Marc'O's troupe effectively created the new cafe-theatre scene of the 1960s. Clementi:
"It was fantastic for us, because it gave us the opportunity to not have to wait years to perform pieces we'd worked upon. We did what all theatre people dream of: write a play, rehearse it and put it on soon after. To realise our ideas immediately. It did us so much good to be confronted with real people as spectators of our theatre. We tried to go a little further every time, but it was always from a communal standpoint . . . The troupe of Marc'O was an arc and a voyage. Five years of collective work, of initiation and invention, the same energy that nourished us all, a community of men and women who united their forces to converge to the same source, who gave entirely to the group, without being compromised by career considerations or personal success." (QMP)
"Les Idoles" and their eponymous film (Marc'O, 1968 - with André Téchiné as assistant director) was a satire on both the world of show business and its "ye-ye" celebrity wave (a kind of French answer to Swinging London and its new pop mythology), and the commercial machinations of the celebrity industry. Clémenti:
“We wanted to share our rage with the spectator so that they'd come out of their two hour voyage with a renewed energy. I hope that our energy served to make the life of our spectator clearer, to make them understand a bit better how the system functioned, how it controlled our lives, trapped us in our houses, the factories, the prisons all for the 'welfare of the nation'. By playing the idols, we refused to become them." (QMP)
The group, consisting of Ogier, Kalfon, Clémenti, the artist Daniel Pommereulle (La Collectionneuse, Rohmer, 1967, and to whom Philippe Garrel dedicated his 2005 film, Les Amants reguliers) and other burgeoning stars of French underground cinema lived and worked closely together, and were aligned in their theatre work to Beck and Malina's Living Theatre, the Italian Centro Sperimentali actors and the Situationists. The young actors were changing the face of European theatre in a way which would spill over into cinema very soon. Valerie Lagrange recalled being introduced to this new form of radical theatre: 
"They lived and travelled all together, possessed nothing and shared everything. They were the purs et durs of the counter-culture. The first play that I saw them perform was La Peste by Camus. During the show, they came down off the stage, launched forth into the audience, rolling around, spitting, contorting themselves, shouting, it was really disturbing. They were like the possessed, in a trance. Incredible! I was bewitched, suffocated by the violence that they expressed, I had never seen anything like it." 2
Margaret Clémenti, Pierre's wife, later became Lagrange's best friend, and inspired the latter's song "La Folie." In Marc'O's film, Pierre Clémenti played Charly le surineur, to Bulle Ogier's Gigi la folle, a parody France Gall and Johnny Hallyday.
Clémenti's early screen appearances exemplified the ambivalence of modern European cinema, with it's emphatic switch of 
appreciation to the work of underground filmmaking, whilst still garlanding the unstoppable grandeur of the masters of mainstream cinema. It is interesting to note that Clémenti turned down a role in the worthwhile but overblown Satyricon (Fellini, 1968) in favour of a role in Philippe Garrel's le Lit de la vierge, not just eschewing the salary and status the former would have brought him, but opting for the challenge of working with Garrel (limited production expenses, a decidely more restricted distribution, and, more importantly, a hands-off attitude on the part of the director). Clémenti recalled his audition for Satyricon, during which the director told him he had been searching for "a succession of faces, a procession of heads . . . You have pointed ears like a wolf, you mustn't hide them" (QMP). They had nonetheless planned to work together on a later project, although the occasion never materialised.
Next page: 1968
