Days of Sodom: The Fascism—Perversion Equation in Films of the 1960s and 1970s

A couple of years ago I was researching a paper on how memories of Italian Fascism were affected by the political and generational conflicts of the 1960s. I became interested in the way a number of feature films made after 1968 ‘remembered’ the period of Fascism and German Nazism with images of sexual violence, and the way these images coalesced with representations of homosexuality, bisexuality and a panoply of perversions, from sado-masochism to incestuous rape and child sexual abuse. These films were part of my memory, too. I had been to see them either soon after they were released, like Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (Gotterdammerung/La caduta degli dei, Italy/FRG, 1969) and Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (Il portiere di notte ,Italy/USA, 1973), or a few years later: I watched Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Saleo o i 120 giorni di Sodoma (Italy/ France, 1975) in a cold fleapit in Pisa in January 1978 shortly after the ban on it, imposed by the Milan Tribunal in January 1976, was lifted. Though I found all these films problematic and disturbing on first viewing, it was not until I watched them again nearly 20 years later that their way of depicting Fascism appeared tome to constitute a historical problem.