So now we have yet another attempt to ban Salò, the disturbing masterpiece by Pier Paolo Pasolini which uses DeSade's 1000 Days of Sodom as a kind of map on which to inscribe with a breathtaking brutality and power the atrocity of fascism in Mussolini's Italy.
The film has always terrified people (and with some reason) and it has more or less constantly been the subject of censoring zeal and horrified attempts at vigilance --against what is never quite clear.
Now a number of groups, including Family Voice Australia and the Australian Christian Lobby, together with the Liberal senators Julian McGauran and Guy Barnett are trying to bring a case in the Federal Court appealing against the censors' classification of the film with an R 18+ rating.
It's not surprising that those affronted by Salò should say that, "The movie shows disturbingly strong depictions of torture, degradation, sexual violence [and] mutilation." It does. But the notion that this means Salò should be withheld from the eyes of adults who have an interest in the history of cinema, or indeed the representation of the horrors human beings can visit on each other, in the name of cruelty, pastime and dehumanisation is perennially bizarre.
Pasolini is, after all, one of the great names in the history of the Italian cinema and a man who brought to the depiction of the poor and downcast on the outskirts of Rome a sweeping and tragic intensity.
If you want to see the power of that vision at its most neo-realist look at I Vitteloni or at the film he made with the great Anna Magnani, Mamma Roma. If you want to see it displaced to a level of mythopoeic starkness look at the film he made of Medea with Maria Callas.
It was of the latter that Bob Ellis, writing in the old Nation Review, said, "It is a masterpiece, of course. Pasolini only makes masterpieces, damn his eyes."
And there is a strong element of truth in that. Pasolini who was gay, Marxist, Catholic, as great a compendium of problems and contradictions as mid-century Italy could throw up, was also-- quite literally and separately from the towering achievement of his films -- a poet of the first rank: that fact stares at you from any plain translation of his work even when it is robbed of the melodiousness of the Italian language.
The fact that he was a poet, a literary man as well as a man of images, is one reason why Pasolini tinkered with other people's masterpieces and monstrosities. The DeSade aspect of Salò -- which is at the farthest remove from the monumental erotomania and monotonies of the mad Marquis -- is in fact the last part of his progressive filming of all the great episodic collections -- Boccacio's The Decameron, The Arabian Nights, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
It's hard to know what leads the anti-Salò lobby so far astray and into such a dark wood of confusion. Is it DeSade's reputation as a gargantuan pornographer?
Well, they should have no worries about Salò which is an evisceratingly anti-erotic film which annihilates any festive notion of sexual kinkiness to present a spectacle of human ghastliness which would harrow the soul if it were not presented with such power and -- for want of a better word -- such grace.
It is not to everyone's, or indeed to anyone's, taste and it may well be that it is a film to be endured rather than enjoyed. Its copraphilia and gladiatorial torments, the way in which it renders the impulse to turn the human feeling of other people into nothing but a site of pain is done with such a scathing coldness that it seems to induce in people who have empathy for its art a state of toxic shock.
Well, so can the blinding scene in King Lear which has its parallels in Pasolini's hell- like vista of political evil.
But the Australian Christian Lobby and Senators McGauran and Barnett should at least find out enough about film history to know who they are dealing with.
They might, for instance, bear in mind that Pasolini is the director of The Gospel According to St Matthew, the film he dedicated to Pope John XXIII, and one of the supreme masterpieces of the cinema which takes as its text the life of Christ not in some souped up summary of Bible quotations surrounded by Cecil B. DeMille religiose modern dialogue and images, but the power and the glory of the original words themselves -- flaming, radiant, with an everlasting novelty that carries conviction -- and he does this with a wobbly camera, in tumbledown southern Italian peasant settings and parched landscapes -- using the idiom of neo-realist cinema like a tongue of fire. So that the most agnostic audience has the disconcerting sensation of witnessing something that has been delivered with a quasi-documentary vehemence and verisimilitude.
Pasolini's St Matthew is one of the greatest homages to the face of Christ since Bach. Salò is discernibly a work by the same master and the fact that it represents an excruciating image of evil should not could deter those who believe in artistic truth.
The idiocies of nanny statism in this area are blowing like a black wind of unreason throughout the land. We contend with laws that won't tolerate any image of a child's nakedness, however innocent, between the ages of two and 16 as if Puck and Huckleberry Finn, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie and all the rest of them had been imagined in vain. To take an image close to the unspeakable spirit of Salò: if a filmmaker wanted to depict the Slaughter of the Innocents his or her work would be likely to be banned as a sadistic act of eroticisation.
Those who want to cover everyone's eyes from the truth of art should think of Blake's words. They themselves are the roses that are sick and the worm that flies in the night and destroys their love is their own minds -- imagining phantoms, denying truths.
Peter Craven is a critic and cultural commentator.