It has rarely been shown in its complete form in Britain, and did not receive BBFVC certification until 2000. As late as 1994, its video release prompted the prosecution of a bookshop in the USA, and in Australia "Salo" was un-banned in 1993 and then re-banned in 1998 after questions in their national parliament.

It is not hard to see why passions are raised by this most profanely political of works. Basing his film on the novel by the eighteenth-century sexual radical the Marquis de Sade, Pasolini transposed the novel's location in Switzerland to an empty Lake Garda mansion in the Fascist Republic of Salo in 1944. However, he kept the main idea intact: four wealthy and powerful libertines gather together in a palazzo to organize a gluttonous, theatrical series of sexual tortures to be inflicted upon a terrified collection of subjugated young men and women.

The actual Republic of Salo--Mussolini's last stand against an advancing U.S. Army--was a historical anachronism Pasolini experienced directly. As a wartime student fleeing from Bologna he found shelter in the little village of Casarsa within the Republic itself. "It was an epoch of sheer cruelty, searches, executions, deserted villages...and I suffered a great deal", he recalled. His brother was also hilled there, a formative event that haunted him all his life.

The film "Salo" emerged during a pessimistic time for Pasolini, and he found its production (over 37 spring days, exactly mirroring the time it took de Sade to write the novel) one of his most taxing assignments. His need to discipline the extemporizations of his large cast of mostly non-actors went against all his earlier practices. He was unused to submitting to such formal rigor, which is also evident in the actual structure of the film (modeled on "Dante's Inferno") with its three-tier, three-day story. De Sade's original fantasy took 120 days to enact: by 1944 it seems this could be whittled down to a more modern 56 hours.

Modern life appalled Pasolini and by this time he was intellectually very isolated in his views. He loathed with a passion the early signs of globalization, commenting to a friend, when asked about a notorious scene in "Salo" where a girl is forced to eat human excrement, that it was really just an attack on junk food. "All these industrial foods are worthless refuse", he fulminated.

The look of the film was important. Pasolini told art director Dante Ferretti to decorate the mansion with what the Fascists called "decadent art": the furniture is Bauhaus, the paintings reproductions of works by Feininger, Leger, Severini, and Duchamp. Aurally the design is also carefully organized: the Italian habit of post-dubbing dialogue has a distinctly distancing effect and on the soundtrack we have radios blasting out Ezra Pound's readings, as well as Big Band music. Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana" makes an appearance because Pasolini thought it "typical fascist music".

The reaction to Pasolini's murder ensured that the public perception of "Salo" was tainted by the score-settling indulged by his enemies on both the Left and the Right: the film has made few friends. Yet it remains one of the greatest poetical and cinematic diatribes ever made, with an oneric ability to shock even the most jaded viewer four decades after it was made. Few artists can ever dream of such resilience or relevance for their work, and--paradoxically in this case--such power over the minds of those who see it.