“That sadists were always the powerful is a fact.”
This is what Pier Paolo Pasolini said in one of his last interviews for Bertolucci’s 1975 documentary, a chilling statement, because it is true. Today we are witnessing further proof of it in the 3 million pages of documents released as part of the Epstein Files.
The Italian intellectual was referring to one of his most discussed and disturbing films: “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom”, inspired by the famous eighteenth-century novel by the Marquis de Sade, and to which the scandal of recent decades, involving the abuse and trafficking of minors, seems to have taken its cues.
Art, life and power operate within an interconnected system that continuously influences and reshapes their meaning. Linked to Jeffrey Epstein, many museum directors, artists and patrons have emerged who collaborated with him in exchange for favours and advantages. This bears witness to the difficult choices that those working in the art world must face every day in the name of the message they wish to convey.
Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, Pier Paolo Pasolini 1976
The Film
“Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom” (1975) is Pasolini’s final film, inspired by a celebrated late-eighteenth-century novel by the Marquis de Sade, from whose name the term “sadism” derives. It is set in the Republic of Salò in 1944, transposing into the repressive context of Fascist Italy a narrative of torture and perversion carried out by four Lords, each representing a different form of power: a Duke, a Bishop, a Magistrate and a President.
The victims are eighteen adolescents from anti-fascist families, kidnapped and locked inside a country villa where, for 120 days, they are subjected to abuse, acts of sodomy and relentless humiliation, until their deaths. The programme of violence inflicted upon them is divided into sections drawn from Dante’s Inferno, specifically the circle of the Violent: the Antechamber of Hell, the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Shit and the Circle of Blood.
The Connection Between Epstein and Pasolini
“…in my film all this sex takes on a particular meaning: it is the metaphor of what power does to the human body, the commodification, the reduction of the human body to a thing, which is typical of any form of power.”
When the film was released, no one could have imagined scenarios more horrifying or perverse, and certainly no one would have believed they would become reality within just a few decades. Epstein’s Virgin Islands become the new Dantesque inferno, where power and capital reign supreme as the new principles governing individual action. The island of Little Saint James stands in for that country villa, cut off from the world, from its rules and its morality. The Lords are far more than four, and they are representatives of financial and political aristocracy. The victims are dozens of underage girls. The 120 days are, in reality, many years.
The spatial and temporal coordinates are inevitably different, but this invites reflection on the disturbing historical continuity of these abuses across different contexts, whether fictional or real. Even in the twenty-first century, in a Western world built on rights and justice, violence of this kind was concealed for so long.
The Anarchy of Power
“It is a film not only about power, but about what I call the anarchy of power. Nothing is more anarchic than power. Power does what it wants, and what it wants is completely arbitrary or dictated by economic necessities that escape ordinary logic.”
Nothing captures the behaviours documented in the Epstein Files better than this analysis by Pasolini himself, as we try to understand how and why things reached this point. The answer is unsparing: the powerful do what they do because they can, nothing more. They are driven by the conviction that, thanks to the capital and influence they possess, their own will is an untouchable law and that they are exempt from any responsibility. The only way to assert this apparently limitless power seems to be to push beyond every human moral boundary through acts of perversion and sadism. As Pasolini intuited, the body no longer belongs to a human being but becomes an object to be used at will, something that can be bought, sold and discarded when broken.
Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, Pier Paolo Pasolini 1976
The Influence of Power on the Art World
The anarchy of power, and the commodification it entails, is present in the art world as well, a world in which economic mechanisms impose a logic that disregards the ethical standing of those who buy and sell. The artwork becomes a commodity, and as such it can end up in the hands of anyone with enough money, regardless of who they are or what they represent. Artists, galleries and museums, in order to survive, often find themselves operating within a system that seems to demand the suspension of their own judgement in the name of the market, without questioning the consequences.
It is therefore inevitable to ask how much sense it makes to create and promote art that is critical of power, if that same art can be purchased, privatised and neutralised by the very people who hold that power. As Pasolini understood fifty years ago: power has no need to censor art, it simply buys it.
