In search of Marco Ferreri

This weekend the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston unrolls Marco Ferreri's Dillinger is Dead. Screenings are at 7 on Friday and Saturday and 5 pm. on Sunday.
I've only had the chance to see a bunch of Ferreri films in the last year coinciding with several titles becoming available on DVD (through Koch Lorber Films). Even when they're not great, and they can be gratingly boring to awesomely excellent, Ferreri has a way of eliciting thoughts and ideas that will roll around your head for days after seeing a specific film. Dillinger is Dead I have never seen and if there's movie karma one day the museum will show The Last Woman, perhaps the most controversial Ferreri film ever, itself not offered theatrically or on DVD. For the purpose of this article I will use the English titles to Ferreri films but his movies usually have different Italian and French titles.
Ferreri is likened to directors like Fassbinder or Pasolini or Bunuel and some could even cull up the name of David Lynch, but in a sense that's grasping at straws to associate one director with another because they all use elements of surrealism. One thing for certain is that if there's a cutting edge theme somebody thinks has just come out chances are that Ferreri did it long ago.
For instance Steven Soderbergh uses a porn star in his latest The Girlfriend Experience but Ferreri did that parlor trick with Abigail Clayton opposite Gerard Depardieu in Bye Bye Monkey (1978).
Bye Bye Monkey starts with Depardieu getting raped by a gang of women in his theatrical troupe. The sex is graphic and the setting is not so much post apocalyptic as future shock. The indelible image of the carcass of King Kong lying on the beach in Manhattan with the twin towers of the newly built World Trade Center is simply cinema architecture supreme. Certainly nobody could have foreseen how this image would play out over 30 years later. Made on location in New York and Ferreri's first film in English Bye Bye Monkey also features Marcello Mastroianni and James Coco.
Mastroianni features prominently in Ferreri films, in fact he's as much associated with Ferreri as he is with Fellini. Mastroianni also appears as General George Custer in Don't Touch the White Woman (1974), a farcical portrait of the American West ripe with anachronisms like people in post-Civil War uniforms mingling with guys in blue jeans and college jerseys who are munching potato chips. DTTWW mixes the present with the past. We're seeing the conflict of Indians and the American army played out in an ruined industrial setting of imploding decaying buildings. Only at the end during the battle of Little Big Horn does the film actually abruptly change the setting to a Western landscape. Catherine Deneuve co-stars as do 70s era French actors Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret and Ugo Tognazzi. All four of these virile males appear in Ferreri's best known film The Big Feast (La Grande Bouffe). Here the quartet are successful business and professional types who gather at a posh summer villa to literally eat themselves to death.
As you can see the films of Marco Ferreri aren't for the squeamish, a fact hammered home hard by Ferreri's second English language film Tales of Ordinary Madness (1981) with Ben Gazzara playing a thinly disguised Charles Bukowski. If you've think you like Bukowski influenced films such as Barfly or Factotum you haven't seen the best. Tales runs the gamut from seedy alcohol infused fantasies to sexual predatory habits to sleeping in unlocked cars to using your cheeks as a pin cushion. Ornella Muti also stars.
If Ferreri didn't make films there would be a black hole in cinema history. Looking over a list of his filmography I've seen less than half of his films, which is a good thing in the sense that there's always a chance another of his works will appear in a retrospective or DVD in some undetermined future.
The clip below is from a 1979 film by Ferreri with Robert Benigni called Chiedo Asilo.