In the early 1970s, Pier Paolo Pasolini released a series of films, including The Decameron (1971) and Arabian Nights (1974) meant to celebrate the body and sexuality. Their popularity encouraged a cycle of soft-porn imitations that disillusioned Pasolini so much that he publicly rejected his previous films and embarked on Salò as a corrective. Set in northern Italy during the last days of Mussolini’s reign, the film is an adaptation of Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. Pasolini uses the tale of amoral libertines who kidnap a group of young people as playthings and victims to launch a ruthless and wide-ranging attack on modernity as a whole, setting up equivalences between Sadean sexual license, Italian fascism and consumer capitalism. But the film’s political allegory tends to be overshadowed by its explicit and abundant nudity, wedded to images of sexual sadism and ultimately extreme violence, giving it the reputation of being one of the first “artsploitation” movies, a precursor to the likes of Funny Games (1997, 2007) and Irreversible (2002).

The French literary enfant terrible Jean Genet was already a successful novelist when he made Un Chant d’amour, his only film. Its dreamlike narrative of a triangular relationship of love denied and lust suppressed among both jailers and convicts in a prison is notable for the mix of the tender and the brutal that characterizes so much of Genet’s writing. The sexual explicitness of Un Chant d’amour made it immediately subject to the harshest censorship. The film bears traces of the influence of Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet and Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks. Unsubstantiated rumors persist that Cocteau was heavily involved in the making of the film.