolini was, in fact, prone to do with street hustlers), but who in fact was in the pay of anti-communist political enemies of Pasolini. In his "self-defense" against the fearsome short gay director, the fellow found it necessary not only to almost beat his head in, but run over, and back over him twice before driving away, leaving a body with a square valley crushed across the chest, much of Pasolini streaked on the road left and right of said chest. And was believed and received a light sentence. He long after confessed that he was hired to lead Pasolini to this slaughter.

Given this, it's difficult in retrospect to dismiss SALO merely because

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