THE DEVIL IS A FRENCHMAN

Pierre Clementi has a brief but striking cameo in Luis Bunuel's 1969 film La Voie Lactee (The Milky Way) playing either the Devil or the Angel of Death, depending on how senior you think he looks with his bum fluff beard and trendy suit. In any event, he is responsible for the death of a man in a flaming car crash, simply because another man wished him ill and the forces of evil and chaos apparently hang around waiting for opportunities to do bad things. It's a weird little vignette, but then this is Bunuel, the greatest surrealist in cinema, and Clementi, an actor who always went out of his way to find interesting films to be interesting in.

REBELS = GARBAGE

Year Of The Cannibals, d. Liliana Cavali (1970)

'I Cannibali' is a film loosely based on a two thousand year old Greek text: ‘Antigone’ by Sophocles. The action takes place in a faceless but fascistic modern city state, a place where the bodies of executed ‘rebels’ block the pavements and roads, are left strewn across fields and piled up on waste ground. It is strictly forbidden to touch the bodies, let alone bury them, so the oppressed people have learned to step over them as if they were bags of rubbish. Indeed, government propaganda describes the bodies as ‘garbage’, and their decaying remains are linked to immorality, to corruption. As the slogan says: ‘rebels make you vomit’ - figuratively, literally.

Antigone (Britt Ekland, very serious) is haunted by her murdered brother’s unburied body, and teams up with a sympathetic foreigner to defy the law and move her brother’s corpse (and others) to a place of sanctity. The foreigner is called Tiresias, and is played by Pierre Clementi, an extraordinary presence in a number of outstanding films of the period. Tiresias’ symbol is the sign of the fish, a clear allusion to one of the first organised attempts to subvert an oppressive regime. With his bright eyes and scruffy little beard, Clementi played both Jesus and Satan in his career, the latter most notably in Bunuel’s ‘The Milky Way’ (1969).

Antigone and Tiresias’ rebellion is short lived, as they are quickly arrested, separated, interrogated, beaten and shuffled around various Brutalist buildings. Eventually, they are murdered and dumped on the street, but they will not stay unburied for long.

SOMETHING INSIDE

The Inner Scar, d. Philippe Garrel (1972) 

The Inner Scar is just one hour long and comprises of around twenty five shots, most of which feature German actress and singer, Nico. The film is in a number of different languages, but has no subtitles, nor does it have credits. As you may surmise, it's so arty that it hurts your head to watch it, and your ears, as Nico's speaking voice is a terrible, sickening thing: simultaneously guttural and piercing (I say this as a major fan of her singing). 

The film is basically really irritating, but it stays watchable simply because the locations are astonishingly beautiful: a desert, some salt flats, a black beach, a waterfall, an ice floe, the edge of an active volcano and a stalactite and stalagmite festooned cave. The actors stiffly superimpose themselves onto these eerie but amazing landscapes, stomping around and pausing to strike statuesque poses - in Pierre Clementi's case whilst completely naked except for a bow and a quiver of arrows.  

It's hugely and unashamedly pretentious, of course, but, then, if it's the nineteen seventies and you're a French art film director and you're NOT making hugely and unashamedly pretentious films then you need your beret knocking off.