In Search of Marco Ferreri

If Marco Ferreri didn't make films there would be a black hole in cinema history.
Ferreri is likened to directors like Fassbinder or Pasolini or Bunuel and some could even cull up the name of David Lynch, but in a sense that's grasping at straws to associate one director with another because they all use elements of surrealism. One thing for certain is that if there's a cutting edge theme somebody thinks has just come out chances are that Ferreri did it long ago.
For instance Steven Soderbergh uses a porn star in his latest The Girlfriend Experience but Ferreri used Abigail Clayton opposite Gerard Depardieu in Bye Bye Monkey (1978). Bye Bye Monkey starts with Depardieu getting raped by a gang of women in his theatrical troupe. The sex is graphic and the setting is not so much post apocalyptic as future shock. The indelible image of the carcass of King Kong lying on the beach in Manhattan with the twin towers of the newly built World Trade Center is simply cinema architecture supreme. Certainly nobody could have foreseen how this image would play out over 30 years later. (continued)