Marco Ferreri: Dangerous but Necessary

Marco Ferreri (1928-97) was a satirist of everything and a proud champion of bad taste, which made his films prophetic. His classic was La Grande Bouffe (1976), a descent into gluttony, drunkenness and sexual abandon that shares a heritage with the Marquis de Sade. The title is an epithet now, but who today can name the director? In 1976, Ferreri probed the depths of male chauvinism with The Last Woman.

Given the excess of his 35 films, and their prescient topicality, Ferreri was still mostly a filmmaker for cinephiles and the occasional anarchist. Anselma dell’Olio’s portrait, more aptly titled in Italian as The Lucid Folly of Marco Ferreri, celebrates a man of rich humor and sharp intellect, who said, “The shock I show is no greater than the shock we see in daily living.''