My sister knew a gentleman, an official in a bureau, a little pig-like man . . .

Pasolini’s much-banned, notoriously disgusting, sexually violent and scatological X-rated film opens, in the credits, with an “essential bibliography” citing not the Marquis de Sade novel on which the film is based, but the works of French cultural theorists and commentators on Sade, including Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Simone de Beauvoir and Pierre Klossowski. From there, Pasolini takes us to an “antechamber of hell” in the winter of 1944, where teenage boys and girls, some of them anti-Nazi partisans, are tortured and killed for the sexual delectation of a few aristocrats sheltered in a castle after the fall of Mussolini. There, aging prostitutes recite erotic stories as the men brutalize, rape and murder their captives.

Filmed mostly in long shot, this series of anti-erotic and anti-fascist tableaux analyzes the sickness and excess of power as it gives way to a series of nauseating fetishes—shit-eating, anality, bridal gowns. Its question is timely: what would it be like if the men who commissioned torture performed it themselves? – A.S. Hamrah