Creatureliness and Posthumanism in Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò

Abstract

With this essay, I wish to offer a reading of two films occupying an infamous space in the Italian cinematic canon of the 1970s, Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (Il portiere di notte, 1974) and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo (1975), arguing that they contribute to the theoretical debate surrounding the posthuman through their portrayal of the relationship between embodiment and history.1 While the films are often analyzed together for their sexualized portrayal of fascism, the important and interlocking themes of the materiality of historical influence on the body and the body’s subsequent metamorphosis and animalization have hitherto been neglected by scholars. Thus this paper builds on Kriss Ravetto’s reading of a body of Italian cinematographic works that, in Ravetto’s words, “refus[e] to disengage Nazism and moral humanism” by exposing the “rhetoric of violence at the heart of bourgeois humanism” (227).2 First, Salo and The Night Porter engage with humanism in the sense of the Romantic notion of humanist art that revealed man’s true essence. As Margaret Atwood explains, “[W]hat man wrote […] was self-expression—the expression of the self, of a man’s whole being” (52). But along with staging humanism as the artistic expression of man, I argue that Cavani and Pasolini are responding to a renewed investment in the notion of “humanity.” This term, privileged in Italian postwar cultural production, was used to explain the urgency of assessing fascism and the crimes against humanity perpetrated during the Second World War, in the name of salvaging a notion of “the human,” which was felt to be still redeemable in the aftermath of almost three decades of fascist rule, Nazi occupation, and global war.