Marco Ferreri: The Director Who Came from the Future

Amir Siadat

When The Big Feast premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, its disgusting actions (the most extreme example: the exploding of toilet and feces splashing on Marcello's head) made Ingrid Bergman, who was a member of the jury, vomit in the cinema hall. There was no better atmosphere outside the hall and the frustrated audiences greeted the rebel Italian director with insults. Apparently, he was used to such harsh reactions to his films. Both the feature films he made in Italy at the beginning of his career, The Conjugal Bed (1963) and The Ape Woman (1964), were severely censored because of their critical approaches towards religion, women, and the family. The first one was about a virgin who, after getting married, almost kills her husband with a sick thirst to have a child, and finally, after the child is born, she leaves the poor man to die alone. The second one took its funny elements from a famous religious story: when a maiden finds herself surrounded by thugs, she asks for help from the Holy Mary to make her safe from greedy men by growing a beard on her face! In the banquet that Marco Ferreri sarcastically invites his guests to, it seems that everything is out of place; There is no trace of the usual rituals and customs; The words of the host are harsh and the atmosphere is unpleasant and stinky; Why and through which way should one enter this annoying and repulsive banquet?

In a part of Dillinger is Dead, Glauco is passing a boring night by watching a home movie. This movie, which is probably related to his and his wife's journey at the beginning of their acquaintance (or in the first days of their life together), seems to contain all the missing links of his life. There is a cheerfulness in frames that no trace of it can be found in the tight space and depressing atmosphere of Glauco's house. The movie is produced in 1969; The era of protests and demonstrations, student riots and women's liberation movement; The era of the new left and the re-reading of Marx's views and the attack on the capitalist and bourgeois system. Attacking the structures and relations of the industrial society is common, and everyone talks of the declining cultural values under the influence of the mass media and commercialization policies of culture, and of course, of boredom - the main theme of the modern era - and about the repetition in civil life; Issues that seem boring and repetitive today, but their mark has clearly been left in the European cinema of those years. The thematic interpretation of the world of Marco Ferreri, who in his most important works, from the late sixties to the middle of the seventies, explicitly or implicitly followed the description of the ups and downs of these two decades without considering this inflammatory context, is not very valid. The presence of Glauco in a dizzying factory in the opening sequence and the reading of a manifesto-like article about issues such as the elimination of individuality, consumerism, the media and the one-dimensional human, written by one of the experts of the same factory – probably by imitating Herbert Marcuse - reveals Ferreri's thought in advance. However, this explicit and early disclosure of "what" the film wants to say - in an ironic way - is itself a measure against "interpretation".

Glauco's house - which is glamorous - is full of boredom. The home movie is projected on the wall, Glauco stands watching it and constantly reacts to it. He wants to caress the face of his beloved and surrender himself to the flow of the sea waves. He wants to sink into the image and become one with it, but behind the image is nothing but a wall. What has been screened is completely the imagination, and the reality of the impenetrable and cruel wall; A complete “nothing”. This childish effort of Glauco reminds one of a chapter of Waiting for Godot: Estragon earnestly looks inside his hat and shoes and with his search misleads the audience that he is looking for something; A thorn, a pebble or perhaps an appendage; But he looks for Godot! The apparent image of the projection device with "distance" is in front of the audience's eyes, so that by seeing Glauco's fumbling in front of the images on the wall, he might ponder about himself and his encounter with the cinema. Isn't this a serious flip to him?

In Don't Touch the White Woman! (1974), the slides of Indians genocide are shown at the same time as Buffalo Bill tells the audience of a night club about his heroics in the Indian killing attacks. Suddenly, the projector is turned toward the audience and those who do not like the images of the mutilated corpses of Indians to be reflected on their bodies and clothes, rush to remove the stains of these images from their faces. The sudden rotation of the images that this group were watching with indifference (and even lust) moments ago, reminded them that they participated in this crime with silence and passivity.

These two examples make it clear to some extent that why there are few moments that arouse the audience's emotions in Ferreri's cinema. His films not necessarily due to the usual and familiar tricks of "distancing", but mostly because of their stylistic arrangements and special cinematic language, alienate the audience. The scene of Gérard and Valérie getting to know each other at the beginning of The Last Woman (1976) is an example in this respect: .

- "Where are you going on vacation?"

- "Tunisia".

- "Okay... the sea... the sun... why don't we spend the holidays together at my house?"

- "Because someone is waiting for me"

A little further, Michel (Michel Piccoli) is standing next to his car and waiting for Valérie. When joyfully she comes to greet her beloved, Gérard asks Valérie to choose between his house and Tunisia! Valérie's choice is to live with Gérard. Michel chases the two, not out of revenge but to give Valérie the suitcase: “Now you're free to do whatever you want; And I will be alone with my pain." And Gérard, who witnesses this farewell, wishes that this "scene" would not last long. This beginning, which is summarized in less than three minutes, with abstract and melodious dialogues, characters devoid of psychological aspects and intense actions and far from the logic of real life, create a space in the light of which the aesthetic "distance" can be seen more clearly. The Last Woman would have been considered as a short film if it had left the end point here, but it changes its tone and goes another direction; Instead of brevity and summarizing complex events into general and semi-abstract patterns, it focuses extremely on the details of the new relationship between Gérard and Valérie, and by insisting on the explicit display of the physical aspect of this relationship, it even goes to the borders of pornography.

In Dillinger..., Ferreri shows how to use the details: Glauco, who suffers from insomnia, flips through a cookbook while watching a TV show and starts cooking to the sound of pop music. He goes to the closet to find his favorite spice and accidentally finds a gun wrapped in an old newspaper. He takes out the guts of the gun and greases it with olive oil. Everything, from cooking to screwing a gun, is shown with complete composure and a lot of attention to detail. The film takes place in silence and there is no dramatic dialogue, so that the audience's attention becomes sensitive to any sound. The actions also seem so insignificant that we do not take Chekhov's famous principle very seriously and we cannot believe that this gun will become an important element later. The next step is to paint the gun and Glauco spending time with a tape recorder and a toy snake. As we get closer to the end, Glauco, who seems to be playing, walks around the house with the gun in his hand, in harmony with the music of the tape recorder, sings and points at the door and the wall, his own reflection in the mirror, and the paintings, and finally shoots three bullets to his wife's brain; Now the night (and the game) is over; Glauco coolly dresses, goes to a quiet beach, and swims to join the passengers of a ship.

Can Dillinger... be considered a kind of revision of Marx's teachings? Will everyone get along if there is no economic problem? How do we know that people do not argue out of boredom and do not start killing each other? The hedonistic lifestyle of the bourgeoisie, which Glauco must have once fought for, now seems boring to him; That's why you are looking for an adventure; Like any other absurd person, he suffers from a common pain and suffers from a universal disaster. His pain is the balance that must be struggled to reach in Aristotelian drama. Dillinger... abandons the incident, the climax and the resolution, and passes completely in the secondary balance. Glauco is suffering secondary balance, from everyday life.

In The Big Feats, a chef, a TV personality, a pilot and a judge have joined together to spend their time in a luxurious villa. At the beginning of their gathering, everything, from the way of cooking and hospitality to the rituals of eating and social conversations, is held with dignity. But then, it becomes clear that this congregation has nothing to do but idleness, gluttony and debauchery. They are busy eating continuously and in a crazy way and they are determined to eat until they die! In addition, none of them have the possibility to leave this temple without any obstacles in their way! According to a grotesque rule, everything looks ridiculous and scary at the same time; People are lowly creatures and are trapped by boredom, laziness, instinct and consumption, and are prisoners of a completely serious theatrical situation that is empty of content; A two-way situation that reaches Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel on one side and Ionesco's Rhinoceros on the other (the group of four encounters a dog upon entering the house that the caretaker warns them to be careful of. After the death of the pilot, the judge and the chef, we see three dogs barking in the backyard!). Ferreri's mischief is to try to give an idealistic look to people's excessive desire to overeat. They stand like a parody of a hero until the moment of their death - which is summed up in eating and sexual pleasure: Ugo the chef - the focal point of the group (who, in a sense, has the role of "leader" for the rest of the group) – on the moment of dying, still eating and love making; Philippe and Andréa (a teacher who joined the group) are by his side until his last breath and are "committed" to providing for his needs! Two years after this frank attack on the greedy tendency of the bourgeoisie, Pasolini in Salo narrated the terrible story of four other men who took young adults captive in a remote villa, with the intention of satisfying their desires, and a decade later Peter Greenaway in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover used the internal affairs of a luxury restaurant as an excuse to talk about consumerism and Thatcherism.

From The Big Feast onwards, Ferreri experienced a kind of filmmaking that was based on improvisation rather than being bound by a script. If there was a script, it would be so transformed during filming that at the end, not much of its original form would remain. Philippe Noiret says that playing in Don't Touch the White Woman was a crazy experience for him: "I never understood what the movie was about!" Apparently, every time he came to the set, they dressed him in a military uniform and filmed the parts related to him without even explaining the outline of the story to him. Every time Maruschka Detmers, the actress of How Good the Whites Are, asked Ferreri to give her an explanation about the script and the role, he gave her a sincere reply: "When the film is released, go and watch it. The ticket money is on me”. According to such a procedure, there was no reason to cooperate with Azcona, the Spanish screenwriter who was by his side from the beginning until nearly two decades. Of course, Ferreri had another justification for this termination of cooperation: "Azcona was disgusted with the image I presented of women". He claimed to be 50% feminist and 50% anti-woman. It is difficult to find a sign of that feminist half in his cinema, but the final shot of The Conjugal Bed and Regina's face at the baptism ceremony of her child, with that cold smile and penetrating look – in which one could read the feeling of satisfaction with the death of her husband and the exclusive possession of the child – can never be forgotten; All the elements and signs related to the church and religion, which in the first half of the film made Regina a saint/virgin, in this shot have given her a scary and evil look. In The Story of Piera (1983), family is entirely a hell: a man who has lost track of his affairs and is driven to madness, and his wife does not take care of him; A daughter and a father who want each other in a non-platonic relationship; A mother who misleads her daughter. She is a hellraiser who is not willing to obey the rules of the family and is always running away from maternal duties. The woman in many of Ferreri's films has a complete break from the stereotype of the mother who is always inactive. She is often active and domineering, and she often ruins men with her choices. Andréa in The Big Feast, at first glance, is like a simple lady teacher who is clear and pure. When Philippe invites her to join them, the others are worried that the teacher will not be able to cope with their demands; However, Andréa stays with the group until the end, moves among all of them, and everyone who has an affair with her dies mysteriously shortly after. In a drama full of decay and destruction, Andréa survives until the end. It is not unlikely that she is the angel of death herself!

History is to be blamed that Ferreri's radicalism is concurrent with the era of liberation of women. The answer to why in many of his works the feeling of insecurity and men's worries about the increasing independence of women is reflected in the second wave of feminism; A wave that started in the sixties and in its extreme tendencies, its goal - in simple words - was to save women from terrifying creature called man! Radical feminism looked at the man as a monster who had established the traditional base of the family in a way so that the woman would obey him as a wife and reproduce the patriarchy in the next generation as a mother. Feminist interpretation of Marx also saw the liberation of women who were relegated at home to take care of the future "labor force" in the minimization of domestic duties and extensive participation in production, and this was only possible with the elimination of capitalism and communist revolution.

Gérard's wife has left the family in The Last Woman with such intention and in pursuit of big hopes. The good relationship he establishes with Valérie seems a little unusual, and Valérie's subsequent behavior with Gérard is even more unusual. Is there a conspiracy? Gérard's only happiness, as a simple worker, is home and a loved one with whom he can relax. But Valérie keeps rejecting Gérard, and this is so frustrating for him that he ends up mutilating himself. In the acute and apocalyptic atmosphere of Bye Bye Monkey (1978), there is talk everywhere about the insidious and underground rats which are about to conquer New York. Lafayette (Gérard Depardieu), who is a stage assistant and the only male member of an off-Broadway theater group, uses a whistle in his house and keeps blowing it to scare away the rats. A little later, behind the stage of the theater, he uses the same whistle to communicate with the women around him! What is the source of terror in Bye Bye Monkey? Rats that may tear the crust of the earth and take over the city at any moment, or the "second sex" that struggles with a destructive force will come to the text from the sidelines?

"Women can be dangerous too. Why have we always shown them as helpless and victimized creatures?"

Off-Broadway feminists - due to such a question - have decided to show a new and outrageous dimension of femininity on stage by changing the position of men and women in the image of "rape". The baby monkey, who was left homeless after the death of his mother (King Kong?) and Lafayette who hugs him during the film – like a mother - and feels sorry for him, creates the image of a defective child who is born from such abusive relationships. Seeing every couple in Ferreri`s films, you can almost be sure that there is no happy ending waiting for them and that everything will lead to disaster (the worst of all is The Flesh in which the main couple's tug-of-war ends in cannibalism!). Dillinger...'s couple's relationship, except that it is a generalizable example in Ferreri's cinema, due to the subtle role of symbolic elements, paves the way for a psychological look: the signs tell of the coldness of the relationship. The woman has prepared food for the man that he does not show interest in. So, he starts “cooking” himself. He throws away the woman's food and eats his own cooking. A gun that a man lubricates with oil during the night and keeps walking around with it becomes an instrument of murder and the tool of eliminating the woman. What follows the murder is the end of this misogynistic daydreaming: we see Glauco in the same sea when he watched the home movie with longing and he could not reach it; He swims joyfully and this time there is no one by his side.

Ferreri lived sixty-eight years and made thirty-three feature films. Although the screening of many of his films caused a lot of controversy and uproar, his death did not cause as much noise among film lovers as it should; Maybe because in the last years there was a clear gap with the good days of his filmmaking. Of course, he seemed isolated even during his prime, and it was not possible for him to keep up with names like Antonioni, Pasolini, Fellini, Visconti and Bertolucci. Mastroianni considered him a "beyond modern" filmmaker. Gilles Jacob believed that with the death of Ferreri, the Italian cinema has lost an original artist who "had no equal in displaying the complex situation of contemporary man - whether with metaphorical language or bluntly and satirically." A decade after Ferreri's death (in 2007), Mario Canale made a documentary about him consisting of fascinating behind-the-scenes parts of his works, archival images of Ferreri himself and a number of interviews with his close colleagues (Rafael Azcona, Philippe Noiret, etc.) and some critics and researchers. Maybe today many of his films (especially the later ones) can be ignored and easily passed by, but the existence of pioneering works such as Dillinger is Dead and The Big Feast along with innovative and radical (although raw and unfinished) ideas and experiences in his career is enough to convince us that the title that Mario Canale chose for his documentary is fitting for him: "Marco Ferreri: The Director Who Came from the Future".