Savage, grotesque, funny, original, disturbing. All can be used to describe his social satires. He has been called "the most ferocious satirist at work in movies" by film critic Vincent Canby. He was best known for "La grande bouffe", the film that caused a near-riot by disgusted filmgoers at Cannes before taking the International Critics' Prize. He has worked in Italy, France, Spain, and the USA, casting the finest actors in modes unlike that of any other director - letting an already surreal fable be guided by what these actors bring of themselves. The results can be bizarre, even madcap, and also touched by sadness. There is abundant nudity (male and female) and open sex in many of his films in the service of "laying bare" a bigger picture of changing, if not failing, male-female roles and relationships. Men, in particular -their gross appetites and petty quirks- are the butt, so to speak, of his often ribald, always mordant humor. In bringing to the fore the unspeakable, the forbidden, he has been called the cinema's Rabelais, but Voltaire might also be apt - as an equal-opportunity cynic, aiming his barbs at bourgeois excess and sexual taboos, male chauvinist freaks and '70s-style "women's libbers", racism, and the inherent frustrations of an overly industrialized society. He is the cinema's version of that sidewalk fanatic who tells us, "The end of the world is nigh!" No one will listen unless you call it comedy. He is the maverick Italian director Marco Ferreri.

Marco Ferreri was born in Milan, on 11 May 1928 from Michelangelo and Carla Vismara. He quickly abandoned his veterinary studies when he discovered cinema. He worked as a liquor salesman and briefly as a journalist before beginning in films as a producer of commercials. He directed commercials for the liquor board. In 1950 he promoted the production of "Cronaca di un amore / Chronicle of a Love" by Antonioni, an author for whom he had great admiration. In Milan he met Riccardo Ghione, with whom, always in 1950, moved to Rome to publish a film magazine, Documento Mensile (Monthly Document), collaborating with other famous writers and directors including Fellini, De Sica, Visconti, Moravia and Zavattini. In 1952 Ferreri was production inspector in "Il cappotta / The Overcoat" by Lattuada. In 1953, always with Ghione, he promoted the production of a movie made of short stories: "L'amore in citt / Love in the City". Zavattini joined them. The stories were directed by Risi, Lizzani, Antonioni, Fellini, Lattuada and Maselli (the latter in collaboration with Zavattini). In the same year he was executive producer of "Donne e soldati / Women and Soldiers", a strange film set in medieval times directed by the critic Antonioni Marchi and by the writer Luigi Malerba. Due to difficulties with the censorship, the film came out the next year but with poor success. In it Ferreri had also acted.
In 1956 Ferreri went to Madrid as representative of Totalscope objectives on behalf of Alfonso Sansone, who would be the producer of his first Italian movie. In Spain he met the comedy writer Rafael Azcona, with whom he was to have a long and happy collaboration from then on. Only in 1958, from one of his novels, Ferreri succeeded in realizing his first movie as a director, "El pisito / The Little Flat". Anticipating the black humor of Luis Garcia Berlanga's films, "El pisito" shows a young couple postponing their wedding until they find a flat. Out of desperation, the young man marries an aged woman, hoping for her early death. Marriage, however, revitalizes the old woman and the young couple's plans are frustrated. After some other projects, which did not go to a good end, he shot on somebody else's screenplay "Los chicos / Children" (1959), a less personal movie, which however, experienced some difficulties with the Spanish censorship and was not distributed. In 1960 he made "El cochecito / The Wheelchair", a grotesque film which became a milestone of the Spanish cinema. Buuelian black humor informs the social satire of this first masterpiece by Ferreri. Its great success at Venice Exhibition allowed Ferreri to return to Italy for "Gli adulteri / Latin Lovers", an episode in a port-manteau movie promoted by Zavattini, "Le italiane e l'amore / Italian Women and Love".

Ferreri split the rest of his career between Italy and France, producing one of the most original and disturbing bodies of work of the European art cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, a startling blend of socio-political critique (sex, consumerism, alienation), black humor and misogyny. In Italy he made a reputation for offbeat and acidic satires of contemporary life, with his early-'60s films, which centered around the crumbling institution of marriage. "Una storia moderna: l'ape regina / The Conjugal Bed" (1963), another film that experienced some difficulties with censorship, ends with Ugo Tognazzi reduced to a wheelchair by his youthful wife's sexual demands. With this film and "La donna scimmia / The Ape Woman" (1964), in which a woman whose body and face covered with hair is exploited by a two-bit showman, Ferreri obtained also the consensus of the public, in addition to that of the critics. In his next film "L'uomo dei 5 palloni" (1965) with Marcello Mastroianni, Ferreri reflected on male obsessions. The feature-length film was cut and edited by the producer Carlo Ponti to one episode and included in the movie "Oggi, domani, dopo domani / Today, Tomorrow, the Day After Tomorrow". Only in 1968 Ferreri could take back the possession of the film, shoot a couple of new scenes (one of which in color) and let it to be shown in the United States and in France (as "Break Up"), however without success.

The movie that marked a new stage in Ferreri's career and brought back to him success both from the public and from the critics was "Dillinger morto / Dillinger is Dead" (1969), in which he portrayed a fetishistic and alienated world. It is the surreal, ambiguous tale of an industrial designer, disenchanted with his wife, job and home, who polishes and fixes an old revolver, kills his mate, and escapes to Tahiti. After some films of less success, Ferreri imposed himself at an international level with "La grande bouffe / Blow-out", a movie shot in Paris in 1973. His 'scandalous' reputation rests principally on this allegory of the ravages of consumerism, in which a team of European stars (Marcello Mastroianni, Ugo Tognazzi, Philippe Noiret, Michel Piccoli) literally eat themselves to death. More precisely than Buuel's "Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie / Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie", more gently than Pasolini's "Sal", Ferreri's breakthrough international hit mixed and then exploded every metaphor for bourgeois power and stasis. In the days of Nixon, Ferreri carved up the myth of the American west with "Touche pas la femme blanche / Don't Touch the White Woman!" (1974). This was a western set in modern-day Paris, the enormous hole where Les Halles used to be serving as a desolate, dusty backdrop for the action. Ferreri reassembled the cast of "La grande bouffe" for this grand spoof. A fin-de-sicle comedy about genocide, and the man-to-man/woman indignities that lead up to the slaughter - a truly unusual film.

In the 1970s Ferreri's attention focused increasingly on changing sexual roles, culminating in "L'ultima donna / The Last Woman" (1976), where a male chauvinist factory engineer played by Grard Depardieu, in a celebrated scene, emasculated himself with an electric knife (as a response to feminism). Civilization as we know it ended a long time ago, Ferreri said sardonically in "Ciao maschio / Bye Bye Monkey" (1978), set in New York. Nothing sci-fi about it, but New York was post-apocalyptic, its apartments inhabited by rats and ruin. As in "The Last Woman" (also set amid inhuman high-rises, shopping centers and superhighways), Depardieu's Lafayette in NYC finds himself amid brave new sex roles, with only the eponymous pet monkey to train into his idea of manhood. A felled figure of King Kong found on a riverside beach said a lot about breast-beating masculinity in the post-modern age - and something about Ferreri's penchant for the bizarre, as well. In Italy, Ferreri directed "Chiedo asilo / Seeking Asylum" in 1979, with the then still little known Roberto Benigni: one of his most beautiful movies, which had however poor success with the public. Ferreri's internationalism continued with his first English-language film, "Storie di ordinaria follia / Tales of Ordinary Madness", shot in Los Angeles in 1981. Ferreri found a mirror for his biting dark humor in the hard-bitten writings and life of Charles Bukowski. The film was based on booze-loving beat poet's Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness and set in the L.A. skids Bukowski called home. There was a genuine audacity and risk-taking in this movie and its nakedness had an aesthetic force.

The 1980s saw Ferreri always very active, with films free and original, often focusing on female characters, that allowed him the collaboration of famous actresses (Ornella Muti, Hanna Schygulla, Francesca Dellera) willing to interpret with him unusual characters. However, Ferreri's films of the decade reflected the intellectual weariness both of Italy and of the director himself, who seemed to be simply pandering to an audience waiting to be provoked. "La carne / The Flesh" (1991) was a film about a man, who meets and falls in love with a beautiful and voluptuous woman, who, by some strange procedure, turns him into a paralyzed sex-slave with a permanent erection! Ferreri won, surprisingly, the Golden Bear for best picture at the 1991 Berlin Film Festival with "La casa del sorriso / The House of Smile", a tale of romance and sexual liaisons in an old folks home - one of his most personal films, which had, however, poor success with the public. The same happened with "Diario di un vizio / Diary of a Maniac" in 1993, one of his most beautiful movies which proved that Ferreri had returned to his most scathing vein. In 1990, Valencia Film Festival devoted a retrospective to him. Another acknowledgement came from Cinmathque Franaise in 1995. The same year the Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema in Pesaro organized a complete retrospective including his television works, which obtained great success, in particular with the young public, who appreciated the modernity, originality and anti-conformity of his works. Throughout his career, Ferreri believed that the cinema was the one place where people from all of life's walk could be equal and so made movies for the masses. Near the end of his life, Ferreri was deeply troubled by the death of the grand old movie houses and by the trend to make artier films for more elite audiences. He expressed his views in his final film, "Nitrato d'argento / Silver Nitrate" (1996), a retrospective of cinema that made compelling arguments for his case. It was a very personal compliment to the one hundred years of the cinema. Ferreri died of heart failure in a Paris hospital on 9 May 1997, just two days before his 70th birthday.

Marco Ferreri's films are daringly excessive, outrageous, to some even obscene. But the filmmaker does not wish to shock or startle or offend the viewer solely for effect. Rather, he wants to jar his audience into pondering his themes: the break-up of the nuclear family, the redefinition of sex roles, the alienation inherent in modern city living. He is a social critic who captures in his images a contemporary world on the edge of social chaos. Ferreri is if anything a humanist -and a pessimist- so frustrated by his perceptions of society that his art can only border on the absurd. Ferreri's films are unified in their despair for modern society. He offers no positive solutions: his characters gorge themselves to death, or deny themselves of the sexuality that is the essence of their lives.

"Society is finished. The values that once existed no longer exist. The family, the bourgeoisie -I'm talking about values, morals, economic relationships- they no longer serve a purpose. My films are reactions translated into images. The Roman Empire is over. We are entering the new Middle Ages. What interests me are moments when the world is dissolving and exploding." - Marco Ferreri