It markedly resurfaces, albeit in different mood, in Blow Out when he expands at length on the wonders of rubber gloves!

Indeed, Blow Out might be regarded as the pivot of his career, the moment when he finally alienated his French audience and appeared to the rest of the world as 'himself': scabrous but charming, immersed in - but subtly distanced from - the outrages of his surroundings. A man who could regard with perfect equanimity both the surreal fetishism of those rubber gloves and the proposition of eating himself to death,

Having their cake and eating it

Blow Out is in many ways a mirror image of Bunuel's El Angel Exterminador (1962, The Exterminating Angel), where a party of house guests find themselves locked in a room without anything to eat. In Blow Out the director Marco Ferreri inverts Bunuel's world into a crueller version in which four men willingly withdraw from everyday life and commit group suicide in an orgy of gluttony. Whether continuing his ballet practice, flexing himself sedately at the wall bars or finally exploding on the verandah, Piccoli continues to convey the same slightly removed intelluality that is perfectly suited to Ferreri's brand of Surrealism. By keeping his sceptical distance he also invites the audience to view the bizarre nature of ordinary objects or the cruelty of human appetites.

It is this quality that so enhances Ferreri's earlier Dillinger e Morto (1969, Dillinger Is Dead). Cinematically, the film achieves a tranquil perfection in terms of formal composition, but it is Piccoli's quiet concentration that makes it one of the most purely reflective films ever made. He roams the house, alone and silent; whether caressing the images that a projector throws on a wall, making a salad or dismantling an old revolver, he judges to perfection the distance between the spiritual needs of humans and the oppressive weight of the world of objects.

Similarly, the achievement of a man taking apart his life and striking out for freedom reaches a peak of anarchic enthusiasm in Themroc, a film financed by Piccoli and in which he unusually appears as a fully paid-up member of the working class. Throwing over his oppressive family and job, he reverts to a state of nature - knocking down the walls of his flat, sleeping with his sister and eating policeman. The cry of anger from this modern caveman revealed a rare side of Piccoli; a sheer physicality rarely glimpsed since.

Semi-detached

Given his usual air of detachment, it is perhaps strange that he has not worked more with Claude Chabrol, the most sardonic observer of the French bourgeoisie, His role in Les Noces Rouges (1973, Red Wedding) personified the small-town urges of the petit bourgeois, but the best-remembered sequence - his seduction of Stephane Audran in the local museum - has distinct overtones of Surrealism.

It is the sort of touch that Bunuel has made his own and which certainly underlines Piccoli's presence in both Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie (1972, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie) and La Fantome de la liberte (1974, The Phantom of Liberty). Indeed, Bunuel's famous three-quarter-length shots seem ideally suited to capture Piccoli's talents: the imposing physical presence, broad chest, thick neck and leonine head can all be contained in the frame. The emotional intimacy of the close-up is rarely demanded, and the characters' ironic detachment underlines the bizarre aspects of any surrounding world.