MoMA Presents: Films of Pierre Clémenti

The Museum of Modern Art will present a film series surveying the work of Pierre Clémenti at The Museum of Modern Art screening October 13th through October 31st. Pierre Clémenti’s magnetic screen presence captured the imagination of countless moviegoers during the cultural heyday of the 1960s and ’70s.

Clementi’s roles are as unforgettable as they are varied, brushing up against the sacred and the profane in characters often adapted from mythology, literature, theater, and religion. Angel, demon, hippie, rebel, poet: a child of 1960s counterculture, Clémenti played—and was—all of them.

In 1967, Clémenti’s purchase of a 16mm camera unleashed a two-decade drive to capture life around him. Chronicling family, friends, travels, life on film sets, and the barricades of May 1968, his small-gauge diaries, bursting with psychedelic flair and ingenious editing, comprise a significant body of underground films. Rarely seen outside of his inner circle in his lifetime, the entirety of his directorial output is presented here in stunning digital restorations, alongside key titles in Clémenti’s iconic filmography as one of the great actors of postwar cinema.