‘Umano Non Umano’: Mick Jagger and Keith Richards turn up in pretentious Italian art film
Mario Schifano, an Italian pop art painter and collagist who exhibited alongside Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, released this unusual art film, Umano Non Umano (‘Human Not Human’), in 1972.
The plotless Godardian-inspired episodic documentary is quite boring (I don’t speak Italian, so it’s very boring to me). Still, it is notable for the inclusion of two odd scenes, one with Mick Jagger and another with Keith Richards. It’s worth mentioning that Anita Pallenberg, once Schifano’s girlfriend, is also in the film, and there are appearances by Carmelo Bene and Italian existentialist novelist Alberto Moravia.
At about 36 minutes in, Mick Jagger is seen prancing around like an idiot in a pink suit with a corsage, doing a not terribly convincing—and spinning—lip-sync of ‘Street Fighting Man’. He looks like he has to take a wicked piss the whole time. At the one hour and one minute mark, Keith Richards is seen arsing around making avant-garde electronic music. That part is actually pretty cool, but the rest of it’s pretty awful. Beware of boobs, as this is mildly NSFW.
Although Umano Non Umano came out in 1972, I’d imagine that Mick Jagger’s scene was probably shot sometime prior to when Marianne Faithfull left him for Schifano in 1969. Two pages are devoted to their affair in her 1994 autobiography, Faithfull. According to her, Schifano was a massive coke freak.
Honesty, though, Schifano was the kind of artist who made Warhol look downright sensible. A psychedelic provocateur with a paintbrush in one hand and a mirror full of blow in the other, Schifano was an Italian art-world darling who took the aesthetics of pop art and dosed them with something a bit more… pharmaceutical. When he turned his attention to filmmaking with Umano Non Umano, what came out the other side was a meandering, occasionally maddening, sometimes mesmerising collage of radical chic, Roman intellectualism, and rock star detritus.
If the film is a swirling mess, it’s also a time capsule from that peculiar moment when rock stars and Euro art weirdos all seemed to crash into each other on a cloud of imported hash and misplaced ambition. Seeing Jagger flouncing around like a confused flamingo is almost worth the price of admission. (Well, if the price is zero and you’re high, maybe.) Keith Richards’ turn, crafting eerie electronic soundscapes while looking like a possessed scarecrow, is genuinely compelling—proof that Keef was always 40 years ahead of the curve, even if he smelled like last week’s socks.
The real star of Umano Non Umano, though, might be the vibe itself: that heady Euro-boho chaos where coke-funded art theory meets unwashed celebrity. It’s got all the trappings of a dream you don’t want to wake from—or remember. That ever-present heartbeat thump throughout the film? Probably Schifano’s own pulse, racing from a heroic dose of something powdery, whispering, This means something… even when it doesn’t.
Maybe that’s why he thought the incessant heartbeat noise going on throughout this film was a good idea.