Pierre Clémenti Series Screening at the Museum of Modern Art Oct. 13-31

Pierre Clémenti’s magnetic screen presence captured the imagination of countless moviegoers during the cultural heyday of the 1960s and ’70s. His roles are as unforgettable as they are varied, brushing up against the sacred and the profane in characters often adapted from mythology, literature, theater, and religion. Angel, demon, hippie, rebel, poet: a child of 1960s counterculture, Clémenti played—and was—all of them. Behind his striking physical performances, which bore the imprint of Antonin Artaud, Lettrist cinema, and the Living Theater, was an ardent, lifelong commitment to creative freedom. Clémenti was a darling of cinematic auteurs (Luis Buñuel, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Pier Paolo Pasolini among them) who nevertheless shunned a traditional path. As an actor, he was uncompromising, choosing independent and iconoclastic roles over studio projects at every turn, which he pursued passionately alongside poetry, theater, radio plays, and films of his own.

Included in the series are Philippe Garrel’s 1969 LE LIT DE LA VIERGE (THE VIRGIN’S BED) and Peter Emmanuel Goldman’s 1968 ROUE DE CENDRES (WHEEL OF ASHES), both distributed by Gartenberg Media.

Click here for information about the screening as part of the series To Save and Project: The 18th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation