Salò-Dante Sur la forme remake chez Pasolini
Abstract
Only Italians have one day renamed Salò o le cento giornate di Sodoma with the new name of Salò-Sade. This denomination exists only in Italy, especially in the 1980s. It is most likely a pastiche of the title of a play by Peter Weiss released in 1963, Marat-Sade (the full title is infinitely longer), from which Peter Brook made a film of the same name in 1967. So I propose to temporarily rename Pasolini's last film, Salò-Dante since, as he himself said, this film is also “a kind of sacred representation, which probably follows what was Sade's intention and has a kind of formal Dante organization”, and more precisely: “Sade, while writing, was certainly thinking about Dante. So I began to restructure the book in three”. That question of the Three in fact rams the traditional Pasolini amphibology, its need for the Two, through the structural obsession of the Four, of the 120-day square of the Marquis De Sade. The essay presents the matrix of this struggle of Two and Three in Pasolini, namely the way in which his work integrates the medieval event of the invention of Purgatorio, as evidenced by the Commedia. Then Pasolini, with his Salò-Dante, after the dreamer who would like to wake up from his nightmare, after Dante the character-narrator who speaks when he does not speak at the moment of Virgil's reproach: “his damnation dreams”, in other words his nightmare.