This text on Pasolini’s Salò first appeared something like 25 years ago in Datacide No.6. It was part of a sequence of texts on cinema which began with a piece on Alan Pakula’s Parallax View and ended in a text on Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.
Here Howard Slater returns to and revives his psycho-social analysis of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom.
‘If you ask for my life, I will stab you in the heart’ 1. Four black and white camera angles
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Peter Whitehead, a filmmaker and enigmatic figure, captured key moments of the 1960s counterculture with his documentaries “Wholly Communion” and “Benefit of the Doubt.” Despite lacking formal filmmaking skills, Whitehead documented major cultural events like Allen Ginsberg’s poetry readings and Pink Floyd performances. His spontaneous, raw filming style, immortalized these moments in British countercultural history, especially *Wholly Communion*. Review of the BFI’s DVD release by Stewart Home in Datacide 10 (2008).
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The text offers a vivid commentary on the transformation of landscapes and their symbolic connections to human aspirations and social struggles. It juxtaposes orderly agricultural fields, symbolizing efficiency and ownership, with untamed forests and lawless frontier towns, representing unpredictability and societal conflicts. Through the lens of Anthony Mann’s westerns, it explores themes of law, identity, community, and the struggle for power, questioning the balance between imposed order and innate chaos.
Read MoreEditor’s note: This is the original version as published in Datacide 6. We recommend you read the version slightly revised
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Minimal Apertures is an addendum to the article The Western by Howard Slater with short remarks about The Wild Bunch, Once Upon A Time in the West, Winchester 73, McAbe and Mrs Miller, Ulzana’s Raid and El Topo.
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A 20 minute long studio dabble from New Order recorded as a test for Blue Monday but shifted to the role of Hacienda video soundtrack finds here its first vinyl release. An intriguing track that marked the onset of a recombinant disco music shot through with a waning punk ethos.
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An analysis of the movies of John Carpenter by Howard Slater from Datacide 5 (1999).
‘As we grow more accustomed to the control of the urban environment through surveillance, zero tolerance zones and regeneration projects it seems as if we inhabit a social world that is policed by technology and is obsessed with security. Just what this technology secures us from is as encrypted as the microchips and cables that power it. Maybe it secures us from ourselves: a constant reminder that we are being ‘watched’ which comes to strengthen the internalisation of those mechanisms of paranoia and stasis that an inherited morality has already instilled.’
11 days before the election the president is suddenly facing a sex scandal after disappearing into his office with a teenage girl. A task force is set up, led by Robert de Niro, and it is decided the thing to do to get the sex scandal out of the headlines is go to war.
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