THE Feast of San Gennaro, the celebration of the Neapolitan saint that transforms Little Italy in Manhattan into a tourist-thronged street fair every September, has made a few memorable movie appearances over the years. It was the bustling backdrop to Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets,” and the scene of a couple of violent crimes in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Godfather” trilogy. This year another Italian-American filmmaker took his turn: Abel Ferrara, chronicler of the downtown underbelly and lately a resident of the neighborhood.
On the final night of the feast last month — also the final night of shooting for his documentary about the event and the personalities in its orbit — Mr. Ferrara was racing up and down Mulberry Street, weaving through the bemused crowds and past the sausage and zeppole stands, looking for things to shoot and people to talk to, and finding material everywhere he turned.
“I didn’t want to shoot during the feast,” Mr. Ferrara said. “But it’s when the talent comes out.” Sure enough, the actor Danny Aiello was signing head shots in the back of one restaurant. In front of another the former Hell’s Angel and “Oz” star Chuck Zito was having dinner. In the restaurant La Mela the owner, Frankie Cee, who has appeared in a few of Mr. Ferrara’s films, was hosting the doo-wop singer Dion and his wife, Susan.
Watching Mr. Ferrara at work — a blur of continuous motion but a lot more in control than he lets on — you can almost see what gives his films their hallucinatory ambience. His movies thrive on a kind of hypnotic chaos, and Mr. Ferrara seemed to be feeding off the din and disarray of San Gennaro, actively looking for digressions. He tried to get a deli owner to reveal who he was voting for in the presidential elections (while a policeman watched warily), stopped for a snack at a falafel restaurant and struck up a conversation with the waiter (“Anyone ever tell you you look like Christopher Walken?”), and bantered with a neighborhood old-timer who goes by Skinny Vinnie. (For reasons unknown the encounter left Mr. Ferrara in possession, briefly, of a pineapple.)
Mr. Ferrara and Shanyn Leigh, an actress who has appeared in his films, have been living for the past few months in an apartment above La Mela. For Mr. Ferrara, 57, the San Gennaro project is a matter of some urgency, a way to reconnect with a neighborhood and a cultural heritage. “If I didn’t do this I would have to come back as a ghost,” he said.
He was born in the Bronx but the Lower East Side is an old stomping ground, the setting for “Driller Killer” (1979) and “Ms. 45” (1981), the shrewd and nasty spasms of boho exploitation that brought him early infamy. With an eye for scuzzy local color and a taste for sin and salvation, he was the unofficial poet laureate of pre-Giuliani New York, and his commitment to trawling its lower depths reached operatic heights with the drug-lord epic “King of New York” (1990) and the crooked-cop odyssey “Bad Lieutenant” (1992).
He flirted with Hollywood in the ’90s, directing two studio movies — a “Body Snatchers” remake and “Dangerous Game,” a psychodrama starring Madonna (both 1993) — that were maligned at the time but have since grown in cult stature.
In retrospect it’s no surprise that as the city cleaned up in the ’90s, becoming less hospitable to criminals and artists alike, the professional fortunes of this maestro of sleaze would suffer. After the Sept. 11 attacks Mr. Ferrara moved to Rome for a few years; he wanted to get away from New York, he said, and it was easier for him to find financing in Europe. For more than a decade now his movies have gone largely unseen in the United States — “The Funeral” (1996) was the last to receive a decent release — but he has been working almost nonstop. He remains a fixture at the biggest European festivals, and his recent movies, among his most fiercely personal, hardly seem the product of a discouraged artist.
Mr. Ferrara’s 15th feature, “Mary,” which had its premiere at Venice in 2005, is only now having a run in New York. (It opens on Friday at Anthology Film Archives.) Like “Dangerous Game” and “The Blackout,” his 1997 drama about a bender-prone movie star, it revolves around a film within the film — in this case a biblical indie called “This Is My Blood.” The leading lady (Juliette Binoche) is so shaken by playing Mary Magdalene that she decamps for Jerusalem. Back in New York a television talk show host (Forest Whitaker) finds himself struggling with his faith as he prepares to interview the Jesus movie’s brash director and star (Matthew Modine, in a role that inevitably calls to mind Mel Gibson but also contains strong elements of the freewheeling Mr. Ferrara).
“Mary” is simply the most direct expression of spiritual crisis in a filmography riven with Catholic notions of guilt and redemption. “I don’t know how anyone with half a brain can make a movie that’s not about those things,” Mr. Ferrara said. “The Catholic thing is so ingrained in our upbringing. Where I come from you’re not raised to think on your own. It’s not that you’re pushed to read the Bible. The Bible is read to you.” But when he started working on “Mary” — “living within three blocks of the Vatican,” he noted — he revisited the Bible and this time approached it “as a revolutionary tome.”
Mr. Modine, who first worked with Mr. Ferrara on “The Blackout,” said via e-mail that he and Mr. Ferrara prepared by poring over ancient scripture. “Abel and I tried to strip away the interpretations and poetic language,” he said.
Like a more serious and angst-ridden “Da Vinci Code,” the film draws on Gnostic texts that have offered alternate views of the life of Jesus and the origins of Christianity. (Several theologians, including Elaine Pagels, author of “The Gnostic Gospels,” are enlisted as interview subjects on Mr. Whitaker’s talk show.) With its sincerely ambivalent efforts to plumb the nature of belief, it’s the rare movie that could stand as a rebuke to both “The Passion of the Christ” and “Religulous.”
Mr. Ferrara pointed out that “Mary” won not just jury and critics prizes at Venice but also the ecumenical award sponsored by a Catholic communications organization — or, as he proudly overstated it, “the Vatican seal of approval.”
He followed “Mary” with “Go Go Tales,” which screened at the Cannes and New York festivals last year but is still without an American distributor. At Cannes he called the movie, an Altmanesque ensemble piece set over one hectic night at a Manhattan strip club, his “first intentional comedy.” At its center is Ray Ruby, a visionary if beleaguered club owner (Willem Dafoe) who happens to be another Ferrara alter ego. In this raucous self-portrait of the artist as a hustler and a holdout, Ray risks losing his lease when his landlady weighs an offer from Bed Bath & Beyond. Ray fights to stay in New York, but Mr. Ferrara for the moment had conceded the battle: the film’s seedy Manhattan go-go bar was built on the soundstages of Cinecittà Studios in Rome.
Mr. Ferrara marked his return from exile last year by embarking on a documentary counterpart to “Go Go Tales,” a paean to a vanishing New York — specifically to its former bohemian headquarters, the Chelsea Hotel, which was at a crossroads after a change in management.
“Chelsea on the Rocks” had its premiere at Cannes, where Mr. Ferrara has a way of upstaging the competition. He used his news conference to launch vitriolic broadsides against the coming “Bad Lieutenant” quasi-remake. Referring to the new movie’s director, Werner Herzog; star, Nicolas Cage; and producer, Ed Pressman (a former regular collaborator), Mr. Ferrara said, “I hope they’re all in the same streetcar and it blows up.”
Mr. Ferrara said he is energized by his recent documentary experiments, which have given him new ideas to use in his fiction. (While in Italy he also started a documentary about a women’s prison in Naples.) He rattles off a list of feature possibilities: a “Catholic western” inspired by “The Searchers,” a present-day “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” a prequel to “King of New York.”
Just as “Chelsea” recalls happier or at least more hedonistic times, his Little Italy documentary will likely function as an elegy for a neighborhood eroded by gentrification. It is understandable that Mr. Ferrara would feel an affinity with endangered institutions, but he was personally loath to indulge in nostalgia. “I’ve been at it too long,” he said matter-of-factly, cutting off an attempted discussion of his earlier work. “I hope I’ve gotten better. It’s too late to stop now.”
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