Les bargasses. 1965. France. Directed by Marc’O. In French; no subtitles. 5 min.
An inspiration for Jacques Rivette’s L’Amour fou, Les bargasses was staged by Marc’O in 1965 at the Édouard VII, the Right Bank theater made famous by Sasha Guitry. This rare documentary footage offers a glimpse of Bulle Ogier and Pierre Clémenti performing in live experimental theater.
Les idoles. 1968. France. Written and directed by Marc’O. With Bulle Ogier, Pierre Clémenti, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Valérie Lagrange, Michèle Moretti. DCP courtesy Luna Park Films. In French; English subtitles. 105 min.
Rock musicals were all the rage in the late 1960s and ’70s, with Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell, and Grease making their sensational way from stage to screen. Les idoles is the least known of these, despite its cult following in both France and Japan. Director Marc’O impressively captures the political charge and devil-may-care exuberance of the iconoclastic production he first mounted on the Left Bank stage of his Center for Theater and Experimentation on Actor Performance, where Bulle Ogier, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Pierre Clémenti, and Bernadette Laffont learned to let loose both physically and psychologically (imagine a Lettrist-Situationist answer to New York’s Living Theater). Les idoles embodies the social violence of Paris 1968: a barbaric yawp of pop psychedelia, yé-yé (France’s riff on British and American go-go), and anticonsumerist critique involving the rise and fall of three pop stars: Clémenti as Charly the Knife (a dead ringer for Johnny Halliday), Ogier as Gigi the Mad (channeling France Gall, Sylvie Vartan, and Jacqueline Taïeb), and Kalfon as Simon the Magician (Évariste, among other trippy pseudoscientific mystics). Also unforgettable are the fantastical costumes by Jean Bouqin, legendary couturier of Bardot, Bowie, and Birkin, and sets by Laurent Gire, with noteworthy contributions by André Téchiné, Jean Eustache, artist Daniel Pommereulle, and architect-theoreticians Paul Virilio and Claude Parent.