Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom was Pier Paolo Pasolini's last film. He delivered the final cut shortly before he was murdered on the beach at Ostia, outside Rome, on 2 November 1975, at the age of fifty-three, and the film was released a few weeks after his death. Moving Sade's eighteenth-century novel to the Republic of Salò (Mussolini's German-backed puppet state in the Italian north between 1943 and 1945) was a deliberate political allegory: Pasolini framed the libertines' debasement of bodies as a Marxist analysis of consumer capitalism.

It was banned in several countries on release, including Australia and the United Kingdom, where it stayed effectively unavailable until the British Board of Film Classification approved it in 2000. More than fifty years of academic writing on censorship, fascism and the limits of representation have grown up around it. The Criterion Collection took it on in 2008, and the Sight & Sound critics' polls have put it on the long list of the greatest films ever made in several different decades.

Pasolini wrote the screenplay with Sergio Citti and Pupi Avati. The cinematographer was Tonino Delli Colli, the Italian master who shot Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew and several Sergio Leone westerns, and who would later shoot Life Is Beautiful; Ennio Morricone wrote the score. No film comes up more often when people argue about the boundaries of permissible cinema, and film studies departments around the world still teach it as the defining test case.