You may know rascally, handsome New Wave icon Michel Piccoli from his roles in such important and subversive sixties and seventies films as Contempt, Diary of a Chambermaid, and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. But you’ve never seen him command the screen as radically as he does as the lead in Marco Ferreri’s indefinable 1969 film Dillinger Is Dead. This revelation of a movie—coming to home video in the U.S. for the first time ever in a special edition Criterion DVD—features Piccoli in what is practically a one-man show. He plays a dissolute, married gas-mask manufacturer who, over the course of one increasingly bizarre night in his claustrophobic, modern home, seduces his maid, tends to his sick wife, and reminisces with some very strange home movies. To say more about where the famously provocative Ferreri takes you would spoil the film’s surreal surprises. According to a new DVD review in Slant magazine, “A rigorous and oddly zesty freak-out, Dillinger Is Dead remains a startling experience.”
As we had reported a few months ago, and confirming long rumors, the DVD is finally out. You probably know where to but it, I already have my copy. Here's the intro from the Criterion NewsLetter:
You may know rascally, handsome New Wave icon Michel Piccoli from his roles in such important and subversive sixties and seventies films as Contempt, Diary of a Chambermaid, and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. But you’ve never seen him command the screen as radically as he does as the lead in Marco Ferreri’s indefinable 1969 film Dillinger Is Dead. This revelation of a movie—coming to home video in the U.S. for the first time ever in a special edition Criterion DVD—features Piccoli in what is practically a one-man show. He plays a dissolute, married gas-mask manufacturer who, over the course of one increasingly bizarre night in his claustrophobic, modern home, seduces his maid, tends to his sick wife, and reminisces with some very strange home movies. To say more about where the famously provocative Ferreri takes you would spoil the film’s surreal surprises. According to a new DVD review in Slant magazine, “A rigorous and oddly zesty freak-out, Dillinger Is Dead remains a startling experience.”
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Another intro on Ferreri I wrote as a pitch to curate a retrospective of his work here in the USA (more on that later...)
Marco Ferreri was one of the most singlar voices of European cinema. Part of the postwar generation that originated Neorrealism and evolved it into the XX century's most important film movements, Ferreri constantly worked with the most notable film artists of his time: actors Marcello Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Michel Piccoli, production designer Dante Ferreti, creating brash and intriguing works that striked "at the exposed nerves of a society that was constantly changing." Namely, Postwar Europe and its struggle towards economic recovery and the political, social, sexual and cultural changes that came with it. One of the most provocative and whimsical auteurs to work from inside the European film industry (one of his producer include Carlo Ponti, for instance,) Ferreri left a lasting body of work that pointed directly at the future of our western societies, by exploring the evolution of the relationship between man, woman and child in an increasingly fragmented and industrialized world. -Milenko Skoknic Cool introduction to the Ferrerian universe via Dillinger is Dead. Check here for screenings near you. check out the video section of this site. New 35mm print! Thanks to Graham Swindoll for the info. LINK> A Ferreri quote I found in the Torino Film Fest site: This is absolutely fantastic news! Koch Lorber will release 8 of Ferreri's films on DVD, hopefully with a chock full of extras, those are so hard to come by. And I will finally get to see Seed of Man! She passed away on April 30th, 2008. She left behind most (if not all) of his husband's work in the Torino Museum of Cinema, under the care of Alberto Barbera, the museum's director. I hope to visit those archives one day. |