Abel Ferrara was there at the beginning. In his new memoir, Scene, the cult director describes his experience at the American premiere of Salò, the hugely controversial final film from Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini. At the beginning of the film – at which Ferrara and company arrived with wine and cheese, given its length – there were 15 people in the audience. Once the credits rolled, there were eight. “I was standing with like six people,” Ferrara says now. “And you know, two or three of those people I still see.”

When it comes to Salò, it seems that you never forget your first time. The film, which has reached its 50th anniversary in 2025, is known for its seemingly endless cavalcade of cruelty and violence, leaves a stark impact on those who come across it. “We had high expectations, but it went beyond that,” Ferrara says. “He had just died, so he was a saint to us.” But not everyone so readily embraces the film on first viewing. Film-maker Catherine Breillat says that at first, she didn’t like Salò, “regretted seeing it, [and] sort of wished that [I] hadn’t”. For Breillat, “you have to be ready to see Salò. Its like Arthur’s Round Table; it will come to you when you’re ready. There’s a moment where you can sit down with the knights of the Round Table, after following a dangerous path, and you don’t disappear into the abyss.”

Ironically, production on Salò, which was shot in a number of locations in Italy in early 1975, appears to have been a contrast to the stark brutality of the film itself. In a documentary about the making of the film, Hélène Surgère (who played storyteller Signora Vaccari) described the mood of the shoot as “jovial and immature”, the cast full of teenagers who would make jokes during some of the film’s most brutal sequences. At the centre of it all was Pasolini himself, who wouldn’t rehearse the actors, and would only tell them what would happen a few minutes before calling action. In an interview by Gideon Bachmann for Sight and Sound while shooting the film – and therefore only shortly before his death – Pasolini said he was aiming to create a “profoundly enigmatic” film, and that “not to be understood or even to be misunderstood is an intrinsic dimension of this work”.

Pasolini and his films were never strangers to controversy, but Salò seemed to be at a level all its own. From its initial release, it was plagued by censorship and accusations of indecency. This began in Pasolini’s native Italy; the film was initially rejected by Italian film censors, but was approved in December 1975, a month after the film’s premiere at the 1975 Paris film festival (which itself was only three weeks after Pasolini’s death). The approval did not last long; Italian censors withdrew permissions for the film in January 1976. Eventually Salò was shown in Rome in March 1977, and even then in a truncated form, with four sequences omitted.

Salò received a limited theatrical release in the US in 1977, but in the UK, it was rejected by the BBFC in 1976 and was first shown at the Compton Cinema Club a year later, uncut and without a certification but the screening was raided by the Metropolitan police. The film wouldn’t be released uncut in the UK until 2000, as a result of new BBFC guidelines, through which the board would only intervene over material for adults if it was illegal or harmful.

But now, decades after these struggles with bans and censorship, Salò, and Pasolini’s work more broadly, seems to be in the midst of a revival. In 2014, Ferrara directed a biopic of Pasolini with Willem Dafoe in the lead role; for Ferrara, who describes Pasolini as being like “his teacher, even more [so] now”, the power of Pasolini’s films only strengthens with the passage of time. “Like all great work, you can reread them at different points in your life and more is revealed.” More recently, in 2024, Bruce LaBruce shot a hardcore remake of Pasolini’s Theorem, called The Visitor, in which the enigmatic stranger, who changes the lives of a middle-class family through a series of sexual encounters, is recast as an immigrant, taking on a new, politically live dimension in contemporary Britain.

Politics is everywhere in Pasolini’s work, and especially in Salò; LaBruce says that its paralleling of De Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom to Italian fascism is “stupefying” , suggesting that Pasolini’s films and politics “transcend any simplistic notion of gay or queer identity”. This seems to manifest in the final scene of Salò, where two young men dance together in an empty room, the sounds of torture and violence just outside and out of reach. There’s a tension in Pasolini’s characters, the ways in which they shift between being victims and collaborators, between trying to save others and save themselves. But not all film-makers relate to the politics of Salò in the same way. For Breillat, Salò unlocked itself to her when she “defrocked it of the metaphor of fascism” and revealed something more universal and philosophical, the idea that, as she puts it, “we all share the same fears and desires”.

But there also remains a sense that Pasolini’s work remains unfinished. Ferrara describes his approach to filming his 2014 biopic as being like a documentary. “We knew we were going to film his death,” Ferrara says. “That was a reality.” Pasolini died on 2 November 1975; he was beaten, run over with his own car, and had multiple bones broken. Ferrara said he and his crew did their own research into Pasolini’s last 36 hours; in his film, the film-maker is assaulted on a beach outside Rome in a homophobic attack, with Giuseppe Pelosi – who, at 17, confessed to the murder but retracted it in May 2005 – fleeing the scene while Pasolini is run over. Over the course of more than five decades, Pasolini’s death remains mired in mystery and conspiracy; there have been suggestions of organised crime involvement, and political motivation. When he retracted his confession, Pelosi said that three men killed Pasolini, calling him a “queer” and a “dirty communist”.

Looming over all of this is the sense of what it meant for Pasolini’s life to be cut short. “The guy died with two novels, a brilliant movie, he’d finished two incredible screenplays.” Ferrara shows Pasolini shooting his unfinished project: Porno-Teo-Kolossal, the story of a man and his servant following a star in search of a messiah.

Pasolini, it would appear, seems to be a gift that keeps on giving; LaBruce says that he returns to Salò “every few years, and it’s always as if I’m seeing it for the first time. It’s just as profound, just as disturbing, just as relevant, if not more so every time.” It is a sentiment echoed by Ferrara, who says that Pasolini will be “always modern […] anybody who believes in the cinema and just gets it is going to give in.” While it is tempting to think that the lasting power of Salò lies simply in its ability to shock and disturb – although it is, of course, both shocking and disturbing – that does a disservice to both the film and its director. While there currently seems to some anxiety that the circumstances around his death might somehow overshadow his life and body of work, these are the things that will carry Pasolini forward into the next generation and beyond.