(Anthem Art and Culture), by Gary Morris (Editor), Bert Cardullo (Introduction), Jonathan Rosenbaum (Foreword). London and New York: Anthem Press, 2009.
— David Hudson, IFC.com
Amongst the varied responses to the film (including Bunuel's "an hedonistic monument"), Pasolini's focuses on the representation within space of these four bodies, "caught up in a synthesis of daily and regular habits that characterize the four bodies depriving them of our comprehension, fastening them in the ontological hallucinatory corporeal existence."
1 After all, the same hallucination is found in the Baconian naked bodies of Last Tango in Paris, considered by Cahiers du Cinema along with La Grande Bouffe and La Maman et la Putain as being part of a trilogy on corporeal abjection. Paul's sperm (Last Tango in Paris), Gilberte's menstrual blood (La Maman et la Putain), and the excrements of Ferreri's quartet constitute a secret part of something existing only as a threshold between inside and outside. A kind of sheath moved by alternated urges in dialectical relation between empty (sex) and full (food) that words are not always able to sublimate. There is neither seduction in Ferreri's excretions nor a critical purpose: they are mere organic functions. The perturbation realm is reached through the representation of the "non-familiar" as the "familiar," the internal body as the outside, the shit as the skin. The four, divided faces of the same alienated male, are almost always dressed, but we can hear their wombs' voices. Only Andrea is filmed naked, as a projection of a primeval and non-historical sexuality, covered in blue that, being the absence's color, is everpresent in the nocturnal external views of the villa. The male sexuality, reduced to impotence (Marcello), to indifference (Michel), or to regression (Philippe), appears then as the consequence of the feminization of the body, warped in the "confusion" between mouth and vagina: to eat not in order to nurture the organism, but to be possessed and fecundated in a sort of deadly fermentation.
Reality tending to the simulacrum, as we can see again in Peter Greenaway's homage to La Grande Bouffe, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and His Lover (1989), where the British director reflects upon the rite of an ancestral urge like hunger, castrated by a set of codes and rules polluting the aesthetic categories, transforming the monstrosity into beauty. What is missing from Greenaway's glacial humor is the desperate smell of death and most importantly the void that permeates Ferreri's film.
1. Cinema Nuovo, no. 231, August-September 1974.
2. Jean Baudrillard, The Consumerist Society: Myths and Structures (London: Sage Press, 1998).
The Celluloid Liberation Front
The aim of the following lines is to explain the defection from my proper name in favour of a multiple name (Celluloid Liberation Front); such defection is in my opinion an essential move in order to free my actions from the dissuasive strategies of the dominant cultural codes.
It is not a subversive proposition but a historical necessity since the epoch of the kings' names is superseded by the (current) epoch of the Hollywood stars' names whose outcome is the simulacrum, which is by definition self-referential.
If the proposition is not subversive, it is likely that the practices aimed at its attainment will have to be subversive. We have to be able to conceive history deprived of proper names, history made of persons not of names, of humanity not of men. After all, identity is something that defines itself in relation with something different than the self, in modern times is measured in relation with the institutional domain of the state. Today we are witnessing the de-institutionalization (which is the proliferation of mutant institutions) of power therefore the single identity is not apt to this new multifaceted situation anymore. The multiple name, does not deny subjectivity . . . on the contrary it acknowledges its manifoldness.
Rather than identity, we should talk about a constellation of identities that, facing the pervading cultural invasion, grants itself the possibility of assuming different roles within the same scenario, thus catching the enemy unprepared. If in the past it was possible to express oneself via a single identity, it was because the communication mode was mainly vis-à-vis, one to one. The digitalization of communication implies that the (varied) agents of communication define the communicative space, which presents several poles superseding the traditional dichotomy producer-consumer.
Since I am a source of information, I can continuously modify the cultural space surrounding me, interacting with multiple interlocutors who will accordingly interpret my signifying inputs.
There are new communicative possibilities. To assume the multiple name is to access the different spheres of communication, hence diversifying the cultural struggle tactics. The proper name is the heirloom of a centralized society that no longer exists.
I want to communicate, not to be communicated!
Almost all the current cultural production is nothing but (and could not be otherwise) intertextuality, a synthesis of different cultural products, and it would be pretentious to claim to be the Author of something. We cannot say we are the authors of anything because we are the authors of everything. I have not used my proper name, but I did use my multiple name that acknowledges the cultural background — which is of a collective nature — influencing my cultural contribution to history.
The dominant system imposed me a proper name which I expropriated reclaiming my identity back in the form of . . . Celluloid Liberation Front . . .
