‘Marco Ferreri was the wild man of Italian cinema, a figure just sporadically appreciated during his career, and one who left many films in need of rediscovery (or simply discovery) since his death in 1997. A handful found their way to international release, some stirring considerable controversy. Yet others that sound just as arresting in description were little-seen then, and seem impossible to find now.

‘One of the latter, until recently, was his 1969 Dillinger Is Dead. Unreleased in the U.S. originally, it’s finally getting exposure here four decades later via DVD issue.

‘Dillinger is both atypical and archetypal Ferreri. Its conceptional outrageousness this time comes packaged in a minimalist, day-in-the-life narrative unfolding in real time, more or less. (Using that form to critique the emptiness of a bourgeois lifestyle anticipates Chantal Akerman’s famous 1975 Jeanne Dielman. The impatient viewer might rebel at its “nothing happening” progress, and/or wonder just what the hell that was about when things suddenly do happen—ambiguously, almost arbitrarily—just before The End.

‘Like Antonioni and Fellini, Ferreri’s great subject was modern man’s dislocation from the “push-button” modern world, his attempt to find meaning and his own relevancy in it. But while those masters conveyed their point primarily through highly evolved filmmaking styles, Ferreri—while a confident stylist—got the job done via outre content.

‘Here, Michel Piccoli plays an industrial designer whose lab is doing some sort of experiment in (what else but) consumer depersonalization. He comes home to his expansive home, where everything money can buy is at hand—albeit unfulfillingly so, particularly the gorgeous younger wife who does nothing but stay in bed, complain of a headache, and sleep. (Since she’s played by Keith Richards’ then-girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, one inevitably wonders if it’s something else that keeps her nodding off.)

‘After seeing a newspaper article about legendary 1930s gangster John Dillinger, our hero finds a gun hidden away on the premises. He meticulously cleans it—while making his own dinner—then whimsically paints it. Mostly he simply passes time, messing around with the couple’s sexy maid (Annie Girardot, like Piccoli a Ferreri regular), watching home movies taken on vacation, poking a snake puppet about his zonked-out wife’s nakedness (no missing the symbolism there), listening to banal pop music, et cetera.

‘When matters abruptly take a violent course, that turn appears just as casual and free from forethought as everything prior. Yet chaos has been restored to the world and to our protagonist, who’d no doubt approve as a life philosophy the director’s later statement “My way of making movies is anarchy….I always take things to the limit.”

‘A Milanese college drop-out who drifted through various occupations before finding the movies, Marco Ferreri started directing features in late 1950s Spain, getting away with as much social criticism as he could within Franco’s dictatorship.

‘Soon he was back in Italy, then eventually dividing his time between there and France, making unlikely international co-productions whose polyglot nature was underlined by the presence of stars like Gerard Depardieu, Irene Papas, Ingrid Thulin, Christopher Lambert, Ornella Muti, Hanna Schygulla, Roberto Begnini, Ben Gazarra, Isabelle Huppert, Claudia Cardinale, Marcello Mastroianni and Ugo Tognazzi, the latter two major Ferreri staples.

‘Accused of being over-dependent on shock value, he shrugged “The shock I show is no bigger than the shock we see in daily living.” Nevertheless, Ferreri’s films were by nature guaranteed to raise hackles. The Harem (1967) had expat U.S. sexpot Carroll Baker as a woman calling all the shots in her sexual relations with three men. 1964’s The Ape Woman was a parable with Girardot as the titular hairy freak.

‘Post-apocalyptic sci-fi The Seed of Man (1969) questioned whether propagating the species was worthwhile under the shadow of global annihilation; The Audience (1971) turned the Vatican into a Kafkaesque institutional nightmare. The next year’s Liza anticipated Lina Wertmuller’s “Swept Away…” (and Madonna’s later remake) by having Deneuve and Mastroianni duke out their battle of the sexes while stranded on a desert isle.

‘Ferreri’s most notorious sucess de scandale was 1973’s Le grande bouffe, about four men (Tognazzi, Piccoli, Mastroiani, Philippe Noiret) who take up residence at a country villa with prostitutes and chefs in order to literally fuck and eat themselves to death—the last word in consumerist excess.

‘After parodying colonialism in Don’t Touch the White Woman!, he went one step even further with The Last Woman, in which the symbolic emasculation by modern society of Depardieu’s macho hero is made literal by his own application of an electric carving knife. The New York Times thought this “easier to talk about than to watch, especially on a full stomach…(yet) full of brilliance….(Ferreri) may be the most passionately wicked satirist since Jonathan Swift.”

‘The director then made two English-language excursions, 1978’s beyond-bizarre Bye Bye Monkey and 1981’s Tales of Ordinary Madness, the latter an adaptation of Charles Bukowski with some unforgettably grotesque scenes (even if Bukowski hated it).

‘His later films became increasingly difficult to see, and one suspects there were plenty more projects Ferreri could never secure the funding for.

‘Ferreri’s sensibility was antic, acidic, surreal and boisterously sexual. As a filmmaker both inextricably part of and eccentrically separate from his native country’s industry, he belongs in the rarefied company of Japan’s Oshima, France’s Blier, and former Yugoslavia’s Makavejev—semi-mainstream, variably daft visionaries wandering through the wilderness of modernity, wondering where Man fits and whether Woman will let him.’ — Dennis Harvey

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Marco Ferreri Site
Marco Ferreri @ Wikipedia
MF @ IMDb
Marco Ferreri, mister dynamite
MARCO FERRERI, DE LA FARCE À LA FABLE
MF @ MUBI
Marco Ferreri Page @ Facebook
MF @ Letterboxd
Ferreri, master of the italian grotesque
‘Marco Ferreri: Dangerous but Necessary’: Film Review
Obituary: Marco Ferreri

 

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Extras

Trailer: ‘Marco Ferreri: Dangerous But Necessary’

Marco Ferréri et Bernard Kouchner

Plateau Marco FERRERI

 

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Michel Piccoli on Marco Ferreri

LA GRANDE BOUFFE/BLOW-OUT (Marco Ferreri, 1973)
[Piccoli at the barre: weighed down by the orgy, he performs slow exercises, while whistling the film’s music, then lightly touches the costumes hung next to the barre, rubs his hands together, before rapidly hiding his face in the crook of his arm.]

MICHEL PICCOLI: It’s fantastic, the films where directors take their time; this scene has an imaginary dimension just by its length. All that is related thus in a single shot, physical and mental states, nostalgia, habits and needs, is extremely delicate and mysterious. The opposite of an anything-goes attitude, whereas at the time Ferreri was considered a political danger, a mental danger, a sexual danger […]. Blow-Out showed gestures and conditions of reunion of characters who never existed; you never heard about four men who got together to kill themselves in eating! We had fun in being the grotesque puppets of grief, in order to die in climaxing; to die with an animality, not to die of mental despair. To play to die.

Ugo, Marcello and I were close friends and of course we had read the script, but as soon as the shoot began, nobody looked at it again! We were inventing incessantly, while remaining very attentive to Ferreri, but he too was paying attention to our pranks. The take-off on Marlon Brando, for example, was suggested by Ugo; it wasn’t in the script. Ferreri had a very deep imagination, a constant anti-psychological streak. He was a man of freedom of creation and he understood that we entered into his game with a lot of pleasure.

For this scene, he certainly didn’t direct me very much. I must have imagined how this solitary being could be the master of his pain; and the final gesture, the psychological point is very certainly my invention – the take was supposed to be longer; Ferreri cut precisely on this gesture.

At the time of Blow-Out I was already well integrated into the troop. But the manner in which I met Ferreri is strange. I was shooting La chamade/Heartbeat with Alain Cavalier – he’s another whom I like enormously, and as we say, his evolution is extraordinary. Ferreri came by to have me read a few pages from Dillinger is Dead and to offer me straightaway the role, while at the time we didn’t know each other […].

Dillinger is the story of man who coming home late, finds a pistol, and instead of committing suicide as is expected, kills his wife, eats, makes love with the maid, roams around the house like lonely child and suddenly jumps into the sea and goes to live on a boat. I am in all the film, continuously. The film was shot in 1969, after the revolution, and it’s a question of the desperation of man who has “made it” who no longer knows where to go. It caused a scandal, so much ferocity on the condition of the “parvenus,” as we said at the time. Too violent, too dangerous.

Ferreri didn’t direct me for a second during the shoot; he would simply give spatial indications. It was up to me to play this solitary person, this solitude, this eternal child or this childlike rebirth of “mature” man, between despair, suicide, simple insomnia, dream. There is another character who comes close fairly close to this, a similar state of solitude and of potential violence; it’s the male character in Agnès Varda’s Les Créatures/The Creatures. Or yet again, it is perhaps close to what Godard used to say to me for Contempt, that I should be “ a character from Rio Bravo acting in a Resnais film,” somehow perfectly split between the physical and the intellectual.

Finally, I have played many loners who were both cerebral and physical. If I had the energy for it, I would write my two lives, psychoanalyze myself via the psychoanalysis of the characters whom I’ve played. That could explain why I went in this direction, why different directors employed me in an ultimately similar way […]. An introspection of myself and of the characters with whom I had a feast, to talk in a culinary way.

 

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19 of Marco Ferreri’s 35 films

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The Children (1959)
‘Four boys meet at a kiosk during a rainy afternoon. One of them must study and the other three go to the cinema, although they’re too young to see the film. Andrés works as a hotel bellman and dreams of being a bullfighter, “El Chispa” runs his father’s kiosk, Carlos is a student, and “El Negro” is a shy boy. The group of friends just wants to have fun, but reality forces them to deal with the problems of the adult world.’ — MMM

the entirety

 

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The Conjugal Bed (1963)
‘Sly portrait of a miserable marriage in the deliciously best black comedy tradition of commedia all’italiana. Ferreri’s observations about marriage or male/female relationships feel rather thin as such and they aren’t always presented in the most subtle manner but it’s the intersections between class, gender, family, social codes, and manners that make Italian comedies of the 1960s so unique. The way these films play with caricatures and subvert them, how unforgettable actors can bring types like seemingly respectable middle-class breadwinners alive in such a fresh manner and find the truthful ironies in their misfortunes. One stares in awe at how such a subgenre could ever emerge and wonders if there’s ever a real way to understand it.’ — V. Lepistö

the entirety (VO)

 

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The Ape Woman (1964)
‘One of Marco Ferreri’s earliest and most beloved films, The Ape Woman is inspired by the true story of 19th-century carnival performer Julia Pastrana. Annie Girardot gives a signature performance as “Marie the Ape Woman,” an ex-nun whose body is completely covered in black hair. She is discovered at a convent by sleazy entrepreneur Focaccia (Ugo Tognazzi), who marries her and swiftly gets her on the freak show circuit to cash in on her distinctive appearance. A freewheeling satire both hilarious and grotesque, The Ape Woman is distinguished by the irreverent wit and anarchic energy of Ferreri’s greatest work.’ — filmlinc

Trailer

 

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The Wedding March (1965)
‘Marco Ferreri’s satiric bent and his particular brand of black humor characterize this four-part film about sex and marriage. Ugo Tognazzi, a frequent collaborator of Ferreri, is the protagonist in all four episodes. In the first he plays the anxious “father” presiding over the engagement and wedding of his pedigreed dog. In the second he succumbs to his spoiled little boy, his curious mother-in-law and his bored, fastidious wife. In the third episode, shot in New York City, he is an American husband reluctant to “tell all” at an encounter session for couples who are self-consciously overcoming their inhibitions. The final segment is a chilling image of sex in a future when ideal partners are inflatable, life-sized dolls. The film had severe difficulties with the Italian censors at the time of its release.’ — bampfa

Excerpt

 

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Corrida! (1966)
‘Made for the second public service channel, this documentary represents Marco Ferreri ‘s return to Spain , with the intention of telling, the history of bullfighting from its origins to modern times. Ferreri and Malerba insert repertoire materials, photos and images shot for the occasion, and put aside the folkloristic aspects to enhance the visual impact of the story and highlight the charisma of matador historians such as Luis Miguel Dominguín and Manolete.’ — wk

the entirety (VO)

 

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Her Harem (1967)
‘Margherita enjoys a series of unashamed romantic romps with three different men. She tells her story to a homosexual male friend and a six-month-old cheetah when she is not enjoining the benefits of her harem. Her cozy arrangement is upset quickly when the men in her life get together and decide to take charge of their situation.’ — unifrance

Trailer

Carroll Baker on Ferreri’s “Harem”

 

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Break-up (1965)
‘Amazing absurdist critique of consumption, alienation and male infamtilism. Ferreri impresses with the opening sequence told in freeze frames after an appropriately noisy industrial soundscape. Mastroianni is perfect for the role of the industrial owner, fixated with the oral stage. The frenzied hedonism, the total disconnection of Italian society, are all told in fine and funny vignettes before a riveting finale.’ — dionysus67

Excerpt

the entirety (VO)

 

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Dillinger Is Dead (1969)
‘In this magnificently inscrutable late-sixties masterpiece, Marco Ferreri, one of European cinema’s most idiosyncratic auteurs, takes us through the looking glass to one seemingly routine night in the life of an Italian gas mask designer, played, in a tour de force performance, by New Wave icon Michel Piccoli. In his claustrophobic mod home, he pampers his pill-popping wife, seduces his maid, and uncovers a gun that may have once been owned by John Dillinger—and then things get even stranger. A surreal political missive about social malaise, Dillinger Is Dead (Dillinger è morto) finds absurdity in the mundane. It is a singular experience, both illogical and grandly existential.’ — The Criterion Collection

Excerpt

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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The Seed Of Man (1969)
‘The Seed of Man is a dystopic allegory about a pandemic. A plague wipes out most of Earth’s population and we are left with a pure and virginal but hippy-looking Adam-and-Eve-like couple named Dora and Cinco. The movie opens with a black and white photographic title sequence that echoes and celebrates Chris Marker’s influential 1962 post-apocalyptic short film La Jetėe. This is a symbolic fairytale about the global crisis in which we are sadly living now.

‘Dora is played by Anne Wiazemsky (you may recognize her as the young manically depressed ginger in Pasolini’s 1968 film Teorema and many other Nouvelle Vague films) and Cinco is played by a lesser known actor Marzio Margine. The young couple is examined by the authorities, and given anti-biotics that will protect them. Their assigned mission is to save humanity by having a child. They find a deserted house to live in near the sea. Not wanting to bring life to such a terrible world, Dora betrays her mission and refuses to give birth. A dead whale on the beach is celebrated simply for altering the landscape of the desolation and also foreshadows future ecological disaster.

‘Marco Ferreri questions the entire rationalist model of understanding reality. If life is in itself crazy, what else could it be in a post-apocalyptic world? So, although they are struggling to make their livelihood, the beautiful couple, Dora and Cinco, out of inconvenience, do not eat the last giant wheel of Parmesan cheese they find. They turn it into a cultural piece, and make room for it in the museum that they build in the house of a taxidermist who died of the plague, who is played by none other than Ferreri himself (who still can be seen moving slightly trying to give direction to Cinco’s character). Fun fact: the space flight images in Cinco’s museum are all set photos from 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick.’ — Purple

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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L’audience (1972)
‘”There’s nothing Kafkaesque. Formalities, just formalities!” Ugo Tognazzi’s police inspector shouts in the opening scenes of Marco Ferreri’s The Audience. It sets the ironic tone for Ferreri’s riff on Franz Kafka’s The Castle, featuring Italian rock star Enzo Jannacci as Amedo, a young naif whose stubborn desire to get a private audience with the pope sends him ping-ponging across the Vatican through a mess of religious and state bureaucracy.’ — Screen Slate

Excerpt

 

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La Grande bouffe (1973)
‘Of no film was it more rightly said: they don’t make them like that any more. Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe, from 1973  is on re-release. Jaded, authentically perverted, drenched in ennui, this absurdist nightmare is a locus classicus of 1970s chateau erotica. In all its seedy sophistication and degraded hedonism, it focuses not on desire but disgust. The nearest immediate comparison is possibly that episode of the Simpsons where Homer challenges trucker Red Barclay to a steak-eating contest which turns out to be fatal. There is also something here of Rabelais, De Sade and the surrealist Raymond Roussel, who believed in the subversive potential of eating the courses of a meal in the wrong order. Four middle-aged men gather for a weekend at a rambling Parisian townhouse – an airline pilot, a TV producer, a judge and a chef – and set out to treat themselves to what looks like an outrageous Roman feast, complete with fine wines and prostitutes. Actually what they want to do is eat themselves to death. Everything about this is grotesque and horrible, perhaps especially the elaborate haute cuisine of that period itself. Britain’s Fanny Cradock used to serve up continental food on TV that looked very similar. It’s a film of its time: crass and preposterous and a bit depressing but with a vinegary satirical tang, a parable for menopausal self-pity and babyish male conceit.’ — The Guardian

Trailer

Excerpt

Le scandale de “La grande bouffe” à Cannes

 

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Don’t Touch the White Woman! (1974)
‘Don’t Touch the White Woman is a prodigiously outlandish political satire which is closer to Marco Ferreri other movies than any spaghetti western ever made. It appears quite inadequate to cram this deliriously eerie work into the spaghetti western genre, best known for violent action. Spaghetti western makers often brought up political topics, but their movies never exceeded the genre’s paradigms as much as this movie does. Marco Ferreri was an Italian auteur and an enfant terrible who used to mingle absurd, grotesque and bleak constituents in his incomparably odd creations. The premise of situating the Battle of the Little Bighorn in modern Paris will prove phantasmagorically bizarre for viewers not acquainted with movies such as Ferreri’s infamous comments on the crisis of contemporary man within the capitalistic society such as La Grande Bouffe (1973) or his wonderfully conceived art-house classic Dillinger is Dead (1969).’ — Mickey13

Trailer

 

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The Last Woman (1976)
‘Marco Ferreri’ s “The Last Woman,” 1976, starring Gerard Depardieu and Ornella Mutu, made quite a splash at theaters when it was released, perhaps because male nudity wasn’t very commonplace. We had seen Joe D’allesandro strut his stuff In Paul Morrissey’s Flesh, but outside of that, there wasn’t too much celebration of male genitalia. In The Last Woman, it’s sort of an anti-celebration, a pessimistic look at the male ego and libido. I saw this twice when it first came out at a theater in San Francisco. It received an X rating and I was only 15 at the time, but back then the theater chains hadn’t yet adapted the puritanical ID check they do today. And there were a lot of independent theaters that weren’t part of bigger corporate franchises.

‘Like Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe, this is a shocker in an abstract, ambiguous vein. While his earlier film deals with boredom of the bourgeois, who attempt to eat themselves to death, this one deals with toxic, fatalistic masculinity. Depardieu plays a construction engineer whose patriarchal role (it’s all about his dick, without it he’s nothing) gets fractured from a domestic situation that severs his relationship with his his wife and infant son. The performances are excellent and Ferreri as usual is dealing with his themes in a mature, yet implied way. He doesn’t spell everything out. The ending will leave you reeling.’ — Paul Gordon

Excerpt

 

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Bye Bye Monkey (1978)
‘Never one to embrace the ordinary, Italian arthouse director Marco Ferreri went hog wild with this New York City-based oddity starring Gerard Depardieu (back in his early, more subversive years, before turning into a fat French joke). And if you thought Ferreri’s LA GRANDE BOUFFE or THE LAST WOMAN were strange, he was simply warming up for this wrongheaded vision of America. The plot alone is enough to leave your queasy, with Depardieu playing a French cad (a big stretch, eh?) who works with a troupe of half-baked radical feminists (isn’t that redundant?) who feels they can’t effectively argue against rape until they’ve actually experienced the act firsthand. Later, he runs into eccentric old fart Marcello Mastroianni, who, while roaming Lower Manhattan, stumbles across a giant (fake) ape lying dead near the Hudson at the foot of the World Trade Center (shades of Dino DeL.’s KING KONG!), with a baby chimpanzee buried in its fur. And it’s no surprise when Depardieu adopts the cute li’l hairball, since they almost look like father ‘n’ son. The plot continues to spin uncontrollably for the first two-thirds, then picks up when girlfriend Gail Lawrence gets pregnant, Gerard is left alone with his monkey, and everybody’s life descends into the crapper.’ — Steven Puchalski

Excerpt

 

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Tales of Ordinary Madness (1981)
”When Hemingway put his brains on the wall, that was style…’ drones the gutbucket poet (Gazzara) to a dozing audience in New York, before retreating home to LA among the ‘defeated, demented and damned’ to stagger through his quotidien tales of ordinary madness. A groan from the lower depths, this is adapted from the autobiography of leftover-beat poet Charles Bukowski. The problem is that Ferreri’s grip on the English language seems too infirm to inject the necessary irony into a phrase like the one above. Gazzara is fine as the grizzled soak of a poet, his snake eyes forever gloating on some distant private joke, but his portentous pronouncements would look better in subtitles. And among the various madonna/whores that people his circle of purgatory is a sloe-eyed seraph (Muti) given to such acts as closing up her vagina with a safety-pin (presumably the corollary to Depardieu carving off his own prick in The Last Woman). For all that, there is a final scene on a beach which proves that Ferreri is the equal of Antonioni when it comes to spatial beauty.’ — CPea.

Trailer

 

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I Love You (1986)
‘Michel is a bored lonely cheap-thrills-seeker. Everything changes when he finds an unusual bobble head doll in the shape of a pretty woman that can say “I love you” and falls in love with it to the point of obsession.’ — IMDb

the entirety

 

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Ya bon les blancs (1988)
‘The humanitarian aid expedition “Angeles Azules” (Blue Angels), comprising twelve Europeans and six trucks loaded with provisions to alleviate hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa, advances across the continent. As a result of the difficulties the team encounters, disorganization gradually takes over the convoy. Each of the members of the group, little by little, yield to their petty, selfish impulses: violence, power, nostalgia – The breakdown of one of the trucks forces Michele and Nadia to wait at an oasis for the arrival of spare parts. But a starving local tribe settles threateningly near them. The chief of the tribe makes a speech they don’t understand, which is followed by a macabre purification ceremony.’ — Lolafilms

Excerpt

 

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Diary of a Maniac (1993)
‘In this stylish and offbeat black comedy, Benito ( Jerry Calà) keeps a diary of his sexual fantasies and cravings. As a result of his on-again, off-again relationship with the beautiful and insatiable Luigia (Sabrina Ferilli), his thoughts along these lines have grown increasingly bizarre. For his own part, he is driven to pick up and bed women at almost every opportunity. As the fantasies recorded in his diary consume more and more of his life, and grow darker and darker, his ordinary waking life becomes flatter and duller, until he disappears altogether.’ — Letterboxd

the entirety (VO)

 

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Nitrate d’argent (1995)
‘The cinema represented one of the most important places for socializing, meeting, seduction, the place where we lived daily, where we also went to sleep, to eat, and not only during intermission. Everyone went to the movies; once installed in the room, one could feel rich, in the same way all were equal. The cinema was the ”house” where you could do everything that was forbidden on the street. We could kiss the girls, make love: the men met the women, the women the men, the men the men, the women the… In short, against a kind of earthly paradise where everything was allowed, even to dream.’ — Marco Ferreri

Trailer

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Her taste was her taste. It made her great and gave her limitations too, which is taste in a nutshell, I guess. ** Dominik, Hi!!! You’re welcome. Me too. My copy hasn’t arrived in the mail yet so I’m still awaiting. Oh, I’m nervous like I always am before readings and events, but I guess it’ll be okay. I think I’m going to read the second of the two sections called ‘The Crater’, the one near the end of the novel. I think. Ha ha, is Jason Biggs still around? I haven’t heard that name in ages. Love handing out free grams of cocaine in the 1980s, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Mine is winging my way too, but unsigned (I think). Across the street, not bad. And a giant looking cinema. I don’t suppose there are actual springs involved in that complex. BTW, my walk home from a cinema on Saturday involved some spontaneous, odd physical movements on my part that turned heads thanks to the input of your musical acumen. ** Sypha, Hi, J. Me too. Oh, right, new Nulick. I too need to cue that one up. I’ve heard of ‘Berserk’. I think I’ve even eyed it in the local manga store here. But, no, I haven’t looked inside. I’m guessing you think I could worse things? ** JM, Hey, Josiah! Maybe her Cecil B. DeMille is out there somewhere. Hope you’re doing great. ** Bill, There you go. Nice masks, yeah. I was supposed to go see the big Gaudi show at the Musee D’Orsay yesterday until I remembered it was Labor Day, which is taken very seriously by all venues of every stripe here. Today I’m off to the Pinault Collection to see re-see the Charles Ray show and newly see mini-shows and/or installations there by Roni Horn, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Dominique Gonzales Foerster. Promising. ** Steve Erickson, If they were in Eurovision last year, I must have seen them, but I’m blanking. Flute? Eek. Err, okay, I’ll cautiously approach them. Thanks. Everyone, Mr. Erickson has … ‘reviewed CRUSH for Gay City News. It’s a rather mediocre example of the queer YA teen aesthetic.’ Wow, lots of luck to your aunt. That’s exciting. Did you already characterise her novel? I’m forgetting. ** Misanthrope, Hi. Mm, I’m still gonna sit out ‘The Northman’ unless something weird happens. That director’s thing is not mine. I don’t even understand the concept of eating Mexican food without eating way too much. ** G, Hey, G! Yeah, that reading and the one I have to do tomorrow night are promo events for the novel so I have read from it. Oh, I have to get this new pamphlet of yours! I’ll figure out how to do that. Congrats! Eek, night bus. I’m scared of buses, I don’t know why. When I have to take bus, it’s like standing in the open door of a plane wearing a parachute. Aw, my weekend was pretty okay. Hoping the week follows suit. Have a divine one! ** Okay. I was nudged towards Marco Ferreri’s often terrific and less often recently celebrated films by an exchange with someone in the comments here, and I’m glad I made that move, and I hope you are too. See you tomorrow.

Quotes:

Szasz’s dark imagination – brutal scenes of cold sadism – is matched by her intimidatingly brilliant writing. Not only that, but Szasz possesses the skill to find the balance between a piece of dazzling experimental writing that is also completely readable in an addictive, page-turning way.
—Thomas Moore

Szasz’s writing reads like controlled frenzy, a limpid prose which – antithetically – contains all of the darkness and monsters we refuse to acknowledge. We might even have a genius on our grubby hands.
—Steve Finbow

 

 

A major novel of perversity and pleasure from a richly exciting new literary talent. Apparently orphaned in a foreign land engulfed by civil war, Tamara finds herself in an isolated and notoriously mismanaged home for abandoned children.

Initially unable to comprehend the local language, she attempts to communicate nonverbally, having seemingly lost the faculty of speech. Unaware of her parents’ true whereabouts – or whether in fact they are even alive – Tamara struggles to make herself understood and to survive in this alien environment where chaos reigns and brutality – or sheer indifference – unfortunately appears to be the norm.

A sinister cast of characters duly appears, including the glamorous but corrupt Director, her overbearingly sadistic partner the Doctor, not to mention the Father – a perverse cleric with a penchant for cruelty – amongst other unsavoury and remorseless individuals, all enforcing a strict hierarchy between the adults and the children (and thus the perpetrators and the victims of institutionalised violence).

Meanwhile, a number of different voices or alters jostle for psychic dominance over Tamara’s internal narrative; through various temporal shifts, rotations and leaps in chronological perspective our heroine’s journey – both geographical and psychological – is described in a disintegrating arc of obscure recollections, fragmented diary entries and increasingly obscene erotic fantasies.

Conversely, these kaleidoscopic projections, delirious daydreams and compulsive diatribes gradually accumulate to articulate a traumatised inner topography that mirrors the devasted and desolate external landscape of a perpetual war zone….

Release Date: 29/04/2022
Hardcover, 214 pages.

 

UK edition: [[[[blue cover]]]]
https://cargorecordsdirect.co.uk/collections/amphetamine-sulphate/products/audrey-szasz-zealous-immaculate

 

USA edition: [[[[green cover]]]]
https://amphetaminesulphate.bigcartel.com/product/zealousimmaculate

 

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They told me that my name is Tamara. But maybe it’s not my real name. I can’t remember anything anyway. I don’t even know where my parents are. The Director told me that my parents are dead. She told me that they were shot in the square. In the city. There was a big shooting there. The people were all lined up in the square, and the soldiers who were standing up on the balconies or lying on the roofs of the buildings fired their guns. They shot everyone in the square. Nobody could escape because the army put tanks at either end of the square so nobody could run away. They all got shot. The Director says my parents are dead but I don’t believe her. One day my parents will come and get me. The Director tells me not to worry. She says I am safe now. She says nobody will ever find me. (p.8)

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I’m basically ignorant and if possible I’d like to keep it that way — illumination is so overrated — and I heard a belt coming down, felt it instantaneously lashing my lower limbs, my thighs, my ass and I didn’t know exactly who was responsible because I was blindfolded and I’d taken too many of those tranquillisers and had too many cocktails and I was probably drooling like an imbecile — I’d been tied to a rocking horse — my tormentors often commented on the youthful innocence of my smile and contrasted it with the perversity of my behaviour — you can put a label on anything but ultimately it’s meaningless — because I am an incorrigible ant in insect time broken burning drowning in the mire of destiny — like all infamous creatures, I have done my share of questionable things — sometimes I feel something approaching shame or guilt — but in reality I have no remorse and after I’ve been particularly cruelly treated I like to examine myself using mirrors — so narcissistic right? — and then they take photographs of me — so we can all remember the contusions that blossom on my skin so brightly, like meadows of lavender in Provence or jacaranda petals inundating the streets of Bulawayo, like a storm of violet confetti — of course they’re precious to me these days, particularly the marks given to me by those whom I love or despise the most and I must like emotionally unavailable people because I scorn intimacy and I have certain needs that must be fulfilled, and I have to select my tormentors carefully just like a designer ponders over their fabrics — yes, I maintain strict criteria and I can’t allow myself to become enslaved to just anyone — not that it would even be possible to give myself away so easily because I have such contempt in my heart for most people — virgo fidelis, my dream childhood, conjuring up images of pink-kneed, dewy-eyed girls trampling wildflowers, across the emerald expanse of lush meadows free from landmines or camouflaged snipers — sinking into cement-grey quicksand — adolescent romance smothered in multiple layers of contaminated sediment — buried beneath various levels of so-called original sin — easing into self-recrimination, day after day — climaxing occasionally — groping soundlessly in the direction of a forgotten sun — and I tell myself that my life ought to have been a bed of roses — on the surface of things — that superficial layer of ice which obscures the depths beneath — I guess it could have been — and it could be yet, in theory — if I could just turn things around — I’m still young, reasonably intelligent, and if I could be bothered, I could probably make something of myself — but anxiety — inexplicably — seizes me, grips my little heart in a vice of trepidation and obscure longing, like a sadistic woman clutching my skinny wrists with her firm hands, clamping them behind my back, or twisting my arms painfully at the elbow, and putting me over her knee, as though I’m still a recalcitrant pupil, an infernal bad girl, who has committed some minor infraction — and naturally, she then goes on to lift my skirt, pull down my tiny black knickers, and having composed herself — I’m wriggling, probably, like a piglet — begins to spank me with unexpected zeal — and if it seems like she’s done this before, it’s because she has — and apparently she likes injured ballerinas, Eastern European waifs, and selective-mute know-it-all brats with black eyes — of course if they happen to look slightly young for their age, it’s a bonus…. (pp.57-59)

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You would love to tie me spreadeagled on the classroom floor and repeatedly stamp on me until you’ve broken my ribs. You call me ugly, hideous, paint freckles on my face, take me to the dentist and pay him to fix totally unnecessary and unsightly metal braces to my upper teeth that hurt my gums and make me look like I’m twelve years old. Barely literate teenagers, predictably outraged by the provocation that my altered appearance represents, mock me mercilessly and pelt me with KFC whilst subjecting me to a tirade of barely comprehensible verbal abuse. They drag me into the road and I am run over by a big yellow school bus. Then I lie in hospital with my jaw wired shut so I can’t speak and my limbs in plaster. Luckily someone has thoughtfully painted rainbows and butterflies on the walls in an attempt to cheer me up during my convalescence. (p.62)

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I hate you. I hate you. Why don’t you love me? You think I can’t give you what you want? You think I can’t turn anyone on? I could go out into the street and get torn to shreds by eighty soldiers in one afternoon. I could have them booting my lifeless little corpse around a crater that used to be a supermarket car park, hoofing me into the trash like a deflated beach ball. I could have them crucifying me with a nail-gun in the gutted remains of the National Museum. All I know is suffering — hate and death. That’s all I understand now. It’s my heritage. My birthright. Our collective legacy. Distilled brutality. I enjoy my punishment. I am a filthy little cunt. I don’t know any better. Look at me you filthy whore. Looking at my crushed and crippled hand? You think that’s fucking funny? Maybe a tank should flatten your car when you’re in it, attempting to traverse a junction. Maybe you get shot right through the skull as your engine idles at an army checkpoint. Maybe you get cut down in a terrorist attack and your body and head are shredded by white-hot shrapnel but you survive it all. I really don’t care. (pp.113-14)

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My name is Minnie Mouse. I squeak incessantly like a little rodent. God told me to gas you then skin your corpse. Your skin so soft, so luxurious. I’d look good as a lampshade. Light of my life. Fire in my groin. Put it inside me. I want to feel it. I need to lose gracefully, like a good sport. I need to step aside. I need a pump-action shotgun and a shopping mall full of unwilling victims. I need a shot of rhythm and blues. Just give me some of that rock and roll music, any old way you choose it. If you wanna dance with me. Takes two to tango. Takes one to know one. One of a kind. One in a million. A million mouths sucking your tits. A thousand fingers flicking my switch. Milk it. Buy it. Love it. Own it. Bought and sold. Used and abused. First hand, second hand, handouts, left hanging, hung out to dry, lay it on the line, somewhere along the line, line them up, knock them down, knock them dead, knock it off, knock some sense into them, a senseless killing, mindless violence, an act of cowardice, a sickening stunt, creaming your pants, egg on your face, scream like a baby, throw your toys out of the pram, eight days a week, in roller-skates, like a pretentious piece of shit. I am stupid and I know it. I am an irredeemably tedious cunt. I am a brat. Just beat me to death with a baseball bat. I would enjoy it. It’s what I want. That would be paradise. I masturbate thinking about it. But I can’t even get close to coming. Nothing will take me all the way anymore. I go to the old people’s home. It stinks of ammonia and excrement. I roll around in their unwashed beds and sniff their linen. It makes me gag and retch and I masturbate hopelessly for hours in futile search of an ever- elusive climax whilst manipulative power-hungry nurses pull on rubber gloves and massage my slender limbs and pour castor oil down my throat until I heave and vomit. It is revolting, idiotic, disgusting, depraved yet utterly banal. I begin to drown in my own sick. I indulge each of my otiose fantasies. I wish the nurse would tie me up so tightly my blood circulation is cut off and then smash a vase over my head and suffocate me with duct tape and a pillow filled with Canadian goose feathers. I wish a mortar shell would land on this building. I wish for air force drones to bomb this town repeatedly for days on end until there is nothing left except a vast lifeless wasteland. A cratered moonscape. I wish for walls of fire to consume this yokel country. I wish a phalanx of marauding cyborgs would stroll through the towns and villages executing any living creature their sensors detect. I hate everyone but I hate myself most of all. I vouch for no one. (pp.131-32)

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Audrey Szasz (aka Zutka) is a London-based writer. She is the author of two novels; Zealous Immaculate (2022) and Tears of a Komsomol Girl (2020) plus two novellas, Invisibility: A Manifesto (2020) and A-Z of Robomasochism (2022) published by Amphetamine Sulphate and Infinity Land Press respectively.

 

LINKS:

Instagram: @szasz_audrey
https://audreyszasz.com/

Audrey Szasz performing at Prague Microfestival 2021

Audrey Szasz ‘Agent Erdely’ on Nearest Truth
https://nearesttruth.com/episodes/ep-199-audrey-szasz-agent-erdely/

Audrey Szasz on Anechoic Chamber:
https://soundcloud.com/thomas_bey_william_bailey/anechoic-chamber-episode-17-audrey-szasz

Interview with Adam Lehrer, Safety Propaganda
https://safetypropaganda.substack.com/p/safety-propagandist-10-audrey-szasz?s=r

Audrey Szasz on Wake Island:
https://anchor.fm/wake-island/episodes/Audrey-Szasz—Tears-of-a-Komsomol-Girl-erk1n6

Tears of a Komsomol Girl review by KDbooks:

 

 

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p.s. Hey. This weekend the blog adorns its red carpet costume on behalf of the brand new novel by master of wordage’s ceremony Audrey Szasz as inserted into the world by new lit’s powerhouse influencer Amphetamine Sulphate. Please spend your local weekend portion checking out the book and its inculpatory evidence. Thanks, and thank you to Audrey for putting together this aperitif! ** _Black_Acrylic, That is a nice phrase. And you’ve come to the rescue of my weekend yet again! Everyone, It’s Xmas in April for your ears courtesy of maestro _Black_Acrylic a la … ‘The new episode of Play Therapy is online here via Tak Tent Radio! Ben ‘Jack Your Body’ Robinson delivers Italo melancholia, Belgian Post-Punk and some new Dancehall experimentalism.’ Whoop whoop! ** David Ehrenstein, I need to read that Adler/Kael piece. This weekend somehow. I wonder if having been wedded to Broughton, one of the worst American experimental filmmakers IMO, had to do with her back turning on the field? ** Misanthrope, Hey! I wondered why I didn’t see on your ‘big’ day. Thanks from the future, buddy. Flit used to be on Facebook, I remember, but, yeah, no sign of him in a very long time. I don’t think I ever knew what his real name was, though, so maybe he’s still around there? The Mexican restaurant portion of your weekend is the highpoint from afar. I hope the whole thing is a blast, man. ** T. J., Oh, now that’s interesting. Rosselini scuttering Duras’s award is somehow hilarious. No, I mean, Kael was very interesting, for sure, and a very good writer. I was an Andrew Sarris guy back in the day when film criticism reading people divided up into those who were Sarris people vs. the Kael contingent. Thanks a lot! ** Dominik, Hi!!! The commenters seemed kind entertainingly coked up this month. Yeah, one more bookstore event on Tuesday. No, it’s at Cahier de Colette, which is a very literary and legendary store. Kind of an honor for me to be welcomed there. Eating a cheese quesadilla is what sex should always be like. Thank you for the perfect Love. I mean, it was kind of perfect, right? Love translating the big review that ‘I Wished’ got in the French newspaper Liberation today into flawless English so I can celebrate or droop, G. ** ryanryan, Hi! No problem, man. Time is relative, ideally at least. Big and good busy on your end, nice. I’m pretty sure that with our little budget we’ll need to stick to hiring actors for our film who live a short drive from the set, but thank you! I’m the tallest in my family. People say the tallest and shortest ones are the ones fated for the most glory. Or maybe they don’t say that. I think they do. Everything is fine with me, just lots and lots of uninteresting to hear about work and worry and forward inching on the film project and seeing friends and all that stuff. I hope your guessed at a chill weekend panned out. Champagne glass style *clink”. ** Steve Erickson, It’s not impossible that the lyricist of a death metal band read that post and realised he should steal that verbiage. Let’s keep our ears peeled. I haven’t seen any Zelensky fantasising yet, which is quite odd now that you mention it. I, of course, don’t know those TV shows. ‘Vortex’ just opened here, and I’ll see it soon, possibly this weekend. I thought ‘Lux Aeterna’ was pretty much total crap. ** Brandon, Hi, Brandon. Nice to see you! Sorry about the funk. I hear you. I’m not in a funk, but I’m in one of those states where I have hair-trigger stress that’s always boiling under the surface, when it isn’t erupting, I mean. Less shitty job! Yay! So your tattoo session is also a first date? That could cut through some ice, seemingly. Should you want it to once the ‘date’ commences, of course. I hope he’s an excellent tattooist if nothing else. Happy that you got to draw and write. That’s where a funk is probably better than a stressfest. Nothing hugely new with me, just lots of film stuff inching forward. Trying to get the point where Zc and I can come to LA and start the groundwork. Mm, I’ve hardly seen anything, although this weekend I’ll see some art and probably at least one movie. If I see anything that should be passed along, I’ll let you know. I hope the inking goes as hoped and the general weekend is the perfect temperature. ** G, Hi! Oh, I’ll try to find that photo. The reading went pretty well, I think. Thanks. You had one too, no? How was yours? No events for me outside of Paris coming up that I know of. I think when I get to LA, I’ll probably do something there. Have a splendiferous weekend, pal! ** Adrian, Hi, Adrian. Good to meet you, and thanks for coming inside. Yes, very true, about the harrowing. Having been making those posts for years now and spending a lot of time on those sites looking for things, I feel pretty confident in saying that about 90% or so of what they write is pure fantasising aloud. Which doesn’t taking the harrowing out of it, but feeling relatively safe in assuming those guys are doing a big, very dark circle jerk changes how it feels to be there at least. Thanks a lot. Please feel more than free to come back anytime for any reason. ** Right. You know what you have in front of you this weekend already, so I’ll leave you to it. See you on Monday.