The Funhouse interview: Balthazar Clementi on Pierre Clementi

Here are two excerpts from the Funhouse interview with Balthazar Clementi that explores the life and career of his father, French actor-filmmaker Pierre Clementi, best known in America for his scene-stealing roles in Bunuel’s Belle de Jour and Bertolucci’s The Conformist, as well as his starring turns in cult films like Bertolucci’s Partner, Marc’o’s Les Idoles, and Liliana Cavani’s The Year of the Cannibals. 

We covered a lot of ground in the hour in which we spoke; the result was three visually stunning Funhouse episodes that emphasized Pierre’s work as a filmmaker but also spotlighted a few of his best-loved film performances.

In this excerpt I start out mentioning the comparisons by film historians of Pierre's work to Kenneth Anger, most likely because they both used dense overlaid imagery in their films. We then discuss the in-camera process Pierre used to create those overlaid images. Balthazar maintained in a question after this that Pierre was directly influenced only by one filmmaker — his friend (whose films he appeared in), Etienne O’Leary, a Canadian who made a trio of influential short avant-garde films in France, and then stopped making films due to medical problems. (O’Leary also appeared in Clementi’s films, sealing the bond of mutual admiration.)

 

In this clip we talk about how Clementi’s life changed after his famous 1972 arrest in Italy in the early Seventies (on a trumped-up drug charge) that led to him losing a year and a half of his career while being in prison. Upon his release, he had even less interest in doing acting work for money’s sake and was known to literally give away the money he made.

The interview with Balthazar was done in conjunction with a festival of Pierre Clementi’s films at MoMA. The other tie-ins concerned the release of a limited edition “Integrale” box of Clementi’s films (containing the nine films on both Blu-ray discs and DVDs, with optional English subs; still available as of this writing) and the long-awaited English translation of Clementi’s 1970s memoir (and essay on the prison state in Italy) <i>A Few Personal Messages</i>, from the small press actually called Small Press.

The interview, which was audio-only on this occasion, was conducted in Central Park, a first for the Funhouse! Here is a pic of Balthazar and me after our talk. He was quite forthcoming in our talk (providing very personal remarks about his birth and his father's later life), for which I thank him. (Thanks also go to Ivan Galietti, for his great translation, heard on these clips.)