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FILM / MEDIA STUDIES

Abel Ferrara
Abel Ferrara Nicole Brenez, promi-

nent film critic and cura-

Nicole Brenez
Translated from the French by Adrian Martin tor for the experimental

cinema programs at the

Cinémathèque française
“A truly remarkable achievement. Brenez does the
best job to date in defending an underappreciated in Paris, teaches cinema

American director not only in terms of aesthetics, studies at Universite Paris

but also for his ethical reflections on the crimes and I/Pantheon-Sorbonne. She
abuses of the past century.” is the author of Shadows
—Jonathan Rosenbaum de John Cassavetes and

other books.
“One of the most exciting film books I have read in
years. This essay is not only a brilliant study on Abel Adrian Martin is coeditor
Ferrara’s work, but a deep plunge into the stormy of the internet magazine
waters of film theory. In short, a masterpiece of
Rouge and the author
modern literature about more than cinema.”
of Once Upon a Time in C O N T E M P O R A R Y F I L M D I R E C T O R S
—Carlos Losilla, film critic and professor of film
America and The Mad Max
theory, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona)
Movies.

Brenez
“Where critical work on Ferrara is concerned,
Brenez has set a daunting new standard.” A volume in the series
—Brad Stevens, author of Abel Ferrara: Contemporary Film
The Moral Vision Directors, edited by
James Naremore
In this concise study, Nicole Brenez argues for Abel
Ferrara’s place in a line of grand inventors who have Cover illustration: Terry Kinney
and the shadows of the three
blurred distinctions between industry and avant- soldiers in Body Snatchers.
garde film, including Orson Welles, Monte Hellman, Photo courtesy Zone Frontiére.

and Nicholas Ray. Rather than merely reworking Cover design: Paula Newcomb

genre film, Brenez understands Ferrara’s oeuvre as

formulating new archetypes that depict the evil of
University of Illinois Press Abel Ferrara
Urbana and Chicago
the modern world. Focusing as much on the human www.press.uillinois.edu
figure as on elements of storytelling, she argues
that films such as Bad Lieutenant express this evil isbn-10: 0-252-07411-4
Nicole Brenez
ILLINOIS

isbn-13: 978-0-252-07411-0
through visionary characters struggling against
the inadmissible (inadmissible behavior, morality,
images, and narratives).
,!7IA2F2-ahebba!:t;K;k;K;k
Abel Ferrara
 Contemporary Film Directors
Edited by James Naremore

The Contemporary Film Directors series provides concise,

well-written introductions to directors from around the
world and from every level of the film industry. Its chief
aims are to broaden our awareness of important artists,
to give serious critical attention to their work, and to il-
lustrate the variety and vitality of contemporary cinema.
Contributors to the series include an array of internationally
respected critics and academics. Each volume contains
an incisive critical commentary, an informative interview
with the director, and a detailed filmography.

A list of books in the series appears

at the end of this book.
 Abel Ferrara

Nicole Brenez

Translated from the French by

Adrian Martin

Universit y
of
I lli n o i s
Pr e s s
U r bana
and
C h icago
© 2007 by Nicole Brenez
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 c p 5 4 3 2 1
∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brenez, Nicole.
[Abel Ferrara. English]
Abel Ferrara / Nicole Brenez ; translated from
the French by Adrian Martin.
p. cm. — (Contemporary film directors)
Filmography: p.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-252-03154-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-252-03154-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-13: 978-0-252-07411-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-252-07411-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Ferrara, Abel, 1951—Criticism and interpretation.
I. Title. II. Series.
pn1998.3.f465b7413   2007
791.4302'33092—dc22 [b]   2006011276
Maybe it comes from being brought up in America
and idolizing Patrick Henry and all these guys. It’s
about freedom of speech and will.
—Abel Ferrara (2002)

Give me liberty or give me death.

—Patrick Henry (1775)
 Contents

Acknowledgments | xi

a cinema of negation | 1
Some Ethical Stakes in Ferrara’s Cinema 1
What Is Passion? Central Figures of Hypermorality 22
“Going to the End of Being” 68
Self-Consciousness: The Visionaries 110
Cinema and Symbolic Reparation 150

interview: abel ferrara | 165

Filmography | 173

Bibliography | 193

Index | 199
 Acknowledgments

I warmly thank Bernard Benoliel, Emmanuel Bonin, Charles-Antoine

Bosson, Stéphane Delorme, Philippe Delvosalle, Ivora Cusak, Fergus
Daly, Agathe Dreyfus, Pierre Hecker, Alexander Horwath, Kent Jones,
Bernd Kiefer, Maria Klonaris, Solange Marcin, Gabriela Trujillo, and
Gaëlle Vidalie for their help with this book. Special thanks go to Thana’s
husband, Robert Lund.
Several parts of this book were encouraged and supported by com-
missions, some from eminent Ferrarans: Aimé Ancian (Sofa), Ray-
mond Bellour (Trafic), Alain Bergala, Carole Desbarats, David Des-
sites (Dreamlight Entertainment), Catherine Gillet (Musée du Cinéma
de Bruxelles), Danielle Hibon (Musée du Jeu de Paume), Luc Lagier
(Court-Circuit), Jean-Pierre Moussaron (Why Not?), Olivier Pierre
(l’Ecran de Saint-Denis), Muriel Thomé (Court-Circuit), Jean-Baptiste
Thoret (Simulacres), Geneviève Troussier (Café des Images), Philippe
Truffaut (Court-Circuit), and Jean-Pierre Vasseur (Opening).
This book originated in a course I taught at Université Paris I (Insti-
tut d’Art et d’Archéologie), directed by Professor Jean Gili. I fondly
thank all my friends and students who attended this course so early on
a Saturday morning; for their remarkable contributions, I would like to
acknowledge Xavier Baert, Briana Berg de Marignac, Laure Bergala,
Laurent Champoussin, Cassandra Cuman, Marc Dante, Séverin de
Lajarte, Émeric de Lastens, Vincent Deville, Jean-Marc Elsholz, Yann
Gonzalez, Florent Guézengar, Jérôme Momcilovicz, Pascal Sénequier,
Seung-hee Seo, and Vivien Villani. In this context, Adrian Martin and
Brad Stevens came—from Melbourne and London, respectively—to
offer us magnificent seminars.
Thanks to Lionel Soukaz for his crucial remarks on The Addiction,
which more than any other commentary prompted my reflections on
this film.
Without the daily support of Michelle Brenez, Pierre-Jacques
Brenez, and Titus Brenez-Michaud, I would not have been able to write
a single line of this book.
The manuscript benefited from indispensable rereadings by Ferraran
experts, whom I can never thank enough: Aïcha Bahcelioglu, Sébastien
Clerget, Stéphane du Mesnildot, Sylvain George, Pierre Gras, David
Matarasso, Alberto Pezzotta, and Louis-George Schwartz. Special thanks
to David Pellecuer for his inexhaustible kindness.
Adrian Martin—with the invaluable help of Helen Bandis and Grant
McDonald, his comrades at Rouge—strengthened the content of the
book by carefully verifying every shot and phenomenon described (as
well as finding every citation) for the English translation. Raymond
Bellour scrutinized the original manuscript with incomparabale care. I
thank them all affectionately for the time they devoted to this project
and for the rigor that is directly proportionate to their sensitivity and
intellectual generosity.
At the origin of this book, as with so many others, there was an ini-
tiative by Jonathan Rosenbaum, without whom international cinephilic
life would not be as living, fluent, and fertile as it currently is.
I warmly thank James Naremore, director of the Contemporary
Film Directors series at the University of Illinois Press, for his trust
and patience.
I dedicate this work to Brad Stevens, a true cinema historian, with
affection, gratitude, and admiration.

xii | Acknowledgments
Abel Ferrara
 A Cinema of Negation

Some Ethical Stakes in Ferrara’s Cinema

To represent is already a murder.

—Georges Bataille (1952)

American Boy, European Friends

Abel Ferrara is to cinema what Joe Strummer is to music: a poet who
justifies the existence of popular forms. Without them, the genre film or
the pop song would be no more than objects of cultural consumption.
In this material world run on injustice and terror, where “popular” is
confused with “industrial,” any cultural expression that does not hurl an
angry cry or wail a song of mad love (often one and the same) merely
collaborates in the regulation and preservation of this world. Is Ferrara,
along with Jim Jarmusch, Tsui Hark, and Kinji Fukasaku, right to (even
accidentally) redeem genre cinema? Would it not be preferable for them
to desert the dirty terrain of what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
named the “culture industry” and, like Jonas Mekas or Stan Brakhage,
invent their own territories, forms, and artistic gestures?
Ferrara’s films offer an answer. How could anyone except a melan-
cholic criminal speak to us in the name of the good (King of New York;
1990)? Who but a paranoid cop could make us believe for a second in
the virtues of forgiveness (Bad Lieutenant; 1992)? Who today could bear
to listen to a moral lesson if it was not acted out by a drug-addicted,
leprous vampire (The Addiction; 1995)? Who could interest us, even
for a moment, in the tired old questions of the family unit or the indi-
vidual? Who could continue to arouse in us a desperate faith in sacrifice
and love, unless they were almost autistic, completely crazed, haunted
figures within films that cultivate advanced arguments concerning the
need to destroy all filmic forms?
Ferrara was born on 19 July 1951 to an Italian American father (who
turned from being a bookmaker to a stockbroker) and an Irish American
mother. He is the youngest of six children, with five sisters. The Esposito
family (renamed Ferrara by Abel’s grandfather after he emigrated to the
United States) originates in Salerno, south of Naples. Ferrara studied at
the Sacred Heart Catholic School in the Bronx: “You were in, like, the
front row and there was this giant crucifix, about eight feet tall, dripping
blood.”1 In 1966, the family moved to the Peekskill district. At Lakeland
High School, Ferrara met Nicodemo Oliverio (a.k.a. Nicholas St. John)
and John Paul McIntyre. He and St. John formed a rock band, bought
an eight-millimeter camera, and made their first ten-minute short, “The
story of a kid who liked getting drunk with his friends.”2 Ferrara returned
to New York to study cinema at the State University of New York at
Purchase and made a series of very short films (one or two minutes
each) on Super 8 and sixteen-millimeter, devised as protests against the
Vietnam War. As part of his studies he spent a year in Britain, where
he participated in his first professional thirty-five-millimeter shoot for
the BBC. Then he returned to New York and reunited with St. John;
together they started writing and making films and playing music.
Ferrara’s œuvre can be read as a critical revitalization of the codes
of genre cinema. He has tackled almost every popular genre: pornog-
raphy (9 Lives of a Wet Pussy; 1976), gore (The Driller Killer; 1979),
the rape-revenge movie (Ms .45, a.k.a. Angel of Vengeance; 1981), the
thriller and film noir (Fear City, 1984; China Girl, 1987; King of New

 | Abel Ferrara
York, and Bad Lieutenant), the television cop series (two episodes of
Miami Vice, 1985; The Gladiator, 1986; and Crime Story, 1986), science
fiction (Body Snatchers, 1993; New Rose Hotel, 1998), fantasy-horror
(The Addiction; 1995), the film-within-a-film (Dangerous Game, a.k.a.
Snake Eyes, 1993; The Blackout, 1997), and historical re-creation (The
Funeral, 1996; ’R Xmas, 2001.) Even music video has not escaped
Ferrara’s enterprise (“California”; 1996). Ferrara has now announced,
among several projects that may be shot in Italy, that he will direct a
comedy titled Go-Go Tales.
This critical interrogation of generic codes resembles neither a styl-
ish reworking nor a simple exposure of cinematic clichés. It is a matter
of formulating, thanks to an arsenal of basic, immediately comprehen-
sible archetypes, certain primal, practical, and troubling questions.
What are the limits of identity? What is an individual? What is a social
subject? What are we conscious of? What are we responsible for? Adrian
Martin has put it well: “Every problem in Ferrara’s films is a social
problem, a problem endemic to the formation and maintenance of a
human community.”3
It is telling that Ferrara made his most violently inventive film-tract
when he was unwisely let loose at the heart of the Hollywood system.
Body Snatchers, in this regard, forms a crucial diptych with Paul Ver-
hoeven’s Starship Troopers (1997). Ferrara’s work introduces disorder
into a cynical world; misunderstandings begin here, since some critics
attribute this disorder to the films themselves. His films are increasingly
accused of being badly made, murkily motivated, and confused—espe-
cially The Blackout and New Rose Hotel.
Crucially, there is no “angelism” in relation to evil and negation in
Ferrara, no implicit belief in an ideal perfection or state of innocence.
If scarcely a trace of utopia or any radical counterproposition can be
detected, this is at least as much due to a fidelity to the negative as to
the fact that everything in this world is already in a state of ecstasy,
exaltation, and pure inebriation. As Ferrara said of Thana (Zoë Lund,
née Tamerlis), the heroine of Ms .45: “Beyond the reasons that this
girl has to kill—revenge, justice, all that—there is also pleasure of a
sexual kind in violence.”4 So which is more cruel, the cynical world, or
the man who merrily draws from it for his films, without pretending to
change anything?

A Cinema of Negation | 
 The aesthetic limitations of Ferrara’s work are obvious. His cinema
needs characters, narrative, mise en scène, and genre. More precisely
and intensely, he needs the irreducible element at the heart of each of
these modes: archetype, fable, staging, and standard imagery, respec-
tively. As for Ferrara’s public image, it is fascinating to the extent that
it offers a smokescreen for the work itself. In the 2003 catalog for the
cinephilic Locarno Film Festival, Ferrara is presented as “deranged.”
For the press, he will always be that big kid (now more than fifty years
old) who strums his guitar instead of answering questions, lives in a
perpetually dishevelled state, and leads journalists to the heights of
poetically burlesque absurdity.5
In the range of figures allowed by the culture industry, Ferrara occu-
pies the place of the “maverick”—half-Dionysus by virtue of his cultlike
devotion to alcohol, half-Orpheus by virtue of the lyre that never leaves
his side. Just as Madonna, Lili Taylor, and Béatrice Dalle have come to
replace Marilyn Monroe, Frances Farmer, and Mae West in their public
personae, Ferrara is reassuringly inscribed in the line of those grand
eccentrics who maintain the fragile continuity between the industry
and the avant-garde: Josef von Sternberg, Erich von Stroheim, King
Vidor, Orson Welles (a photo of whom decorates Ferrara’s bedroom),
and Nicholas Ray.
Ferrara calls himself the “master of provocation.”6 His œuvre affirms
the value of explosive outbursts. In the script for Mary (first written
in 2000 and subsequently reworked)—the central subject of which is
the shooting of a film about Jesus—the director, James, threatens the
projectionist, forcing him to continue a screening; he ends up watching
the film alone, gun in hand.7 For Ferrara, images are a matter of life and
death. Whether one creates or simply looks at a film, it must constitute
an event in the existential sense of the word. He once stated, “You should
be willing to die for a film.”8 But why accord such importance to images,
to the realm of the symbolic? And how to deal with the requirements
of such an exacting and lofty position?
This book is the fruit of an annual seminar devoted to Ferrara’s
work that I have been teaching at Université Paris I since 1996. I have
been able to measure, over this time, the constant enthusiasm elicited
in students and guests (some of them filmmakers) by Ferrara’s films.
Each two-monthly encounter is dedicated to a different dimension of

 | Abel Ferrara
the Ferraran corpus—for example, “The Dreamer Killer” in 1998–99,
“Evil without Flowers: Ferrara and the History of Theories of Evil from
the Ancient Greeks to Hannah Arendt” in 1999–2000, or “Right, Liberty,
and Criminal Life” in 2003–4. This book does not terminate the analysis.
We can see here one sign among many of the interest in and admira-
tion for Ferrara shown over many years by French and other European
cinephiles. His first major interview appeared, under the title “American
Boy,” in a 1988 issue of La Revue du cinéma, thanks to Alain Garel and
François Guérif.9 The Cinémathèque Française, under Jean-François
Rauger’s initiative, organized a comprehensive retrospective of Ferrara’s
career in 2003. In Italy, the first monographs on the director were pro-
duced in 1997, followed by several book-length studies.10 The Venice
Film Festival has often honored Ferrara’s films: Chris Penn received
an acting award for The Funeral, while New Rose Hotel received the
International Critics’ Award. Critical recognition of the same order has
occurred in Ireland, Austria, and Germany. In Britain, Brad Stevens
dedicated five years to writing and researching a magisterial reference
book, Abel Ferrara: The Moral Vision.
Appreciative American commentaries are not entirely absent, start-
ing with the essays and in-depth interviews by Gavin Smith and Kent
Jones.11 Yet it seems that Ferrara’s work has encountered enormous
resistance in the United States, where his four most recent films (The
Blackout, New Rose Hotel, ’R Xmas, and Mary [2005]) have hardly been
screened in cinemas. Asked what he would do if ’R Xmas failed to achieve
American distribution, Ferrara responded with his customary drollness:
“‘We burn the negative. We eat the negative with tomato sauce. On
D. W. Griffith’s grave.’”12 Moreover, when a Ferrara film is produced
and distributed by the American industry, it does not necessarily fare
any better. As Jonathan Rosenbaum commented in 1994, “[C]ertain
studios perversely want certain good films to fail, e.g., most recently and
blatantly, Paramount and Peter Bogdanovich’s The Thing Called Love,
and Warner Brothers and Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers.”13 I want to
show why the culture industry has good reason to repress Ferrara, just
as it repressed Orson Welles, Monte Hellman, and Charles Chaplin.
There are three essential propositions underlying Ferrara’s work:
1. Modern cinema exists to come to grips with contemporary evil.
On this level, Ferrara’s enterprise renews for the twenty-first century

A Cinema of Negation | 
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