The Films of Pierre Clementi at The CCA
Oh yeah, that’s the exact art-house spot, baby!
Ever wonder what it would be like if the work of Jonas Mekas got mixed up with the work of Kenneth Anger and maybe a bit of the archive aesthetic of Bill Morrison, as well as a heavy sprinkling of politicised Godard, a dash of Chris Marker and then spiked with hallucinogenics and fired into your eyeballs at a million miles an hour all set to a thundering prog/art/rock 60s soundtrack? Then the films of Pierre Clementi are for you!
Fortunately all the above is exactly up my preening aesthete street which is why I was down the CCA last night like a velvet-clad revolutionary bullet to attend RFN Scotland 6818’s ‘The Revolution is Only The Beginning: Let’s Continue Fighting’ and it was an absolute happening, man.
Clementi was an actor who had starred in some of the most original films at the time (‘Belle De Jour’; ‘The Conformist’; ‘Pigsty’) but had also picked up a camera and began “documenting” (?) his own life and, especially, the political climate at the time. The results are images of his friends and family combined with staged theatrics and visual tricks along with footage of how society and politics were changing at the time. Oh, and then edited to with an inch of their lives to produce an utterly hypnotic effect.
And it is the pace of the editing that, for me, was the key. The static images here do the films no justice: they need to be seen in motion and dance. A lot of the “freak-out”, psycadelia of the 60s can feel dated or naive and although Clementi’s work drips that hippy naivety (which is also part of its furiously innocent charm) it doesn’t feel dated at all, instead having that spectacular energy of “anything is possible”. It’s rough and scrappy but dynamic as all hell.
The obvious parallel is Kenneth Anger except with magic and mysticism replaced with radical Left-wing politics. Yet the main difference between Clementi and Anger is in the pace of editing with many sequences of Clementi’s work exploding in dazzlingly prolonged bursts of rapid intensity which I can only describe as though Kenneth Anger had had a love child with Conlon Nancarrow. The effect is joyously overwhelming as pop-art slogans, multi-coloured filters, neon and countless other eye-popping effects and devices crash, smash, overlay, fuck (yeah, I think there’s an argument to describe that some of these images are fucking each other furiously on screen) and, generally go bonkers before our eyes.
The evening finished with Clementi’s ‘The Revolution is Only a Beginning: Let’s Continue Fighting’, his collage film of the riots in May/June 1968 with live musical accompaniment by the band Pleasure Pool and the result was that having a live band just increases the intensity levels. The band were great, although the only drawback was that it lasted just 22 minutes or so and I could’ve done with a little longer to enjoy it all but by that time of the night it had gone 11 and the ice in my tap-water had melted.
RFN Scotland 6818’s screening of Clementi’s films was an eye-opening education and if you get that chance to see any of Clementi’s work I urge you to do so. I had a blast and it’s still going on over the weekend… hence why I’m back down there this afternoon. After all, it’s only the beginning: let’s continue watching.
