‘One of the great faces of cinema, Pierre Clémenti was a darling of the 1960s European arthouse, often working without pay if the project appealed to him. He would create a career and star persona steeped in a revolutionary spirit, drawn to characters who would challenge the status quo and beliefs of the bourgeoisie, either as chaos agents, as in Belle de jour, or as the locus of change. His life, and career, were disrupted in 1972 by an arrest in Italy and then 17 months split between two prisons, Regina Coeli and Rebibbia, for drug possession. He wrote a memoir of his time in prison, A Few Personal Messages (1973), which has only now been translated into English by Claire Foster. It’s striking, and discouraging, to read a book published almost 50 years ago making the same points about prison abolition that’s continued to circulate now. It’s a stark and moving text, with a sharpness of language formed from anger and grief, grounded in Clémenti’s radical politics and ethos as an artist. He is always a poet, even as prison takes away his language. …
‘From the beginning Clémenti was adamant about the importance of the immediacy of art, and the rejection of more commercial avenues, eschewing offers from talent scouts. Born the illegitimate child of a maid, Clémenti’s turn to acting was entirely by chance. He spent most of his youth working odd jobs in Paris, including as a telegram delivery boy and bellhop-cum-poet. One day he was spotted in the street and asked to join a theatre troupe. He took acting classes at the Theatre du Vieux-Colombier and the Theatre National Populaire, working in cafe-theatres for the next few years with Jean-Pierre Kalfon, who spotted him initially, Marc’O, and Bulle Ogier, who’d all become life long collaborators in film and theatre. He would later write, “I always thought that in order to be an actor, one must answer to some higher order, to a rule of life and thought, a quasi-religious Asceticism,” the driving force behind his artistic choices. This quest for the sacred, would be, for him, something he would then need to share with an audience. His work as an actor was tied to various artistic communities, from the cafe-theatres to the filmmaker collective the Zanzibar Group, and the wider political upheaval of May ‘68—he flew back from Italy to France in order to film and take part in the protests—are all grounded in a desire to change the world around him, liberating the audiences from the chains of normalcy.
‘In 1967 Clémenti picked up a 16mm film and regularly began filming. The films he would make from this footage, all self-funded and made over a number of years, are a mix between diaristic and lyrical, heavily influenced by the American underground movement. They’re an exploration of how human psyches are shaped by the radically changing cityscape around them, but always return to Clémenti’s politics. Visa de censure n° X (1967) begins with a naked Clémenti coming out of a cave—the dawn of man, and later he and his wife would climb cliffs by the oceans, their naked bodies exalted by the sun. He would reuse his diaristic footage throughout his few films, of figures in the Paris underground like Tina Aumont and Nico, of his family in nature, of his own face. These films are constantly moving, superimposing the neon lights of nightlife or people on the streets of Paris onto whatever else he was filming. He would film the protests of the May ‘68 movement in The Revolution Is Only a Beginning. Let’s Continue Fighting (1968), but would juxtapose images of his family. His only feature film, In the Shadow of the Blue Rascal, made in 1986, is a sci-fi punk film about the after effects of a failed revolution. After a criminal gang is given control of the city of Necropolis to quell the revolutionaries, the ones that survive have been institutionalized and tortured with drugs. The film braids in moments from Clémenti’s life, including his arrest. He would work through this again in the 1988 short Soleil, a film specifically about his time in prison, recreating his arrest and weaving in text from his memoir. In this short he would always return to footage of his mother, son, and wife, the figures that, while imprisoned, would always ground him.
‘Due to this trajectory, Clémenti was famous, but not wealthy, and a key figure of various counter-culture movements. When he was 28 years old he was awoken the morning of July 24, 1971 by the Roman police for a charge of drug possession. He was arrested and would spend 17 months in prison, until his charges were thrown out due to insufficient evidence. He was alone in this, with no help from the French government due to his involvement with May ‘68. This incarceration in Italian prisons changed Clémenti, and his memoir non-linearly focuses on life in prison, the oppression of the State, and his own life, all now inherently linked. The book begins and ends with a direct address, first to a warden of the prison, and ending with one to a judge, asking them to experience the prisons as he did. Clémenti’s desire to undergo something transcendental and make it communal, which formed his acting career, shapes this text just as much.
‘Fascism, Clémenti writes, “takes root somewhere in the back of the brain and never leaves.” The Italian prison system at the time of his arrest grew directly from Italy’s fascist regime, with the same men working under Mussolini now police officers and judges. In Italy, prisons would function as a means of absorbing the masses of unemployed men from the south of Italy and anyone who deviates from the norm. Clémenti was initially housed in Regina Coeli, as a “preventative” detention for his charge of drug possession. In Italy the minimum sentence was two years for drug possession, the same amount for trafficking. People would spend months in prison simply for being caught smoking a joint or looking suspicious, Clémenti writes, with no idea when they would have their trial. This, he writes, was punishment for people rejecting the bourgeois society that the judges upheld. Traffickers were businessmen, which could be understood; users were a sickness that needed to be stamped out. “It wasn’t my trial being held here: it was a trial about drugs and addicts,” Clémenti wrote. He would later add, “The addict isn’t the only person being targeted; it’s through his image that all of society’s bastards, bands of outsiders, and any others who don’t conform to the norms of the moment are also targeted. And any departure from the norm is then judged and stifled.”’ — Madeleine Wall, MUBI
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Further
All of Society’s Bastards: Pierre Clémenti and “A Few Personal Messages”
Soundtracks for the Movies of Pierre Clementi
Boxset DVD & Blu-ray with the complete film works of Pierre Clémenti as a filmmaker
Pierre Clementi @ Letterboxd
PIERRE CLÉMENTI: THE UNRELEASED REELS
An Evening With Pierre Clementi
Pierre Clémenti, Rebel With a Cause
Pierre Clementi, Handsome Devil, Sacred and Profane
The Films of Pierre Clémenti
Buy ‘A Few Personal Messages’
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Extras
Soleil (1988) – Pierre Clémenti
clip of Visa de Censure n°X by Pierre Clémenti. 1967-1975
Extract from Pierre Clémenti ‘s The Revolution is Only A Beginning. Let’s Continue Fighting (1968)
In Focus: Pierre Clementi
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Conversation with Pierre Clémenti, Miklos Janscó, Glauber Rocha et Jean-Marie Straub (1970)
Pierre Clémenti: When people discover cinema, they will change, creating their own cinema.
Jean-Marie Straub: And that’s exactly why they’re not allowed to find out at the moment. Because those bastards smell good, they have a good sense of smell. And it is also because of this that it is dangerous for intellectual critics to start saying that we are making films for a minority, etc. They line themselves up with this prohibition. But when the people – I don’t like the word “masses” – discover cinema, then something will happen…
Miklos Jancsó: It’s almost the same betrayal as when intellectuals were confronted with Nazism. It is clear that the critics, the intellectuals, are on the side of…
Straub: Unconsciously. Without realizing it, they support the system by spouting the same old nonsense…
Clémenti: When people see a film, they experience a sort of identification, they are influenced by the star of the film. I think that when people start filming with their own cameras, when they point them at their families, their homes, their jobs, something will click in their heads, they will discover that in films there is nothing see …
Straub: They’ll find that everything shown in the movies is completely irrelevant, it’s just rhetoric. Rhetoric that turns into a complete void. What I call “pornography”. People are going to find that under the name of “art” it’s pornography thrown in their face, that commercial cinema is nothing but rhetoric, pornography, illusion.
Glauber Rocha: This terrorism directed against cinema is unfortunate. Unfortunately the moment when we classify a film as “artistic”. Because nobody talks about “artistic” paintings, or “artistic” novels, or poems – but they talk about “artistic” films. This is already a pejorative judgement… And contradictions end up emerging from this terrorism that has been imposed for reasons of economic interest. And then there is something even worse: the total ignorance of producers and managers. They are completely illiterate – not all of them, but 99% of them. They don’t know the basics of how things work…
Jancsó: No, that’s not it. For these people, cinema is a completely different thing. It’s power, it’s…
Clémenti: For people, cinema is what they don’t see on TV. As TV brings them what they usually find in the cinema, sooner or later they won’t move from home. They will go directly to the factory. Television will be the new divine machine that will satisfy them, that will satisfy all their desires. Cinema will disappear. It’s a possibility, because I’m sure if very smart people get hold of TV, it will become something very powerful, fabulous, colossal. When TV regains all its power, everyone, everyone who works will be taken back to their ghetto. It will alienate entire nations, people will no longer go out except to go to the factory – they will be completely alienated by a machine, which will take the place of religion, stories, big stories. I believe that the only art capable of combating this today is cinema. At least cinema as a logical extension of what is happening today.
Hartog: A lot of young people today are making films outside of industry structures. They argue that the idea of a 90 minute film is a commercial idea. They do underground movies or newsreels or things like that. Do you think this is a good direction or not?
Clémenti: When people see an underground film, they suddenly realize that they could do the same, or even better. And that’s the stimulus it takes to make them buy a small camera. These young filmmakers who spend one or two years finding the money to finish their films… A super 8 or 16mm camera allows them to make the film they want, and just for that, underground cinema is revolutionary. And underground cinema also has something positive in that it awakens something in people’s minds.
Rocha: I generally agree with Pierre, but there are two ways of seeing cinema. One as a means of expression, like literature, to which everyone has access, and the other as a profession. When cameras are as easily purchased as typewriters or pens, people will use sights and sounds to write letters. But in literature, there are those who write poems, essays, novels, plays… Me, I’m a professional.
Straub: And that’s exactly why I wanted to make my last film (Othon, 1970) in 16mm. Just to show that it’s not someone who plays this or that role in the cinema, but anyone can do it. It’s not complicated – anyone could have made a film like this.
Rocha: You absolutely have to see this film. Its very important. It’s an evolution of technology…
Straub: There was no set – we shot everything on location. The only danger of underground cinema is that it is underground cinema. There are already trusts and monopolies planning to grab hold of it, transform…
Clémenti: But it has already happened. Books are over. Books will disappear to make way for libraries of super 8 films. In America now there are super 8 cameras that develop 1000 ASA and are inflated to 35mm. So I am convinced that the film industry will completely change, and that it will expire…
Straub: It will colonize the underground…
Rocha: You can’t show an underground movie on Broadway, the same way you can’t bring a Hollywood movie to American campuses. Because the underground market is already there…
Clémenti: On all American campuses, you can show underground films.
Rocha: But, you see, it’s already a system, an industry…
Clémenti: It is an alternative society which is only at the beginning, and which attacks the system – whether it is positive or negative does not matter. So far, it’s positive…
Rocha: No, at the moment I feel like everything is against Hollywood. It’s very positive…
Clémenti: I think giants like Paramount are falling apart right now. Because of what ? Because people have made low-budget movies and made millions. The big studios don’t know what to do anymore. They are finished.
Rocha: But I feel that the crisis in American industry is only illusory, and that underneath they hold everything very well…
Clémenti: No, American cinema is screwed…until it finds, reinvents a filmic language. But under the current conditions, all the major studios are disappearing.
Straub: They’ve been screwed for five years. And it will take ten more for them to let go.
Jancsó: This is a very serious problem for us – we are always bothered by international distributors. It’s true, it’s obvious. I don’t know what we can do, something has to be done. We must destroy…
Rocha: At the end of the day, it’s a political problem.
Clémenti: At the moment I can tell you that we are making ten million copies from a single recording, and there will be…
Rocha: Next year, with the arrival on the market of cassettes, there will be a distribution system for films on the same model as books.
Clémenti: Yes, there will be such a system, but only for films to be consumed, that is to say films that have contaminated everyone, all of human nature. More and more cinema is becoming an enterprise of cretinization. Except for the cinema linked to film clubs and that sort of thing, where everything that is projected is completely useless, where the sound is not heard, where the image is painful, the copies are terrible. Why ? Because young distributors don’t have the money to make good copies or don’t believe in it. And so we will have libraries of Super 8 films, with millions of copies of each. I think it’s the end of the film industry… There have been all these revolutionary upheavals. The cinema in France is more and more alienated, in harmony with television, with the TV channels. And I have the impression that the cinema which tries to relate to people, to change their consciousness, will be put aside. The worker who wants to buy a book will buy a film. But it will be circumscribed, because society knows very well that…
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Book
Pierre Clémenti A Few Personal Messages
Small Press
‘Pierre Clémenti’s refusal to conform may have been his undoing. On July 24, 1971, Italian police raided the apartment where he was staying in Rome. As his five-year-old son, Balthazar, looked on, the actor was arrested on dubious drug charges (a possible result of his leftist politics and long-haired aesthetic) and thrown in jail without trial for 18 months. This harrowing experience became the subject of his memoir, A Few Personal Messages, which has just been expertly translated into English for the first time, by Claire Foster. The book is equal parts a manifesto and a reflection on the years leading up to his confinement; it decries the inhumanity of prisons, daring politicians, wardens, and religious leaders to create a better world. Foster’s rendition of the French is precise, tracking closely with Clémenti’s original sentences while maintaining a fluid, natural English cadence and the revolutionary power of his message. Clémenti’s is, essentially, an abolitionist narrative.’ — Hyperallegric
Excerpt
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p.s. Hey. It’s rare if not unprecedented that the blog rolls out its red carpet function twice in one week, but here’s an unmissable occasion. Today the blog helps welcome the long, long awaited English language publication of visionary filmmaker and daring-est actor Pierre Clementi’s prison journal into physical reality. Clementi is one of my great personal heroes and a total role model for other artists if there ever was one, and the book is fascinating. The blog and I hereby urge it on you. ** Charalampos Tzanakis, Hi. He also looks boring, if you ask me. I can’t recommend Paris as a destination much less place to live strongly enough. I like Lyon, yeah. I wouldn’t want to live there necessarily, but, yeah, it’s nice. As is Athens, as I recall from my one and only visit there forever ago. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Ha ha, I think your board game wins, actually. Oh, cool, happy that I magically landed on your fave. I assume you’re not actually writing a one sentence review of ‘Club Atlas’? But if so, what is/was it? Love writing a million word review of your dog, G. ** David Ehrenstein, Top of the morning to you, sir. ** Sypha, Yeah, the Warhol clouds struck me as being way too overfamiliar. Cool about the pen-and-paper Zelda role play game of your invention. Were you ever a D&D guy? I wasn’t, but, as I’m certain I’ve said before, I went to university with the guy who invented it and who was inventing at the school while he was there. ** h now j, Hi! Great to see you! My trip to LA was very productive. It sounds like yours did its job magnificently too. Me too, I hardly did anything on my trip but work, and I missed a ton of things I’d wanted to see/do. But now you’ve broken the ice. Happy day! ** _Black_Acrylic, Ha ha. Granted I’m not the most familiar Queen E person but how is it that that cloud has even the merest resemblance to her? Is it supposed to be her head, or … Wow. ** politekid, Hi, pal. I know those Goosebump games, or, rather, there’s a store here that sells rare board games, and they were on display there. In my childhood’s generation, relief board games were rather few and far between. ‘Candyland’ and ‘Snakes and Ladders’ and such. I kind of exaggerated about liking pop-ups more than normal books, but you know what I mean. I looked into doing a pop-up book once, and it looked too hard and expensive to do, sadly. But I haven’t given up. Zac and I plan to go back to LA for the next work spurt in late December. We don’t start filming until mid-March, but there’s still a lot left to do before that. I almost put a Peanuts cloud(s) in the post believe it or not. I can’t remember why I didn’t. Helluva a dream you had there. I envy it, or, wait, envy you, although your imagination and id would certainly be interesting to illustrate. I used to have a recurring nightmare as a little kid of this ghost of a dead dog raised up on its hind legs chasing me through a forest, and then, in the dream, I find a wooden shed to escape into but then the dog ghost, naturally, just floats through the wall, and I’m trapped, and then I wake up in terror. I had that dream a million times. ** Jamie, Politekid gives great comment, that is very true. But yours aren’t too shabby whatsoever either, dude. I think I would like to make a board game, come to think of it. I’m not so into my novels being adapted as films, but maybe adapted as a board game? I feel sparkly imagining it. The jet lag seems to have found the exit and is slowly leaving through it. No, I’m watching the Herzog doc today. Actually, it turns out he didn’t direct it, just produced it, which makes me think whoever assigned it made a mistake, but I will watch it. I actually love his documentaries a lot, or the ones up until, oh, the early 90s at least. Today? Mm, continual catching up on emails, Zoom film meeting, maybe a trip to the great After8 Books, maybe go see the Christian Marclay retrospective at the Pompidou if I can find someone who wants to go with me. Stuff like that. You + Friday equaled … ? Ha ha, seeing photos of current, bald Art Garfunkel makes me sad for some weird reason. Explaining why Ritz Crackers aren’t widely available for sale in France love, Dennis. ** malcolm, Hi. Yay, creating obsession is the best. Well, in most cases. What makes your one retail job fun and the other one stupid? But, yes, water under the bridge of an artist’s rich, rich life. I don’t know that Raum album. Thank you, I’ll snag it. Have the ultimate today. ** Okay. I do hope you are enjoying your visit with Pierre Clemente’s book, and I bid you a fond farewell until tomorrow.
Now available in North America 