Saturday 5 March 2011

Here we go again: Christians give voice to outrage over 'Salo'

The never-ending battle against the 1975 film Salo has moved to fresh ground. The Festival of Light (now known as FamilyVoice Australia) has asked the Federal Court to ban Pier Paolo Pasolini's film again, claiming that its release last year on DVD was an improper exercise of power by the Classification Review Board.
Thanks to the work of a dedicated band of Christian activists led by the Liberal senator Julian McGauran, Salo has been banned in Australia for most of the last 36 years. A brief few years of release in the 1990s saw the reinvigoration of film censorship in Australia and the banning of Salo again for another dozen years.
Salo follows a group of young men and women abducted by fascists and subjected to rape, torture and death in an Italian palace. Described by the board as ''a serious study of corruption which accompanies the exercise of absolute power'', the film was released last year in a boxed set with ''additional documentary features'' that the board thought ''would mitigate the level of potential community offence''.
Nevertheless, Senator McGaur- an and FamilyVoice Australia moved against the film again, this time in the courts. The barrister Anthony Tudehope accused the board of a long list of failings when judging the film, in particular the failure to separately identify and assess elements of violence, cruelty and fetishes - even bestiality, though Salo contains no congress with animals.
But the controversy surrounding Salo has been the age of the victims and the actors playing them. Along with a minority of the Classification Review Board, Mr Tudehope argued they are children being subjected to child sexual abuse, which was ''simply not acceptable'', he told the court.
But that was not the view of a majority of the board, which found Pasolini's victims ''clearly sexually mature'' and that their fate at the hands of the fascists would not offend reasonable adults given the ''context, purpose and stylised, detached cinematic techniques'' of the film.
The solicitor Nick Gouliaditis denied any failures of process in Salo's release. He told the court that assessing the merits of a film required ''highly subjective'' judgments which ''the Classification Review Board has been entrusted to make''.
Justice Margaret Stone has reserved her decision.
David Marr @'SMH'

John Waters On Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom

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