Beneath his beard collar, his chubby face and his eyes like two blue marbles, Marco Ferreri, director of the famous great food (1973), always affected the calm and good-natured air of a teacher in a spree before the outbursts of anger, incomprehension and hatred that his films unleashed. The truth is that he was – in Italian cinematography where competition was fierce – an arsonist of the worst kind. Apart from Pasolini, we do not see his equal in radicalism and provocation.
On the march towards the advanced stage which is ours, the deleterious dynamics of the consumer society inspired him, already half a century ago, with a feeling of nausea which nourished his firebrands in many visionary ways. His films – for the most part forgotten and invisible – would today lead him directly to prison, better still, there would be no one to produce them. Scatophilia, fetishism, nudity, pedophilia, incest, self-mutilation, cannibalism, suicide, rape… With him, all the boxes of the scandalous catalog are checked. At the same time, this Attila of bad taste, this blasphemous madman, this exorbitant athlete of the seventies was a fierce humanist coupled with a subtly conceptual filmmaker.
Scatophilia, fetishism, nudity, pedophilia, incest, self-mutilation, cannibalism, suicide, rape… With him, all the boxes of the scandalous catalog are checked.
We can judge on play, from January 26, at the French Cinematheque which programs all of his work, that is to say twenty-seven feature films plus a handful of shorts. Let’s quickly go over the preamble – birth in 1928 in Milan, producer of an alternative film journal, occasional actor, spirits representative, salesman of telephoto lenses, died in May 1997 in Paris – and let’s find him in Spain where his meeting with the Writer Rafael Azcona, who would become one of his most faithful scriptwriters, was decisive in his transition to directing. His three Spanish films – The Apartment (1959), Children (1959), The Little Car (1960) – inspired by Buñuel and wonderfully funny, is a sordid black farce served steaming under Franco’s nose, mentioned in the first of his titles as a popcorn maker. Which will take revenge by censoring the second.
To give a slightly more precise idea of this, let us say that in The Apartment, a couple in their forties made up of a virago and a lymphatic are awaiting the death of an elderly lady who sublets them part of the apartment they covet, and that the man, a low profile office worker , will go so far as to marry the old woman to get into her good graces. Variation: a paralyzed old man, wishing to afford the same motorized machine for the disabled as one of his friends, poisons his whole family to do so in The little car…
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