Page 84 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

Cultural Transformation 71

I have added nothing of my own…Even the structure of the story is identical,
although obviously it is very synthetised (sic). To make this synthesis I…was
able to reduce…certain deeds, certain speeches, certain days from the immense
catalogue of Sade’ (para 2).

While cinematic adaptations of sprawling literary texts often require
extensive compression or consolidation, reducing Sade’s libertines and
their violent lusts with a historically specific moment (and its
iconography) is a perilous maneuver. The libertines’ effectiveness as
fictional entities resides as much in their exaggerated anatomies as in
their ‘monstrous’ cruelties and their resistance to metaphors that limit
their signifying potential. In Salò, however, Pasolini – in his own words –
recognises his work as presenting:

…an immense sadistic metaphor of what was the Nazi-Fascist ‘dissociation’
from its ‘crimes against humanity’. Curval, Blangis, Durcet, the Bishop –
Sade’s characters (who are clearly SS men in civilian dress) behave exactly
with their victims as the Nazi-Fascists did with theirs. They considered them as
objects and destroyed automatically all possibility of human relationship with
them. (para 4)

Gary Indiana, in his BFI monograph on Pasolini’s Salò, elaborates upon
the Italian director’s ‘cinematographic transposition’, seeing it as a
meditation on power that ‘condenses’ the novel’s ‘mayhem to credible
proportions’, even if its tone frequently resounds with a ‘pedantic
moralism’ in the process (2000: para 10).
As critics such as Georges Bataille, Angela Carter, and Matthew
Coniam note, however, readers far too frequently and reductively dismiss
de Sade’s writings as constituting little more than a vile strain of
‘monstrously’ violent and misanthropic pornography, a gesture no doubt
facilitated in large part by the depictions of the often ‘extreme’ carnal
events catalogued within his novels. In his essay, ‘The Trouble with de
Sade,’ Coniam insightfully targets Pasolini’s Salò as one of contemporary
cinema’s ‘most careful and important’ (2001: 127) adaptations of de
Sade’s work. At the same time, he is quick to acknowledge that Salò is
also perhaps contemporary cinema’s least successful adaptation of de
Sade, especially when it comes to capturing the libertine and potentially