The Passion of Pierre Clémenti: European cinema's christ-devil child 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

Bunuel cast Clémenti once more in La Voie lactée (1969), a surrealist road-trip in which he appears at the scene of a car crash, as a christ-devil claiming to have been responsible for the accident. Dressed in a high-collared white Nehru jacket and trousers, he is carrying a staff which could well have been the same one he sported so menacingly in Belle de jour. By this stage in his career, his mere presence triggered audience expectations: outlaw, diabolical, a menace to society, and beautiful. The more kinetic body language he had used in earlier roles such as Les Idoles and Partner now gave way to a more static posturing on screen. He upped the ante when, in 1969, Pasolini cast him in Porcile, in which he played a young cannibal condemned to a brutal death. He has very few lines, using achingly wanton body language to portray his visceral drive, “I slew my father, I’ve eaten the flesh of man, and I quiver with joy.”

In Philippe Garrel's black and white le Lit de la Vierge (1969, prod. Zanzibar), in which Zouzou played the roles of both Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary, Clémenti was cast as a sort of hippie Jesus Christ. Music was provided again by les Jeunes Rebelles, with a track by Nico. Clémenti plays a frail, haggard Christ unable to communicate his message to the world. For Zouzou "Pierre is beauty in its purest state: a perfect body, tall, black curly hair, black eyes with long eyelashes, high cheekbones and an irresistible smile. He often dresses in black." According to the actress, during filming in France, before they set off for Morocco, where filimg continued, Clémenti fell off a cliff by accident and miraculously landed, alive and unscathed, in the sand, rescued only after Sylvina Boissonnas had called the fire brigade. During the course of filming however, Clémenti began to unravel, and ended up being admitted into a psychiatric ward in Rome. Friends of his indicated this was after he had found out that his wife Margaret was having an affair with Garrel.

Frédéric Pardo shot an accompanying super-8 black and white and colour 30 minute silent film entitled Home Movie: On the Set of Phillipe Garrel's Le Lit de la vierge. Influenced by the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites and Casper David Friedrich, Pardo's movie is a celebratory salvo which documents the Garrel inner circle in Morocco in 1968 on the set of Le Lit. While the stars of the Garrel film were Clémenti and Zouzou, here in Pardo's behind-the-scenes keyhole it is Garrel's peripheral actors who take center stage: Pierre-Richard Bré, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Babette Lamy, and most prominently, Tina Aumont.

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