Marco Ferreri: La Grande Bouffe, La Carne and Provocation

Marco Ferreri: The Provocateur of La Grande Bouffe and La Carne

Category: Italian cinema, directors, personal experience

Who was Marco Ferreri? He was a Milanese director (1928–1997) who made three films in Spain and some two dozen more in Italy and France, and he became European cinema's great provocateur with La Grande Bouffe (1973). He filmed men eating themselves to death, a man raising an ape instead of a child, and a husband who castrates himself with an electric knife. His films offended critics, censors and feminists for forty years, and they still look ahead of their time.

I first met Ferreri on paper. In Cairo I followed European cinema through the French and American editions of Premiere, and I was one of those Egyptian cinephiles who saved money all year to see 20 or 30 films during the Cairo International Film Festival. One year [SHERIF: year, likely 1991 or 1992] the festival programme listed La carne (The Flesh, 1991), his film with Francesca Dellera, under the Arabic title «اللحم البشري», "Human Flesh". I still remember a fellow filmgoer hunting for it and saying: «أنا هنا عاوز أشوف اللحم البشري» ("I'm here to see Human Flesh"). As I remember it, the film was announced but never shown. I suspect censorship, though I have never found a record that proves it.

Key Takeaways

• Marco Ferreri was born in Milan on 11 May 1928 and died in Paris on 9 May 1997.
• He began in Spain with the screenwriter Rafael Azcona. El cochecito won the FIPRESCI critics' prize at Venice in 1960.
• La Grande Bouffe caused the scandal of Cannes 1973 and still shared the festival's FIPRESCI prize.
• His biggest juried prizes came from Berlin: a Silver Bear for Chiedo asilo (1980) and the Golden Bear for La casa del sorriso (1991).
• Ornella Muti was his key actress, in The Last Woman, Tales of Ordinary Madness and The Future Is Woman.
• Critics often called him a misogynist. His own answer: "I am half misogynist and half feminist."

Who Was Marco Ferreri? From Milan to Madrid with Rafael Azcona

Category: biography, Spanish period

How did Marco Ferreri start? He started in film as a producer and organiser in Milan and Rome, then found his voice in Franco's Spain, where he met Rafael Azcona and directed El pisito, Los chicos and El cochecito between 1958 and 1960.

A Veterinary Student Who Drifted into Cinema

Ferreri was the son of an insurance accountant at Generali and studied veterinary medicine in Milan. He later told Maurizio Costanzo on television that he had meant to be a vet and became a director by chance. In the early 1950s he worked in production, helping on Antonioni's Cronaca di un amore and Lattuada's Il cappotto, and he appeared as an extra in Lattuada's La spiaggia. He also travelled between Italy, France and Spain selling advertising.

Madrid, 1955: The Meeting with Azcona

In 1955 he was in Madrid selling camera lenses when he met Rafael Azcona, a humorist and writer. Azcona became his co-writer for the rest of his life. Their first film, El pisito (1958), co-directed with Isidoro Ferry, is a black comedy about Madrid's housing shortage: a man marries a dying old woman to inherit her flat. Los chicos (1959) followed, then El cochecito (1960). In El cochecito, the veteran actor José Isbert plays an old man so desperate for a motorised wheelchair like his friends' that he is ready to poison his family to get one.

The Spanish films are where Ferreri's cinema took shape. They show bodies made to serve property, families treated as machines, and death played as comedy. Spanish critics called it humor negro, and the label followed him to Italy.

The 1960 Venice Prize: What He Actually Won

El cochecito won the FIPRESCI prize, the award of the international film critics, at the 21st Venice Film Festival in 1960. In Spain it also won the Sant Jordi award for best Spanish film. It did not win the Golden Lion, and Ferreri never did. His later Venice entry, Il futuro è donna (1984), competed without winning.

For years I was sure that Ferreri had won the big prize at Venice. The record is more modest, and more interesting. His Venice laurel came early, from critics, for a small Spanish film about a wheelchair. The major juried prizes came later, and from Berlin.

After El cochecito, Ferreri took Azcona back to Italy. They directed an episode of Le italiane e l'amore (1961) and then Una storia moderna: l'ape regina (1963), with Ugo Tognazzi as Ferreri's alter ego. The censors cut it heavily, and the uncut version was not released until 1984. The provocateur had arrived. For more on Italian cinema's other great scandal-maker, see my comparison of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Tinto Brass.

The Ape Woman, Dillinger Is Dead and The Seed of Man

Category: Italian period, 1960s, film analysis

What are Marco Ferreri's key 1960s films? The Ape Woman (1964), Dillinger Is Dead (1969) and The Seed of Man (1969). In each one, the institutions of modern life (show business, the bourgeois home, the State) turn bodies into objects, and Ferreri films it as black comedy.

The Ape Woman (1964): A Marriage Sold by the Ticket

Ferreri and Azcona drew La donna scimmia from the real story of Julia Pastrana, a 19th-century woman exhibited in freak shows. Ugo Tognazzi plays Antonio Focaccia, a Neapolitan hustler who finds Maria (Annie Girardot), a woman covered in hair, living in a convent. He bills her as an "ape woman" brought back from Africa. He tries to sell her virginity, marries her when the nuns insist, and takes her to perform semi-nude in Paris nightclubs. Love never stops him from counting the takings.

The film exists in three versions. In Ferreri's own ending, Maria and her baby die in childbirth, and Antonio buys back their embalmed bodies from a museum to exhibit them himself. Before the Italian release, either the censors or the producer Carlo Ponti cut the exhibition, leaving only the deaths. Alberto Moravia complained in L'Espresso that the story had lost its "logical conclusion". The French version added a happy ending: Maria survives, loses her hair, and Antonio has to work on the docks. At Cannes in 1964 the French press met the film with near-unanimous disgust, and Bosley Crowther of the New York Times called it "oddly distasteful". Peter Bradshaw, reviewing the 2021 restoration in the Guardian, compared it to Freaks and La Strada. In 2008 it joined Italy's list of 100 films to be saved.

Dillinger Is Dead (1969): One Night, One Gun

Dillinger è morto is the film critics most often call Ferreri's masterpiece. Michel Piccoli plays Glauco, an industrial designer of gas masks who comes home to a cold dinner and a wife (Anita Pallenberg) in bed with a headache. While cooking himself a gourmet meal he finds an old revolver wrapped in a 1934 newspaper announcing the death of the gangster John Dillinger. Through the night he cleans the gun, paints it red with white polka dots, watches home movies, seduces the maid (Annie Girardot) and stages his own suicide again and again. At dawn he shoots his sleeping wife, drives to the sea and signs on as cook on a yacht bound for Tahiti.

There is almost no plot and no psychology, only objects. Mira Liehm compared the film to the Theatre of the Absurd, and Paolo Bertetto read the escape to Tahiti as "the paralysis of all possibilities". Piccoli said Ferreri barely directed him beyond blocking. Cahiers du Cinéma championed the film, Paris opened its doors to Ferreri, and Piccoli became his most loyal actor.

The Seed of Man (1969): Parmesan at the End of the World

In Il seme dell'uomo, a young couple, Cino (Marzio Margine) and Dora (Anne Wiazemsky), drive out of a tunnel into an unexplained catastrophe. They settle in an abandoned seaside fort, and agents of the State order the survivors to repopulate the earth. Cino builds a museum of the dead civilisation, which includes a wheel of Parmesan that Dora would rather eat. A foreign woman (Girardot) arrives as a rival and is killed, and Dora serves her body to Cino. When Cino forces a pregnancy on the sedated Dora, the land explodes beneath them. Here Ferreri's nihilism is at its starkest, and the cheap production becomes the film's style. The red polka-dot gun from Dillinger turns up in the hands of the major.

Why the 1960s Films Still Matter

Watched together, these films are a dress rehearsal for La Grande Bouffe: food, consumption and death as one system. The same line runs into L'udienza (1972), in which Enzo Jannacci spends the whole film trying to reach the Pope. It won Ferreri the FIPRESCI prize in Berlin, shared with Ken Loach's Family Life. For a later variation on the theme of food at the end of the world, see my essay on food scarcity in dystopian films, from Soylent Green to The Platform.

La Grande Bouffe and the 1973 Cannes Scandal

Category: La Grande Bouffe, Cannes, censorship, personal experience

Why was La Grande Bouffe so controversial? It premiered in competition at Cannes on 21 May 1973 as one of France's official entries. The audience booed and whistled, the jury president Ingrid Bergman called it one of the festival's "most sordid and vulgar" films, and the French Minister of Culture demanded an explanation. Yet the film shared the critics' FIPRESCI prize and became a hit.

A Film Chosen to Represent France

The French selection committee had been criticised for a dull line-up in 1972. In 1973 it chose three bold films: René Laloux's La Planète sauvage, Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore and Ferreri's La Grande Bouffe, a French-Italian co-production with Marcello Mastroianni, Ugo Tognazzi, Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret and Andréa Ferréol. Eustache's film had already divided the Croisette. AFP wrote that the "battle of Cannes" was over and that Ferreri's screening risked being "even more turbulent".

The Night of 21 May: Boos, Whistles and Kisses

Accounts of the evening differ. The ORTF evening news reported boos and whistles, but also applause, and said "very few spectators left the room". It filmed outraged viewers: "It's a disgrace, a film like this representing France!" Télérama later recalled the booing starting halfway through, at the flatulence and the exploding toilet, and Andréa Ferréol remembered a man in the stalls shouting, "Now all you have to do is piss on us!" Italian reports of the 2023 restoration add whistles and spitting aimed at the cast and director, and say Ferreri blew kisses back at the furious crowd. New York Magazine reported, via Apollo, that a critic punched Ferreri on the nose and the two rolled on the floor. Bergman is said to have been physically sick. These stories grew with each retelling, and I would treat the spitting and the punch as part of the legend.

"Political"? No, "Ecological": The Press Conference

At the press conference, with his four stars and Ferréol beside him, Ferreri lost his temper. An INA clip shows him rising to rebuke a journalist who called the film "political", and insisting it was an "ecological" film. I have long remembered a clip in which he tells his critics something like "I hate you too", but I have not found it in the archives, so I offer it as memory rather than record.

The Press, the Minister and the Censors

The French press was brutal. Jean Cau wrote "shame on the producers [...] shame on the actors". In Le Figaro, Louis Chauvet felt "a physical and moral repugnance" at having to discuss the film, and André Brincourt said it "belongs more to psychiatry than to criticism". François Chalais on Europe 1 called the day the festival's "most degrading" and France's "most sinister humiliation". The Culture Minister, Jacques Duhamel, ordered André Astoux, head of the CNC, to explain "these unqualifiable choices". In Britain, Mary Whitehouse called it "the most revolting film I have ever seen".

None of it hurt the box office: nearly 2.5 million French viewers went to see what the fuss was about. At the closing ceremony the film shared the FIPRESCI prize with The Mother and the Whore. In Italy, the censorship board asked for 40 metres of cuts and restricted the film to viewers over 18, and the public prosecutor in Catania had it seized. The uncut version only returned to Italian cinemas in December 2023, in a 4K restoration that put back about five minutes.

Reading About It in Cairo

I knew the scandal long before I knew the film, from the French and American editions of Premiere that I read in Cairo. I saw La Grande Bouffe much later, probably on DVD. [SHERIF: confirm DVD or other format] By then the scandal had become film history, the way Pasolini's Salò did two years later, and Tinto Brass's provocations after that. For more on the Italian tradition of provocation, see my piece on Tinto Brass's journey through provocative cinema.

La Grande Bouffe Explained: Food, Death and Four Actors Playing Themselves

Category: La Grande Bouffe, film analysis, personal experience

What is La Grande Bouffe about? Four successful friends shut themselves in a villa outside Paris to eat themselves to death. Marco Ferreri and Rafael Azcona made the suicide pact a satire of consumer society, and the four stars play characters who carry their own first names.

Marcello, Ugo, Michel and Philippe

Ugo (Ugo Tognazzi) is a chef and restaurant owner, Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) an airline pilot and womaniser, Michel (Michel Piccoli) a television producer, and Philippe (Philippe Noiret) a judge who still lives with the old nanny who raised him and controls him. By giving the characters their actors' names, Ferreri made it seem the stars were playing themselves. Apollo notes that Mastroianni, the charming hero of post-war Italy, ends up drenched in sewage from an exploding toilet. Tognazzi, a skilled amateur cook, plays the chef. The food came from the Paris delicatessen Fauchon, and the actor and food writer Giuseppe Maffioli prepared the dishes on set.

Andréa, the Prostitutes and the Order of Death

The men invite three prostitutes (played by Florence Giorgetti, Solange Blondeau and Rita Scherrer, according to the Italian credits), who flee at dawn in disgust. Andréa, a plump schoolteacher who visits with her pupils to see the garden's famous lime tree, stays to the end. Andréa Ferréol had to gain 25 kilos in two months to get the part. She sleeps with all four men and becomes the calm attendant of their deaths, which is the film's darkest joke.

Marcello dies first, frozen at the wheel of an old Bugatti in a snowstorm. Michel collapses after an attack of flatulence at the piano. Ugo dies on the kitchen table, eating a pâté shaped like the dome of Les Invalides. Philippe, a diabetic, dies on the bench under the lime tree, in Andréa's arms, after eating a pudding shaped like a pair of breasts. In the last scene, delivery men leave whole carcasses of meat in the garden, and a pack of dogs eats them.

Sade, Rabelais and Buñuel

On the night of the premiere, the ORTF evening news described the film as going "beyond the Rabelaisian or Pasolinian" into "the abject". Later critics have compared it to Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, with food in place of sex, and to Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel, another bourgeois gathering that cannot end. Cahiers du Cinéma grouped it with Last Tango in Paris and The Mother and the Whore in a kind of "trilogy of degradation". Ferreri, himself a gourmand who had sought treatment for overeating in Switzerland, called it a "farce of four physiological machines". The theme is not appetite but its exhaustion: impotence, boredom and a death drive dressed up as a feast.

From Scandal to Classic

Roger Ebert called it "more of an experience than a treatise". Cannes, which had booed it, invited Michel Piccoli to present it again in Cannes Classics in 2013. The chef Fergus Henderson calls it "the greatest food film ever". The 2023 restoration toured Italy uncut.

The Sex Scenes: Drama or Provocation?

All the sex in the film is between adults, and none of it is erotic in the usual sense. Ferreri films flesh as more consumption: Andréa's body is served like another course, and the pudding breasts make that point explicitly. Apollo argues that the film's "sexual contempt" is more unnerving today, particularly given how Ferreri pushed Ferréol to gain weight. My verdict is that it is provocation in the service of drama. The nudity is meant to repel, not to seduce, and that is exactly the satire.

A Grande Bouffe in Cairo

I saw Ferreri's feast come to life in Cairo. At the Cairo International Film Festival [SHERIF: year, likely 2000, the 24th edition], Ornella Muti was a guest of honour, and a reception was held in the Muhammad Ali Palace in Manial. When the buffet opened, the Egyptian media rushed it. Muti couldn't eat, and said in Italian something like "mangia, mangia". It was a grande bouffe of its own, and it leads me to the actress who was Ferreri's other great obsession. For another side of 1970s European excess, see my essay on the erotic fairy-tale films of the 1970s.

Ornella Muti and Ferreri: The Last Woman, Tales of Ordinary Madness and The Future Is Woman

Category: Ornella Muti, film analysis, nudity in context

Which Marco Ferreri films did Ornella Muti make? Three: The Last Woman (1976) with Gérard Depardieu, Tales of Ordinary Madness (1981) with Ben Gazzara, and The Future Is Woman (1984) with Hanna Schygulla. Ferreri used her to embody a vital femininity against a man who can no longer be saved.

After the evening in Manial, I went back to the films that had made Muti a star of European art cinema. Ferreri once said an actress is "a body in space", and he used her that way.

The Last Woman (1976): Depardieu, Muti and the Electric Knife

In L'ultima donna (La Dernière Femme), Depardieu plays Gérard, called Giovanni in the Italian version: a laid-off engineer in Créteil, on the grey outskirts of Paris, whose wife has left him to join a feminist group. He meets Valérie (Muti), a nursery teacher at his baby son's daycare, and they move in together. A happy, sexual beginning sours into jealousy and domination. Valérie accuses him of wanting only his own pleasure, refuses his proposal, and in the final scene he castrates himself with an electric knife. Carlo Rambaldi made the effect just before leaving for Hollywood.

The film was shot in Paris between September and November 1975, so Muti, born on 9 March 1955, was 20. Both leads are nude for long stretches, Depardieu almost throughout. Critics read the nakedness as the point. FilmTV describes Depardieu as a hungry, oversized "version of the baby", and Muti as a still, maternal, almost passive presence that the man can photograph but never understand. Its reception was scandalous and mixed. It opened in France in April 1976 and screened at Venice that September, where the Corriere della Sera's headline called Depardieu's character the "mutilated Adam". FilmTV now calls it one of Ferreri's most successful films.

Tales of Ordinary Madness (1981): Muti as Cass

Shot in English in the United States and set in Los Angeles, Storie di ordinaria follia is drawn from Charles Bukowski's 1972 collection Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness, and in particular from the story "The Most Beautiful Woman in Town". Ben Gazzara plays Charles Serking, a drunk poet based on Bukowski's alter ego Chinaski, and Muti plays Cass, a young, self-destructive prostitute. Theirs is a fragile love. In one image she closes her body with a safety pin, and she takes her own life while he is away in New York chasing a publishing deal. Ferreri won the David di Donatello for best director, while Janet Maslin of the New York Times dismissed it as a blend of "pretension and pornography". For me it is Muti's finest work with Ferreri. The sex is shown as loneliness, not spectacle.

The Future Is Woman (1984)

In Il futuro è donna, which competed at Venice, Muti plays Malvina, a pregnant young woman whom a couple (Hanna Schygulla and Niels Arestrup) rescue from men harassing her in a nightclub. The two women grow close, and the man is pushed to the edge. Muti told the Corriere della Sera in 2025 that when she became pregnant before a planned Ferreri film, he called it "a marvel" and said he had long wanted to make a film about women giving birth, and about the frustration of the man who cannot. Whether that call became this film is not clear from her account.

What Muti Says About Ferreri

She has called him "perhaps the most tender" of her masters. At first, she said, they fought, and he directed her through his assistant: "Tell that one that in the next scene...". "Then we made peace and loved each other very much. He was a truly important person for me." About Depardieu, whom she describes as having an energy that makes "the walls move", she stays fond but cautious, given his recent court cases (see my timeline of the Depardieu allegations). [LINK: future Meeting Venus article on Ornella Muti]

"Farewell, Macho": Bye Bye Monkey (Ciao maschio, 1978)

Category: Bye Bye Monkey, film analysis, Cannes

What is Bye Bye Monkey about? In a near-empty, rat-infested New York, a young Frenchman (Gérard Depardieu) finds a baby chimpanzee beside a giant dead King Kong and raises it like a son. The Italian title, Ciao maschio, means "Goodbye, male", and the film shared the Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes in 1978.

For years I called this film "Farewell, Macho" and pictured Ornella Muti beside Depardieu. The title I remembered is right, a literal translation of Ciao maschio, but Muti is not in it. Her film with Depardieu is The Last Woman.

The Cast: Depardieu, Mastroianni, Coco, Fitzgerald and Gail Lawrence

The film was shot in English in New York and on Long Island. It was a French-Italian co-production, written by Ferreri with Gérard Brach and Rafael Azcona, photographed by Luciano Tovoli and designed by Dante Ferretti.

• Depardieu plays Gérard Lafayette, an electrician who lives alone in a basement.
• Marcello Mastroianni is Luigi Nocello, an old Italian sculptor who keeps the wax displays.
• James Coco is Andreas Flaxman, the cynical owner of a waxwork museum of the Roman Empire.
• Geraldine Fitzgerald is Mrs. Toland.
• Gail Lawrence, born in New York in 1948 and known in adult films as Abigail Clayton, plays Angelica, an actress in a feminist theatre troupe that also includes Mimsy Farmer and Stefania Casini.

Lawrence was one of the first adult-film actresses to cross into a mainstream art film. She later called Ferreri "a madman", "very intense" but "very creative", someone who "looked for ways to be shocking".

King Kong's Corpse and a City of Rats

Ferreri's New York is a dystopia, almost empty of people and full of rats. Lafayette works as a lighting technician for the feminist troupe. While improvising a piece about rape, the women knock him unconscious and Angelica rapes him. Later, beside the Hudson at the Battery Park City construction site, Lafayette, Luigi and a group of drifters find an abandoned baby chimp in the palm of a giant King Kong sculpture. Flaxman warns him the ape will rob him of his freedom. Angelica moves in and shares the chimp's care, but when Lafayette ignores the news that she is pregnant, she leaves.

The Ending: Rats, Fire and the Survivors

Lafayette comes home to find the chimp eaten by rats. Desperate for human contact, he breaks into the wax museum, fights Flaxman, and dies when a fire breaks out. The only survivors are Angelica and her child. At Cannes in 1978, the film shared the Grand Prize of the Jury with Jerzy Skolimowski's The Shout.

The End of the Male

Bye Bye Monkey completes the line that runs from The Last Woman. Two years after Gérard cut himself off with an electric knife, another Gérard prefers raising an ape to becoming a father, and dies among wax Caesars in a city run by rats. Like King Kong's corpse, the male has outlived his myth: the museum's Romans are wax, the gorilla is a prop, and the future belongs to the woman and the child. Whatever nudity Lawrence's role involves, she was an adult in her late twenties, and the film frames it within the troupe's role reversal rather than as display. The whole film inverts who holds power over the body, and that is exactly the cruelty Ferreri wanted us to feel. For more on Americans who found their best roles in European cinema, see my essay on American actors who went to European cinema.

Was Marco Ferreri a Misogynist? The Charge and the Defence

Category: misogyny debate, criticism, editorial

Was Marco Ferreri a misogynist? Critics accused him of it for decades, pointing to bodies served like food and women used as objects. Defenders, including his actresses, read the same films as attacks on the male. Ferreri himself said: "I am half misogynist and half feminist."

The Charge

The accusation followed Ferreri throughout his career, along with charges of obscenity and "gastric pornography". The Italian critical site CineCriticaWeb lists "misogynist" among the labels that stuck to him, next to "provocateur" and "moralist". MYmovies dates the "regressive misogyny" of his work to Chiedo asilo (1979). Abroad, Janet Maslin of the New York Times called Tales of Ordinary Madness a blend of "pretension and pornography". At Cannes in 1973, Claude-Marie Trémois of Télérama wrote that La Grande Bouffe blasphemed "man" and sanctified excrement. Writing in Apollo for the film's 50th anniversary, Thomas Marks found its "sexual contempt" more unnerving today, given "Ferreri's methods of working with female actors". That was a reference to his insisting that Andréa Ferréol gain 25 kilos for the role.

In the films themselves, women are often reduced to bodies: Maria exhibited as "the ape woman", Andréa served like a final course, Valérie photographed and possessed. In Bye Bye Monkey the feminist troupe rapes Lafayette as part of a role reversal that Ferreri never resolves. I found plenty of hostile reviews, but no record of an organised feminist protest against a specific film.

The Defence

The defenders begin with the endings. In The Last Woman the man castrates himself, in Bye Bye Monkey he dies and only the woman and child survive, and in La Grande Bouffe the men die while Andréa survives them all. Sentieri Selvaggi sums it up: "as usual in Ferreri, the woman ends up proving her superiority." FilmTV writes that he made Muti the symbol of a vital femininity set against an "unsaveable, phallocentric" male. The journal Allegoria describes his treatment of the sexes as "strongly influenced by the feminist struggles" of the period. In the 1980s he co-wrote Storia di Piera (1983) and The Future Is Woman (1984) with Dacia Maraini and Piera Degli Esposti.

What His Actresses Said

The actresses' memories are mixed and personal. Ferréol gained the weight under medical supervision. Ferreri later told her she "understood nothing" because "I created you fat and you got thin", and it took her four years to lose twenty kilos. Yet she thanks him for opening the doors of European cinema to her. Muti remembers that they first spoke only through his assistant, and that he later became "perhaps the most tender" of her masters. Gail Lawrence called him "a madman", but "very creative". I found no comparable accounts from Hanna Schygulla or Annie Girardot.

Where I Stand

I see Ferreri as an avant-garde filmmaker, in the same provocative tradition as Tinto Brass, and I am well aware of the accusation of misogyny that has followed both. [SHERIF: add a firmer personal verdict here if wanted] For how I approached the same question with Brass, see my article on Tinto Brass's portrayal of women and its reception.

La Carne, Censorship and the Golden Bear: Ferreri's Last Years

Category: La carne, Berlin, censorship, personal experience

What happened in Ferreri's last years? In 1991 he won the Golden Bear in Berlin for La casa del sorriso, a love story set in an old people's home, and took La carne (The Flesh), with Francesca Dellera, to Cannes. He made two more films before his death in Paris on 9 May 1997.

La casa del sorriso: The 1991 Golden Bear

In La casa del sorriso (The House of Smiles), Ingrid Thulin, the great actress of Bergman's films, plays Adelina, a former "Miss Smile" who lives in a care home in Romagna. She falls in love with Andrea (Dado Ruspoli), an old guitar teacher, and the other residents and the staff find their passion embarrassing and disapprove. Ferreri, then in his sixties, filmed desire in old age with tenderness. The film won the Golden Bear at the 41st Berlinale in February 1991. It is one of only a handful of Italian films ever to win it.

La carne (1991): Love, Then the Refrigerator

In La carne, Sergio Castellitto plays Paolo, a separated father of two who plays piano in a friend's nightclub and longs to relive the ecstasy of his First Communion. He meets Francesca (Dellera), who is drifting after an abortion and a stay with an Indian guru. They shut themselves into his beach house south of Rome and do little but eat and make love. When she plans to leave, he kills her, cuts up her body, keeps it in the refrigerator and eats it piece by piece. It is Ferreri's last and most literal union of sex and consumption, the logic of La Grande Bouffe taken to its end.

Dellera, born on 2 October 1965, was 25 when the film was released, and she had begun her film career in Tinto Brass's Capriccio. Ferreri said she had "the most beautiful skin in Italian cinema", and much of the film is built around her nude body, presented as the object of Paolo's hunger. The critic Tullio Kezich wrote that she was so at ease before the camera that "when she is dressed she seems nude, and when she is nude she seems dressed". That is the film's trap. The camera shares Paolo's devouring gaze, and the ending makes that gaze literal. You can read it as Ferreri's critique of male desire or as one more display of a woman's body; the film supports both readings. It competed at Cannes in May 1991 and made Dellera famous in France.

The Last Films and Death in Paris

Diario di un vizio (1993), with Jerry Calà and Sabrina Ferilli, competed in Berlin. Ferreri's farewell, Nitrato d'argento (1996), was a collage of film history about the death of cinema in public cinemas, and it screened as a special event at Venice. He died of a heart attack in Paris on 9 May 1997, two days before his 69th birthday. He is buried in Rome's Verano cemetery.

«اللحم البشري» in Cairo: The Film I Waited For

I was one of those Cairo cinephiles who saved all year to see 20 or 30 films at the festival. One year [SHERIF: year, 1991 or 1992] the programme listed La carne as «اللحم البشري», "Human Flesh". I still hear a fellow filmgoer asking for it: «أنا هنا عاوز أشوف اللحم البشري» ("I'm here to see Human Flesh"). As I remember it, the film was announced but never shown, and I suspect censorship. I finally saw it later on Berlusconi's satellite channels. For more on the cinema ties between the two countries, see my piece on cinema between Italy and Egypt.

Ferreri, Pasolini and Tinto Brass: Three Italian Provocateurs Compared

Category: comparison, Italian cinema, censorship

How does Marco Ferreri compare with Pasolini and Tinto Brass? All three used the body, sex and food to provoke, and all three fought Italian censors. Pasolini made the body sacred and political, Brass celebrated pleasure and the female body, and Ferreri staged the end of the male with a nihilist's laugh.

Shared Ground: Bodies, Appetite and the Censors

The links are real. Ferreri acted for Pasolini in Porcile (1969), as a grotesque character. Four years later, the ORTF report from Cannes called La Grande Bouffe "beyond the Rabelaisian or Pasolinian". Pasolini's Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), adapted from Sade, opened in Milan on 10 January 1976, two months after his murder. It was seized three days later on complaints of obscenity, and a court cleared the full version only in 1978. Brass's Caligula was seized across Italy in November 1979, six days after its release. Its producer was convicted at first instance, and although the verdict was overturned in 1980, the court still ordered the prints destroyed. Ferreri had faced the same treatment: L'ape regina was heavily cut in 1963, and La Grande Bouffe was seized in Catania in 1973. Francesca Dellera links Brass and Ferreri directly. She began in Brass's Capriccio (1987) and became famous in Ferreri's La carne (1991). I found no sourced comment by Pasolini on Ferreri's films.

The Differences

Pasolini was a Marxist poet who filmed bodies as either sacred (the peasants of his Trilogy of Life) or degraded by power (Salò). Brass, from Salon Kitty (1976) to La chiave (1983) and Paprika (1991), treats sex as liberation and the female body as the centre of the frame. Ferreri does neither. His men eat, copulate and die out of boredom, and his women outlive them. Where Pasolini indicts power and Brass celebrates pleasure, Ferreri laughs at the death of a species.

	Ferreri	Pasolini	Brass
Key films	Dillinger Is Dead, La Grande Bouffe, The Last Woman, La carne	Accattone, The Gospel According to St. Matthew, Porcile, Salò	Salon Kitty, Caligula, La chiave, Paprika
View of the body	A consuming machine headed for death	Sacred, or crushed by power	A source of pleasure and freedom
Women	Survivors who outlast the male	Mothers, peasants, victims	Desiring subjects, but filmed as spectacle
Censorship	L'ape regina cut; La Grande Bouffe seized in Catania	Salò seized in 1976, cleared in 1978	Caligula seized in 1979, prints destroyed
Legacy	Golden Bear 1991; prophet of consumer collapse	Poet-martyr of Italian cinema	Master of Italian erotic cinema

Where I Place Ferreri

I see Ferreri's work as avant-garde, comparable to Tinto Brass. [SHERIF: add your view on Pasolini's place in this comparison, if wanted] For one of the actresses who embodied Brass's erotic cinema, see my portrait of Stefania Sandrelli, the star of La chiave.

Salò and La Grande Bouffe: Two Readings of Sade

Both films shut four powerful men inside a villa. In La Grande Bouffe (1973), a judge, a pilot, a chef and a TV producer eat themselves to death in a house near Paris, and critics have called it Sade's 120 Days of Sodom with food in place of sex. Pasolini adapted Sade directly in Salò (1975). He moved the story to the fascist Republic of Salò in 1944, where a duke, a bishop, a magistrate and a president hold young captives in a villa and subject them to sexual violence, coprophagia and torture. For Ferreri the closed world destroys only the men who chose it. Their excess is suicide, and the feast is a farce. For Pasolini the villa is a machine of fascist power, and the victims are others. One is a comedy of consumption, the other an indictment of consumption as domination.

Conclusion: Marco Ferreri, the Last Provocateur

Category: conclusion, personal experience

Marco Ferreri spent forty years serving audiences what they did not want to eat. There was a woman sold as an ape, a man who paints a revolver with polka dots and kills his wife, four stars feasting themselves to death, a husband with an electric knife, a chimpanzee eaten by rats, and a lover in a refrigerator. Cannes booed him, Italian prosecutors seized his films and critics called him a misogynist. Berlin gave him a Golden Bear. He described himself as "half misogynist and half feminist", and his films still refuse to settle the question.

I came to him the long way. In Cairo I read about him in the French and American editions of Premiere. I waited at the festival for La carne, listed as «اللحم البشري», a film I remember as announced but never shown. I have long remembered a clip in which he told his critics something like "I hate you too", though I have never found it in the archives. Years later I watched Ornella Muti, his great actress, unable to eat at the Manial Palace reception when the Egyptian media rushed the buffet, saying "mangia, mangia". To me Ferreri is avant-garde, in the same provocative line as Tinto Brass, and I know the accusations that follow them both. [SHERIF: optional closing line]

FAQ: Marco Ferreri

Who was Marco Ferreri?

Marco Ferreri (1928–1997) was an Italian director, born in Milan, who began in Spain with the writer Rafael Azcona and became one of European cinema's great provocateurs. He is best known for La Grande Bouffe (1973), Dillinger Is Dead (1969) and The Last Woman (1976). He died in Paris on 9 May 1997.

What is La Grande Bouffe about?

La Grande Bouffe (1973) follows four friends, played by Marcello Mastroianni, Ugo Tognazzi, Michel Piccoli and Philippe Noiret under their own first names, who shut themselves in a villa to eat themselves to death. The film satirises consumer society and bourgeois decadence.

Why was La Grande Bouffe so controversial at Cannes?

At its Cannes screening on 21 May 1973 La Grande Bouffe was booed and whistled. The jury president, Ingrid Bergman, called it one of the festival's most sordid and vulgar films, and France's culture minister demanded explanations. It still shared the FIPRESCI critics' prize with The Mother and the Whore.

Did Marco Ferreri win at Venice?

Yes, but not the Golden Lion. Marco Ferreri's El cochecito won the FIPRESCI critics' prize at the 1960 Venice Film Festival. His biggest juried prize was the Golden Bear in Berlin in 1991 for La casa del sorriso, and he won a Silver Bear in 1980 for Chiedo asilo.

Which Marco Ferreri films starred Ornella Muti?

Ornella Muti made three films with Marco Ferreri: The Last Woman (1976) with Gérard Depardieu, Tales of Ordinary Madness (1981) with Ben Gazzara, in which she plays Cass, and The Future Is Woman (1984) with Hanna Schygulla.

What does Ciao maschio mean?

Ciao maschio means "Goodbye, male". It is the Italian title of Bye Bye Monkey (1978), in which Gérard Depardieu raises a baby chimpanzee found beside a dead King Kong in a ruined New York. It shared the Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes in 1978.

What is La carne about?

La carne (The Flesh, 1991) stars Sergio Castellitto as a pianist who shuts himself in a beach house with Francesca Dellera's Francesca. When she plans to leave, he kills her and eats her. It competed at Cannes in 1991.

Was Marco Ferreri a misogynist?

Critics often accused Marco Ferreri of misogyny, while defenders read his films as attacks on the male, whose characters die or mutilate themselves while the women survive. Ferreri described himself as "half misogynist and half feminist".