Style over Substance

Film: Fellini’s Casanova
Format: DVD from Quincy Illinois Veterans Home Library OCLC Interlibrary Loan on The New Portable.

Years ago, when I was working on a BA in English, my brother sent me something about how to be a really good English major. It was a joke, of course, a piece of satire that naturally included a great deal of truth. One element of it was that you should pick a particular author and hate all of that author’s work. I suppose the film equivalent of that is to pick a director that is widely acclaimed and hate all or most of that director’s output. For me, that director is Federico Fellini. I know he is lauded and well-loved, but I find virtually all of his work completely self-indulgent and navel-gazing. I didn’t have a great deal of hope that Fellini’s Casanova would be any different.

And…it’s not. Fellini’s Casanova is a riot of mise-en-scene and enormous, elaborate costumes desperately in search of being something more than just a series of events connected by a single character. I know that there are people who like this stuff. I know that Fellini has people who adore his work. I’ll I see, though, is a whole lot of style and virtually no substance.

Slacker Cinema

Film: I Vitelloni
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

There are films out there that wield a tremendous amount of influence in the cinematic world. Halloween, for instance, is single-handedly responsible for a number of horror movie and slasher tropes just by way of example. I’d been told that I Vitelloni carries that same sort of responsibility; it’s basically the first movie about young slackers ever made. In that respect, I was curious to see it. On the other hand, this is a film by Federico Fellini, and I’ve almost always been underwhelmed by Fellini in the past. Oh, I see the talent; I just don’t always like the movie. In the case of something like Satyricon, I don’t even really see the talent.

That said, I Vitelloni really is slacker cinema. We have a group of five young men in a small coastal Italian town who spend their days mostly doing nothing but wishing they could do something else. The leader of the group is Fausto (Franco Fabrizi), a womanizer who has managed to get the sister of Moraldo (Franco Interlenghi) pregnant. Most of the film comes from the point of view of Moraldo, or at least he is our narrator, and in the case of this film, the surrogate for Fellini.

Film Within a Film

Film: Zire Darakhatan Zeyton (Through the Olive Trees); 8 ½
Format: Internet video (Olive Trees) and streaming video from NetFlix (8 ½) on laptop.

Just as there are dozens of musicals that are essentially about musicals, there are plenty of films in the world about films, filmmakers, and the filmmaking process. For me, this is a much more interesting topic. I mean, most musicals about musicals are about the necessary pluck and determination needed to put on a show at any cost, and basically indicate that those people who are show people (and who thus smile when they are low) are particularly special and wonderful. Filmmakers might well do this, too, but they don’t seem to do it exclusively. Frequently, films about film are filled not with unashamed promotion of directors as saints, but frequently as people just as confused and lost as anyone else.

Zire Darakhatan Zeyton (Through the Olive Trees) is a film deeply connected to the idea that life and art blend into each other and overlap, often becoming confused, one for the other. I had thought that Kiarostami’s Close-Up was the most convolutedly meta film I had ever seen, but that’s only because I had not yet seen this one. This is the final film in his “Koker” trilogy. The first film, Where is the Friend’s Home?, is a treatise on civic duty and friendship. The second film, Life, and Nothing More concerns Kiarostami searching for the stars of the first film after a massive, destructive earthquake, putting a layer of meta onto the first film. This one is essentially about the filming of the second film, which is about the first film, making a meta parfait of Iranian film goodness.

Self-Indulgence

Film: Giulieta Degli Spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits)
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player.

Okay, I’m just about done with Federico Fellini, and I’ve decided that this is a good thing. So far, Fellini has been hit or miss with me, and the emphasis has been much more on the miss side. I’ve liked a few, but those I haven’t liked, I really haven’t. This is relevant because I’m going to say things that will likely seem untoward to a film that is regarded as one of his great films--Giulietta Degli Spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits)

Like a lot of Fellini, this one stars his wife, Giulietta Masina. She is Giulietta Boldrini, a simple woman who believes her husband is getting a little something-something on the side. This causes her to start a spiritual quest to find herself and discover what it is she really wants. It starts with the desire to emulate her open and plainly sexual neighbor, Suzy (Sandra Milo). Eventually, this leads to enlightenment. In short, it’s a decadent, hedonistic version of Eat, Pray, Love with a lot more sexual overtones.

%(*^ing Clowns!

Film: La Strada (The Road)
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I don’t like clowns. I don’t have the typical phobia of clowns that a lot of people have—I’m not scared of them; I just don’t like them. I’ve thought about it and I determined a few years ago that the reason I don’t like clowns is pretty simple. Clowns are crazy. They’re like socially approved crazy people who have license to do whatever they like at any moment. On those very rare occasions when I am approached by a clown, I don’t know how to react because I don’t know what’s going to happen. I could easily get smacked in the face with a fish or doused in confetti or kicked lightly in the ass. All I really know is that I don’t want any of those things to happen, so I want the clown to go away from me.

Fellini’s La Strada (The Road) takes place in a circus in no small part and features a number of clown-like characters, so it showed up with one strike against it. Fellini is a director I feel like I’m supposed to like, that if I don’t like one of his films, there’s something wrong with me rather than the movie. But…clowns and a circus. I watched it anyway, but this is a film I probably would have avoided forever had it not been on The List.

A Cinematic Cadbury Creme Egg

Film: La Dolce Vita
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on big ol’ television.

Great directors get known for both their body of work and for specific films. Say “Hitchcock,” for instance, and given enough time, people will come up with a good number of his films, but the first and most visceral reactions will probably be films like Vertigo and Rear Window and not The Manxman. With Fellini, one of those visceral, go-to movies is undoubtedly La Dolce Vita.

Because of this, and because of the structure of the film, it has been broken down, studied, and analyzed like few other films. In truth, the film takes place over a series of seven non-consecutive days and nights, and this brings up some interesting religious parallels. There are, for instance, seven deadly sins and seven virtues and a great deal has been written tying the seven nights of this film to the seven deadly sins. I’m not going to go there. It may well be what Fellini intended. He may also have chosen the number seven as the seven days of the week or Shakespeare’s seven ages of Man, and I could probably work out something with a few more watches of the film that would fit either of those—especially the second one.

I’d rather look at the film as a whole, though, and discuss the gestalt of the film rather than the individual pieces because regardless of how each piece of the film fits together or works symbolically, the film itself does have—at least to me—an overarching feeling and a meaning that I take from it.

The title, La Dolce Vita translates roughly to “The Sweet Life,” and on the surface, that is exactly what the film is about. As characters, we have the idle rich, the dilettante artists, the aggressively hipster, and the bored bourgeoisie. Our main character is Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni), a former author who has sunk to the ranks of journalist and who essentially looks for celebrities to write stories about. He is frequently accompanied by Paparazzo (Walter Santesso), a celebrity photographer willing to do virtually anything for a picture (and thus the source of the word “paparazzi” for omnipresent celebrity photographers). Marcello has a sometimes suicidal girlfriend named Emma (Yvonne Furneaux) and frequently may or may not have sex with wealthy heiress Maddalena (Anouk Aimee).

As he moves through the film, it becomes evident that Marcello is different from many of othe people he interacts with in one significant way—he is sometimes introspective enough to realize that he is wasting his life in the constant and worthless pursuit of the life of pleasure that seems to be the central existence of the celebrities with whom he hobnobs. He meets, for instance, Swedish-American movie star Sylvia (Anita Ekberg), whose life seems to consist of thinking whatever is in her head at the moment is frightfully important to everyone else, and who flits from idea to idea at a moment’s notice. She finds a stray kitten, for instance, and sends Marcello off to find milk in the middle of the night, but the moment she sees the Trevi Fountain, the kitten is forgotten in her desire to jump into the water.

There’s a part of Marcello who desires nothing more than this sort of existence, of living on a whim and an impulse, and having the money and power to do exactly what he wants whenever he wishes it. Not able to make it as a more artistic writer, his method of doing that is by attaching himself to those around him who can live in this fashion, and thus he is able to partake in this sweet life by osmosis, a sort of human remora living on the scraps. His reattachment to the world in which he truly lives comes from the person of Steiner (Alain Cuny). Steiner is an intellectual and has the sort of life that Marcello seems to want, but Steiner, too, has doubts. Near the middle of the film, he tells Marcello between a comfortable, material life and the more interesting and risky world of a spiritual life. So, when Steiner kills his own children and himself, it appears evident that in the end, he couldn’t make that decision.

Marcello does, though, eventually fading even from the ranks of journalism into those of the press agent, talking up stars and trying to arrange publicity for them, all in his continual attempts to latch himself to that sweet life that he has chased for the entire film. It eludes him for the entire film, too. Why? I think it’s because he thinks too much. Those people throughout the film who seem pleased with that indulgent, hedonistic existence are those who don’t appear to have a thought beyond their next pleasure. Marcello, on the other hand, is essentially excluded from that life for the very reason that he thinks about it so much—he can’t have it because he wants it.

The film is bookended by scenes that seem like they play into this idea. At the start, a helicopter flies a statue of Christ over Rome en route to taking the statue to the Vatican. The spiritual world is, in a sense, leaving Rome behind, and while the statue appears to bless the masses below, it is also something entirely out of reach. At the end, fishermen haul what looks like a dead manta ray onto the beach. Unlike the Christ statue, the manta is real, disgusting, and dead, and is also close enough to touch. In essence, while Marcello has forced himself to strive toward that goal of unobtainable life in the clouds, all he can really achieve is the real, and the real is unattractive and a little terrifying.

It is a great piece of art and a great film. I find it interesting that the film is frequently listed as both a drama and a comedy. I can’t call this a comedy. This isn’t because it’s not funny in places, nor even because of the brutal murder of children in the last hour. I can’t call this a comedy, because it is entirely the opposite of one—it’s a tragedy in the classic sense. Marcello is a tragic figure because he can’t have what he wants, and the reason for it is two-fold. First, he can’t have it because he wants it too much. Second, and more importantly, the life that he desires really only exists in fantasy. Even Sylvia, who is as much a muse to this sweet life as anyone in this film, is forced to return to dry land and suffer the indignation of being slapped in front of the press for the peering and leering eyes of the public in the tabloids.

That life might truly be sweet, but it's an empty sweetness. And that's the point.

Why to watch La Dolce Vita: It’s influential enough that it added a word to the lexicon.
Why not to watch: The characters are vacuous intentionally.

Heart of Gold, Head of Tin

Film: Le Notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria)
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on middlin’-sized living room television.

In any group of experts and wannabee-experts, someone will dislike any given classic. I learned this as an undergraduate English major. Name any canonical author or book, and there’s someone who hates it. Shakespeare’s classic Othello was once summed up along the lines of “wives should mind their hand linens.” Haters gotta hate. I’m not immune to this. There are parts of The Canon that I dislike and don’t want anything to do with. The only way I survived reading Emily Dickinson’s poetry was the realization that almost everything she did was in ballad form, and could thus be sung to the Gilligan’s Island theme or “House of the Rising Sun.”

When it comes to directors, I can hang with anyone, but I’m pretty ambivalent on Fellini. That feels like saying I’ve watched too much Hitchcock or that Kubrick doesn’t do anything for me. Fellini sits on a high pedestal when it comes to film geek wankery, but so far, I’ve come away unimpressed. Amarcord was interesting to a point, but essentially little more than cotton candy, and Satyricon was flat out weird and made me uncomfortable in spots. So I watched Le Notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria) more to say that I’d done it than with any sort of expectation or joy.

Le Notti di Cabiria is the story of a prostitute named Maria Ceccarelli (Giulietta Masina), nicknamed “Cabiria.” She is a prostitute who works the streets of Rome. Despite what she does to make a buck, Cabiria is remarkably naïve. It’s almost painful to see how easily she is duped by those around her. In the opening sequence, she stands on the bank of a river with her boyfriend. When she least expects it, he pushes her into the river and runs away with her purse. Unfortunately, Cabiria can’t swim, and has to be rescued by some people who simply happened to be there.

While a true naïve, Cabiria is also aggressively proud of herself for owning her own house. She uses this fact to differentiate herself from the other prostitutes on and nearby the street corner. It’s not much of a house, of course, but it is a house. At times it seems like Cabiria has little else. Nothing good seems to happen to her. Her dunking in the river is really just the start. And yet, soon enough, Cabiria is willing to look at the world through rose-colored glasses once again.

We follow Cabiria around, see her petty jealousies and feuds, and then witness her pulled up on stage by a magician and hypnotist. While mesmerized, she is told that a young man named Oscar is there, and that he loves her and wishes to marry her. She’s eventually awoken from the trance to the jeers and cheers of the audience. Cabiria is proud, and hates being laughed at, so she sulks backstage until the people in the audience have left. But one man, Oscar D’Onofrio (Francois Perier) claims to have been touched by her innocence, and a romance blooms.

But, you should know where this is going. Nothing good happens to Cabiria. Everything that might possibly make her happy will come back and bite her. Oscar is not a nice guy, after all.

In that sense, Le Notti di Cabiria is a tragedy, but it’s impossible to call this film a real tragedy. The reason is that while Cabiria reacts in extreme ways to what happens to her, nothing does much more than temporarily set her mood back. After each terrible knock, each crushing disappointment, she is back to her old self, cheerful and looking on the world as something special to be enjoyed rather than a terrible, crushing prison. She is that rare naïve person who remains naïve regardless of the terrible things that happen to her.

There is something beautiful here. It’s not the film, and it’s not Giulietta Masina, but it is the attitude of Cabiria. There is something really beautiful about an attitude that continues to believe in the goodness of people and the joy of life moments after taking yet another kick to the face.

Masina is an odd looking woman. There are times when she looks waifish and elfin, and other times when she looks terribly old. She has a face that is impossible to place in years. Could by 25, could be 45. The reality was just about dead middle of those two extremes.

Did I like this movie? I’m not sure. I like this movie’s attitude. I found it uplifting and life-affirming. But I’m still not sold on Fellini.

Why to watch Le Notti di Cabiria: Our heroine has a true heart of gold.
Why not to watch: She also has a head made of tin and spun wire.

Hedonism

Film: Satyricon
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.


I’m not a big fan of hedonism as a philosophy. On the surface, it looks like a pretty benign way of thinking. Pleasure for the sake of pleasure is, well, pleasing. At its fullest expression, though, it becomes indistinguishable from sociopathy. Essentially, at its extreme, hedonism is less about pleasurable experiences and far more about doing anything for one’s own pleasure regardless of consequence. On the more benign end of the spectrum, you get people doing things they like and carrying those pleasures to an extreme that affects them, but not others. At the other end, you get something along the lines of Salo.

Satyricon, otherwise known as Fellini Satyricon falls somewhere in the middle of the two extremes, and from what I can see, it leans further toward Salo than it does toward, say, The Big Chill. I had the damnedest time making sense of this film in any sort of context other than witnessing gaudy excess and personal pleasure at the cost of everything else (the personal pleasure of the characters on screen—certainly not mine in this case).

Satyricon is based on what is believed to be the first ever novel, or at least the first one of which fragments have survived. Fellini made this film to match what was left of the original document—the film is similarly fragmented, ending one scene and skipping ahead to the next without any sort of transition between. In fact, the film ends in mid-sentence much like the surviving manuscript.

The film, which evidently takes place at the height of Roman decadence, vaguely tells the tale of Encolpio (Martin Potter). Encolpio is obsessively infatuated with Gitone (Max Born in his one and only film role), his young male slave. Sadly for Encolpio, Gitone has been sold to a flamboyant actor (Fanfulla) by his roommate, Ascilto (Hiram Keller). Encolpio goes to get his slave/sex partner back, and then fights with Ascilto. The two decide to part ways, allowing Gitone to choose where he’ll go. He goes off with Ascilto, leaving Encolpio heartbroken and ready to commit suicide until an earthquake intervenes.

Scene shift. Encolpio meets the poet Eumolpus (Salvo Randone) in a gallery and the two head off to the estate of a wealthy man giving a banquet. The man, Trimalchio (Mario Romagnoli), considers himself a poet even though he has no real skill (according to Eumolpus). The two poets have a falling out, and then Trimalchio stages his own funeral. We get a little vignette about a widow using her husband’s body to save the life of a young soldier.

Scene shift. Encolpio is now a prisoner aboard a slave ship. Gitone and Ascilto are there as well. Forced to fight the owner of the ship in combat, Encolpio is instead spared because of his looks, and then forced to marry the man, Lichas (Alain Cuny), in a ceremony aboard the ship’s deck. Sadly for Lichas, the current Caesar is overthrown and he is beheaded, once again allowing Encolpio to chase after Gitone and other young boys.

In the struggle for power, a man and his wife commit suicide rather than allow their property to be handed over to the new Caesar. Ascilto and Encolpio arrive at the house and find a willing slave girl still there, so they spend a little quality time with her, leaving only when the soldiers of the new Caesar arrive and burn the bodies of the former masters.

Scene shift. Encolpio and Ascilto meet a caravan headed to an oracle. The people in the caravan are hoping that the oracle, a hermaphroditic albino child, can cure their mistress of her nymphomania. Until they reach the oracle, though, the woman’s husband pays the two men to keep his wife satisfied. To help maintain some semblance of order in the caravan, the woman is tied down in the cart, and left tied down during the “satisfy my wife” sessions. Eventually, they reach the oracle, and decide to kidnap the child by killing his keepers. However, the child can’t stand the heat or sun of the desert and dies, and they then kill the man who persuaded them to commit the kidnapping.

Scene shift. Encolpio is thrown into the den of the Minotaur, who takes pity on him and refuses to kill him. As a reward (punishment?), he is told to get busy with Ariadne, a pretty young maiden, while a crowd watches. He can’t, and is publically humiliated. He then discovers his old friend Eumolpus, who is now ridiculously wealthy and corrupted. He suggests a sea voyage to the Garden of Delights to restore Encolpio’s manhood, but this doesn’t work.

And on and on. Eventually, Ascilto is killed by a ferryman, and Eumolpus dies, leaving his fortune to anyone who is willing to devour his corpse.

Seriously, what the hell?

I have no idea how to react to this film. Fellini has a thing for physical freaks and disturbing images, and nowhere does he indulge in that more than in this film. It’s almost as if he’s giving in to his own hedonistic urges at the expense of the audience’s sanity or enjoyment. I felt assaulted by this film, like it was seeing if it could cause me some sort of psychic damage during its running time.

I’m certain that someone wiser, worldlier, or more scholarly could wax rhapsodic about the true value of Satyricon, but unfortunately, you’re stuck with me. From where I’m standing, this film was a pointless excursion in excess, a film about nothing but itself. It left me with nothing but an empty feeling, a touch of queasiness, and the faint beginnings of a whanging headache. It feels like waking up after sleeping a little too long and having a slight metallic taste in the back of one’s throat. It’s both unpleasant and completely unexplainable.

Screw you, Fellini!

Why to watch Satyricon: You’ve got time to kill and a sense of joy in hurting your own brain.
Why not to watch: It not only makes no sense, it’s ugly to watch.

Fellini's Fabulous Flashback

Film: Amarcord
Format: DVD from Davenport Public Library through interlibrary loan on laptop.



















If you love film, at some point you’re going to run up against the catalog of Federico Fellini. Love him or hate him, you have to know him. You can’t know the novel as a form without some familiarity with Dickens, you can’t discuss Cubism without having a vocabulary that includes Picasso. And you can’t pretend to know anything about film if you haven’t spent at least a little time in the magical (and sometimes not so magical) worlds of Fellini.

Amarcord is perhaps Fellini’s most accessible work. It’s also virtually plotless, following a year of life in Italy around the rise of fascism. And while the fascist movement does make an appearance, and is at the center of one of the only really unpleasant moments in the film, it essentially doesn’t mean much in the final analysis. The movie is based on Fellini’s childhood at least in part, although he denied that it was truly autobiographical. It takes place in a small seaside town based loosely on Rimini, the town of Fellini’s childhood.

The film opens with the appearance of the puffballs, evidently a seed of some type, similar to the springtime appearance of dandelion fluff. The townspeople say that when the puffballs appear, winter is soon at an end, and the town celebrates with a massive bonfire and the effigy burning of the old witch winter. We then follow a year of life in the town, focusing primarily on the life of Titta, a young man; his parents; a few of his other relatives; several of the townsfolk; and a number of his schoolmates. The film follows Titta, et al. through a year, ending with the return of the puffballs the next year.

Amarcord reminds me very much of Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine. Essentially, it is less a coherent, complete story than it is a loose collection of vignettes with a common group of characters. These characters, certainly drawn at least in part from Fellini’s life, are nonetheless caricatures. For instance, Volpina, either the town prostitute or simply the town slut, is so greedy for sex that she’s all but pleasuring herself walking down the street. The blind accordion player does his best Ray Charles whenever the music strikes him. Gradesca (roughly translated as “appreciation”) is the town’s beauty, and she knows it, appearing in most scenes in a red coat and dress, and always at least partly in red in every scene. She is the woman the boys, Titta especially, moon over.

While some of the events of the film are unpleasant or sad, this is a time that is viewed not so much with a nod toward realism, but through the hazy warm glow of nostalgia. There is a magic here, a sense of unreality, as Titta and his friends attempt to come of age in a time that is remembered only indistinctly. There is a wistfulness even in the sadness, and a carnival-like feel to everything.

This is perhaps most evident in the scene in which virtually the entire town rows out a few miles to witness the passing of a massive luxury liner. As the boat passes, the people cheer. Some cry, overcome by the majestic size and power of the Italian ship. But it is obviously a fake, a prop, a piece of scenery and stagecraft. It is, essentially, the same as this film—something that stands in for the real thing, and even looks at times like the real thing, but is not.

"Amarcord" translates as “I remember” in the dialect of Fellini’s hometown of Rimini. It is a lovely, heartfelt remembrance, if one not so concerned with telling literal truth.

Why to watch Amarcord: It’s joyously Fellini-tastic.
Why not to watch: No plot = big problem for you.