Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Salò" has been commented perhaps more than any other movie has. Yet, what is missing in all the commentaries I have read so far is the fact that this film was written and directed by a man who was in first line the founder of film semiotics and a professor of philosophy. Therefore, "Salò" cannot be watched without sufficient knowledge of the science of the signs and its metaphysics. This, of course, turns this movie into a piece of art before an extremely high theoretical background. Hence, it is not a movie for everybody. Pasolini even went so far as to quote – like in scientific works – the sources that he used for his last movie: most of all Philippe Sollers' "Numbers" and Roland Barthes' semiotic writings.
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According to semiotics, a sign represents reality, while reality presents itself. But since we cannot perceive reality without signs, we live in a semiotic world. A sign and its designated object, however, are always separated by a con-textural border: Signs never reach reality, but reality, on the other side, survives only in the signs that we perceive. Signs, therefore, dilute reality, and, as a result of this dissolution of reality, they become ambiguous. Or, to put it from the other side: it is only because of their ambiguity that signs preserve reality. The abyss between a sign and its eternally unreachable object is the very source of creativity. Even a photograph – an icon in the terminology of Charles Sanders Peirce – and thus the sign that is closest to its represented object – will never turn into this object, as, vice versa, the object itself can never be exchanged by its photograph, but photography would not be considered as art if there would not be creativity involved.
And this is exactly what Pasolini demonstrates in his final movie: This allegedly cruel and gruel icons represent a reality by scooping out like in no other movie the creative potential in the con-textural abyss between signs and their objects. Watching the "Salò", therefore, means watching behind the signs that we see in the movie. Pasolini leads us directly into this creative abyss, he creates a world out of this never-land, out of the nothing about which the German-American philosopher Gotthard Günther wrote that there is a world "that God has not yet created". It is, therefore, a world that has to be created by man, and this exactly involves all the cruelty that only mankind ever achieved: the torturing scenes, the eating of feces, the rapes, the executions. It is not by chance, either, that Pasolini divided "Salò" into four circles: Here Sollers' non-Aristotelian number theory, Derrida's also non-Aristotelian work, Barthes' semiotics and Pasolini's "Heretical Empricism" meet one another. For people without this background, "Salò" appears as a museum of random historical absurdity, merging the Marquis De Sade's stories and the fascist practices of Mussolini that accompanied the film director's whole life.
"Salò" urges the audience to watch behind the pictures, thus behind the signs. After all, this is exactly what metaphysics is about: behind the reality, here: behind the artistic and fragile reality of the signs: The signs could be exchanged by other signs, since their ambiguity create a theoretically infinite number of artistic worlds, and it was Nietzsche who said that metaphysics is acceptable only as an artistic one.
https://365movies.is/
According to semiotics, a sign represents reality, while reality presents itself. But since we cannot perceive reality without signs, we live in a semiotic world. A sign and its designated object, however, are always separated by a con-textural border: Signs never reach reality, but reality, on the other side, survives only in the signs that we perceive. Signs, therefore, dilute reality, and, as a result of this dissolution of reality, they become ambiguous. Or, to put it from the other side: it is only because of their ambiguity that signs preserve reality. The abyss between a sign and its eternally unreachable object is the very source of creativity. Even a photograph – an icon in the terminology of Charles Sanders Peirce – and thus the sign that is closest to its represented object – will never turn into this object, as, vice versa, the object itself can never be exchanged by its photograph, but photography would not be considered as art if there would not be creativity involved.
And this is exactly what Pasolini demonstrates in his final movie: This allegedly cruel and gruel icons represent a reality by scooping out like in no other movie the creative potential in the con-textural abyss between signs and their objects. Watching the "Salò", therefore, means watching behind the signs that we see in the movie. Pasolini leads us directly into this creative abyss, he creates a world out of this never-land, out of the nothing about which the German-American philosopher Gotthard Günther wrote that there is a world "that God has not yet created". It is, therefore, a world that has to be created by man, and this exactly involves all the cruelty that only mankind ever achieved: the torturing scenes, the eating of feces, the rapes, the executions. It is not by chance, either, that Pasolini divided "Salò" into four circles: Here Sollers' non-Aristotelian number theory, Derrida's also non-Aristotelian work, Barthes' semiotics and Pasolini's "Heretical Empricism" meet one another. For people without this background, "Salò" appears as a museum of random historical absurdity, merging the Marquis De Sade's stories and the fascist practices of Mussolini that accompanied the film director's whole life.
"Salò" urges the audience to watch behind the pictures, thus behind the signs. After all, this is exactly what metaphysics is about: behind the reality, here: behind the artistic and fragile reality of the signs: The signs could be exchanged by other signs, since their ambiguity create a theoretically infinite number of artistic worlds, and it was Nietzsche who said that metaphysics is acceptable only as an artistic one.
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