The Harem

An agent for a liqueur company, he became involved in the cinema by making short advertising films; later he worked in the production sector and finally in the sale of cinema equipment, moving to Spain. There he met the young humorist Rafael Azcona, with whom he set up an extraordinary, lasting working relationship: the first fruits of their partnership were “El pisito” (1958), “Los chicos” (1959) and “The Little Coach (El cochecito)” (1960), the three “Spanish comedies” marked by a corrosive anti-bourgeois sarcasm. On returning to Italy, Ferreri continued his Spanish theme with “Queen Bee (L’ape regina)” (1963), an anti-Catholic satire in which the institution of matrimony is so fiercely under fire as to unleash the ire of the censor (requiring various cuts in the film and a slight change to the title). He fared no better with “The Ape Woman (La donna scimmia)” (1964), a bitter and lucid parable on the relationships between the sexes, dominated by the exploitation of the weaker sex, but the producer decided to amputate its beautiful finale. The director’s pitiless eye is found again in “Il professore”, a splendid and fierce episode of “Countersex (Controsesso)” (1964), then in the uneven anti-male chauvinist fable “Her Harem (L’harem)” (1967); but it was with “Dillinger is dead (Dillinger è morto)” (1969) the unforgettable essay on the solitude of contemporary man in capitalist society, that he produced his masterpiece. Following that, he directed dark allegories on the future (“The Seed of Man (Il seme dell’uomo)”, 1969), Kafkian fables with an anticlerical flavour (“The Audience (L’udienza), 1971, one of his best results), bizarre readings of the mythology of the West (“Touche pas à la femme blanche (Non toccare la donna bianca)”, 1974), reaching another peak with the Rabelaisian tale “La Grande Bouffe (La grande abbuffata)” (1973), which anticipates the iconoclastic fury of Pasolini’s “Salò” (1975). From then onward, Ferreri’s career continued with alternating fortunes, rarely regaining the fortunate blend of tenderness and cruelty of his best works, except perhaps only in “The last woman (L’ultima donna)” (1976) and in the late “La casa del sorriso” (1991). His farewell to a cinema that no longer exists in “Nitrato d’argento” (1996) closes, on a melancholy note, the career of this genial director who defies classification. —italica.rai.it