Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom
The movie deals with rich, corrupt Italian serial seducers at the time of the fascist Republic of Salò (1943–45). The seducers kidnap eighteen youths. The youths are exposed to almost four months of sadistic behavior, intense violence and sexual torturte. The movie is associated with certain themes. They include morality, nihilism, capitalism, sexual material and fascism. The movie has four segments, which were inspired from the narriative poem The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (the Italian poet): the Anteinferno, the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Excrement, and the Circle of Blood. The movie also has constant references towards and several discussions of Friedrich Nietzsche's 1887 novel On the Genealogy of Morality, Ezra Pound's poem The Cantos and Marcel Proust's novel sequence In Search of Lost Time.