Dillinger Is Dead (Dillinger è morto)
Part of BAMcinematek
Fri, Feb 27 at 2, 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm
Sat, Feb 28 and Sun, Mar 1 at 6:50, 9:15pm
Mon, Mar 2—Thu, Mar 5 at 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm
Directed by Marco Ferreri
With Michel Piccoli
(1969) 90min
"Considered by enthusiasts to be his first masterpiece, nightmarish 1969 happening Dillinger is Dead could ignite Ferreri’s reputation here in a first U.S. release, but only on its own lastingly abrasive terms." –L Magazine
“In Dillinger we see the full ripeness of Ferreri’s poetics and aesthetics and at the same time a springboard towards a cinema less and less tied to the real but rather increasingly stylised and abstract.” –Vertigo Magazine
Long unavailable, this exclusive engagement of Ferreri’s masterpiece will be presented in a new 35mm print courtesy of Janus Films. Michel Piccoli stars as Glauco, an alienated industrial designer yearning to break free from his materialistic, humdrum existence. When he discovers a revolver tucked away in a kitchen cabinet one night—wrapped in old newspapers announcing the death of John Dillinger, the notorious bank robber and murderer—the gun becomes a symbol of redemption and freedom as he ritualistically sheds the vestiges of his bourgeois life. A scathing critique of middle-class values loaded with ironic, pop-art imagery—a handgun painted red with polka dots, a lawn statue wearing a gas mask—and set to a kitschy 60s AM pop soundtrack, Dillinger Is Dead is playful, powerful social commentary. In Italian with English subtitles. New print courtesy of Janus Films.
L Magazine on Dillinger is Dead
"Located historically and stylistically smack between Pasolini’s Teorema and Fassbinder and Fengler’s Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? — those other late 60s erotic and thanatotic violations of upper-middle class security — Dillinger upends a meticulously quotidian account of its comfortably situated protagonist’s unraveling with kooky and caustic surrealism, including Glauco’s childlike immersion in a cine-bath of grotesquely mundane home movies projected across his mod living room and a wall-to-wall soundtrack/commentary of psychedelic light jazz and American AM gold." More
The Village Voice on Dillinger is Dead
"...the final moments of Dillinger Is Dead can still send an audience startled and scintillated into the night." More
Time Out New York on Dillinger is Dead
"Despite, or perhaps because of, Ferreri’s singularly messy mixture of baroque and bleak, his work is rarely revived—which makes BAM’s run of the director’s 1969 entry into what Pauline Kael termed the “come-dressed-as-the-sick-soul-of-Europe parties” subgenre all the more welcome." More
Film writer Michael Atkinson on Dillinger Is Dead in BAMbill
"Existentialist anti-comedy? Symbolic consumerist quasi-satire? Absurdist non-thriller? Minimalist psychological case study?"
More
Vertigo Magazine on Dillinger Is Dead
"Ferreri’s cinema has always been a great circle where movies, characters, events, and objects return. It’s a frozen cinema where the sense of the End is imminent, but the conclusion is still out there and to come." More