sdyer@bbnccv.UUCP (Steve Dyer) (06/25/85)
I missed programs 3 through 7, but managed to take time to see the double feature of "Loads" and Pasolini's "Salo: 120 days of Sodom." It is always interesting to try to intuit programmer George Mansour's linkage in this festival's double bills (though many festival-goers have finally decided that there has been NO thought given to the pairing or the selection of films.) Still, giving Mansour more credit, both films present us with images of enslavement to sexual fantasies: in the case of "Loads", quite funny and benign, and with "Salo", quite likely the most horrendous vision ever set to film. "Loads", a short 20-minute "home movie" by San Francisco filmmaker Curt McDowell, came first. It is a quirky, likeable little film about a filmmaker's obsession with straight, preferably seedy, men, whom he unabashedly invites up to his loft to be captured forever on film while parading around in the nude and allowing themselves to be serviced sexually. The result is a kind of cinema verite verging on the pornographic, but always keeping us off-balance with its almost anthropological point-of-view towards the men who agree to participate, and the feverish depiction of the filmmaker in the midst of his fantasy. "Salo", of course, is the kind of film your best friends warn you about seeing. I forged ahead, thinking that if THEY could stand it, so could I. It is Pasolini's last film, reportedly unfinished, since he was murdered during its final scenes. Although he was originally said to be murdered by a "boy", it seems that the Italian Mafia and other right-wing groups may have had a role in planning, if not executing, his death. "Salo" describes a group of Fascists during the final days of Mussolini's Italy who capture or purchase a group of teenage boys and girls, and keep them emprisoned in a local chateau as an outlet for their depravity (which truly subscends any concept of sexual preference you could imagine: rape, murder, torture, coprolalia, straight sex, homosex, you name it, "it's IN there.") The film is broken up into four sections, an introduction, describing the procurement of the teenagers, and three "Circles": Circle of Manias, Circle of Shit, and Circle of Blood. Most of these are self-explanatory, although "manias" may be taken as surrender to sexual excess of every kind. The "circles" begin with parlor narrations by blowsy, middle-aged prostitutes relating their older, active days, and progress to the activities which these "stimulating" narrations produce. Pasolini clearly meant this to be a kind of allegory wherein Fascism is revealed for what it truly is. It is worth asking, however, whether the film actually succeeds in communicating this, for it is truly one of the most disgusting, unwatchable films ever made, accelerating past the baroque to the bizarre with each passing minute. It is the art film equivalent to a "snuff film"--that's how horrendous and powerful are the scenes, and one where saying "it's only a movie" won't work. I found it alienating and draining; I was more numbed than moved at its end. -- /Steve Dyer {decvax,linus,ima,ihnp4}!bbncca!sdyer sdyer@bbnccv.ARPA