In Fellini’s 8 1/2 an intellectual laments that the director, Guido, has no central idea, no clear intellectual concept. An English journalist wedges in,”What do you think about the marriage of Marxism and Catholicism?” In 8 1/2 Fellini doesn’t just bury neo-realism, but all the pre-existing conventions of what cinema must be like. Why must a film have a simple story,a clear idea, lucid images? Is that really like life?
Importantly, Fellini perceptively saw that popular culture was not inherently virtuous but might even be fascistic.Fascistic roots to the addiction to unreality. The Disnification and monetization of ecstasy. Antagonists like Berlusconi might be tempted to concede on that point.In reality, postwar Italy, like all Europe was consumerist, media-saturated and glamour-obsessed, and Fellini reflected all this accurately. He avoided invoking the polemic based resistance of working class opposition; Fellini’s vision sidestepped the archetype by focusing of transcendent values by dealing with the virtual reality of people (rich director, optimistic prostitute ) who are far more desperate than to be seduced or contained by stereotypes and rational social reality: they are misfits, and marginalized classless fantasists.
---Of all the Italian postwar filmmakers, Fellini was the most honest about the heritage of fascism. He engages with it indirectly, through his obsession with Italian popular culture. Fellini's films are full of circuses, provincial actors, music-hall performers: he lingers lovingly, perhaps most of all in Roma, on his memories of kitsch working-class entertainment in the 1930s and 1940s, that is, the Mussolini era. The Marxist Antonio Gramsci attributed the clownish Mussolini's success to his mastery of Italian popular culture, and the novelist Thomas Mann made the same point in his story Mario and the Magician (1929). Fellini loves and hates the lousy lugubrious singers, pseudo-Busby Berkeley dancers and white-faced cabaret stars (Cabaret is another Fellini rip-off) who populate his films.---Read More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/jul/24/featuresreviews.guardianreview11 image:http://noesland.blogspot.com/2009/11/tutto-fellini.html
The most significant aspect of Fellini’s 8 1/2 is the aspect that individuates Fellini’s use of romantic self-exploration. This film about a man’s need to make a film ends up being, in effect, the very film the man is going to make. The name that this ambivalence suggests to us as artistic scion is of course, Pirandello, especially his play, Six Characters in Search of an Author. Here, too, there are characters that have appeared to an author and can be dealt with only by being theatricalized, performed. And this performance for Fellini always operates under a stable set of preoccupations: how in contemporary Italy cheap illusionism is hijacked by necessity and how unreality becomes a given leading to a collective amnesia over a refusal to come to terms with a fascist past. As if Fellini, was projecting a reinterpretation of Caravaggio as painting “noir”, plumbing into a lost syntax buried shadowy contexts now resurrected by the Berlusconi as diluted media pablum for the masses.
---Fellini predicts our culture of universal voyeurism. Everyone is staring - at celebrity, at glamour, at themselves. At the end of La Dolce Vita a group of dissolute revellers see a giant fish on the beach. Its huge, empty eyes are wide open. "But you see, it's still looking," someone says. Given how acutely Fellini described the voyeuristic, celebrity-obsessed, almost weightless culture we inhabit, it seems extraordinary now that he was ever accused of rejecting realism for vapid fantasy. But Fellini was a politically embattled film-maker. Or rather, he fought a battle not to make political films, of the kind that would satisfy Italian film critics.--- Read More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/jul/24/featuresreviews.guardianreview11 image:http://anab.eu/post/382796536/what-i-learned-at-uni-monday-italian-cinema
Pirandello’s people were imagined, Fellini’s remembered, but their needs are the same. The father in Six Characters says to the theatre manager, as he pleads for a chance for him and his family to play out their story: “That which is a game of art for you is our whole reality.” It is the dictum towards which Guido, the protagonist, has been moving. As in Pirandello, Fellini shows us his characters before they become characters, before they become transformed into archetypes they are more ambiguous and primal. Untamed. The results are different, but the imperative is the same.
Much in the same way the characters in the current legal case of Sylvio Berlusconi are all in search of their own author and can only begin to be comprehended through the theatricality, the stage of the press and the courts. Berlusconi is a kind of Guido making his own movie that he hasn’t really well defined, and escaping into a world of dreams, memories and fantasy as escapism he establishes a similar tension seen in the collision of a gritty reality of running a nation and a fluid unreal world of which we see only a superficial veneer of sexuality; Berlusconi is also trying to defy the laws of gravity only like Guido there is a rope around his leg pulling him down.
---What makes Fellini's cinema so different from that of, say, Jean-Luc Godard or Alain Resnais is that he never loses his passion for the sauce and spice of life. His most abstract moments are steeped in the sights, smells and flavours of the streets of Rome. He is as much part of that city's identity as any of its great artists - Michelangelo or Bernini or Caravaggio. One of the ways in which he rejected Marxism was by dwelling on the true scale and depth of Italy's history, the ghosts of baroque Rome, and most of all Roman Rome.---Read More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/jul/24/featuresreviews.guardianreview11 image:http://hotelmarios.blogspot.com/2010/05/caravaggio-exhibition-in-florence-at.html
The “solution” to Guido’s and Berlusconi’s case respectively is to realize in their conscious what their unconscious is trying to tell them: They are the plot. The two pressures that have been on them throughout- the need to make a film/run a state and the agony of self-realization- flow together to make the conclusion.
Nick Squires: The Italian Prime Minister said he wanted to help set Karima el Mahroug up in business because he feared poverty and a lack of opportunities would otherwise force her into prostitution. He also repeated he thought at the time she was the granddaughter of Hosni Mubarak, then Egyptian president.
His political opponents accused him of lying, asking how he could have believed a relative of one of the Middle East’s wealthiest rulers was at risk of having to sell her body for money. “He’s trying to reconcile the irreconcilable,” said Anna Finocchiaro, the opposition Democratic Party’s leader in the Senate. Read More:http://www.nationalpost.com/Bberlusconi+gave+exotic+dancer/4598921/story.html
Berlusconi has a long history of reconciling the irreconcilable and succeeding to some degree. Like Guido, his status and luxury has offered no guarantee of domestic tranquility. His affair with Lario, a secret love affair that produced on illegitimate child, racked his own sense of guilt and conflicted with his own sense of family and need to be loved.
---there was something of the grotesque and ridiculous (pace Felliniesque) in the Genoa protests last year too. Berlusconi had reimagined the Palazzo Ducale for the world leaders, their strolls, chats and informal photo ops, to the extent that the location became more like a studio set, the whole enterprise akin to Fellini’s famous reconstruction of Via Veneto in Cinecittà for La Dolce Vita (1959); even imported ripened lemons had been attached to the lemon trees. In reality, the area was another impregnable fortress, a cage surrounded by a five-metre-high steel wire, 20,000 members of the security forces, armed, snipers and (apparently) anti-aircraft weaponry. What was Berlusconi expecting? The last days of the Czar? During the summit, despite the civil war raging outside the cage, the sun shone, the lemons glistened and the Palazzo functioned as intended. Such an occurrence cries out for the language of Fellini.---Read More:http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2003/book-reviews/fellini_lexicon/
In The Mirror and the Lamp, M.H. Abrams celebrated study of romantic poetry, he tells us how, around 1800, the subject matter of art became the maker himself. “The work ceases but a criterion looking in a different direction, namely,is it sincere? Is it genuine?’ Does it match the intention, the feeling, and the actual state of mind of the poet which composing? The work ceases then to be regarded as primarily a reflection of nature, actual or improved; the mirror held up to nature becomes transparent and yields the reader insights into the mind and heart of the poet himself.Read More:http://www.worldlitonline.com/july-06/article1.pdf
The artist becomes the subject. This mode has survived the romantic era and become increasingly intensified. Many films exemplify this-Woody Allen in Stardust Memories among others- but few as thoroughly as 81/2 . It is the quintessence of a modern form of romanticism concerned with representing a serious objective: the artist as pilgrim, as both warrior and battlefield.The tacit antagonism between Fellini and a Berlusconi relating to the control of the arts, their monetization,and differing and mutually exclusive views on reconciling the irreconcilable.The wild and unrestrained privatization of Italian television in the early 80’s and the insane commercial interruptions inserted into films led to this statement by Fellini: “The continuous interruption of films shown on private networks are an outrage; it only hurts the director and his work, but the spectator as well who becomes accustomed to this hiccuping, stuttering language, and the suspense of mental activity, to a repeated blood clot in the flow of his attack that ends up turning the spectator into an impatient idiot, unable to concentrate…This disruption of syntax can only serve to create a race of illiterates on a larger scale.” ( Minnie Proctor )
---Fellini uses the musical art to refer to the greater society, then has us come back and reflect on this art: namely, the film Orchestra Rehearsal. In a sense, all works of art contain their own interpretation of the function of art. Like the music rising above the smoke and dust, as if it were a form that individuals can recover for some kind of elemental unity, so too Fellini takes us beyond our frailties and chaos. We cannot free ourselves from religion, from art, from Society. In a sense, his films, especially the one under consideration here, are Society rehearsals, readying individual members of the audience to conduct themselves and be conducted more wisely in a restricted if not repressive world. ---Read More:http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/40/fellini.htm
Initially, Fellini is part of the same history that he desires to relate. Pasolini had talked of “throwing [his] body” into the struggle, but for Fellini it was more a question of a mind already in the midst of the struggle, a psyche that was the arena of the struggle; the formative experience of Italian society in the first half of the 20th century had already taken its toll, eradicating the hope of objectivity or perspective, rendering non-subjective writing impossible. This leads to the second aspect of the problem: Fellini’s intellectual development was inevitably founded on that cultural and intellectual winter of Mussolini’s Italy. After the liberation, the position from which Fellini could critique fascism was a position itself created by the experience of fascism – his was unavoidably a standpoint intrinsic to the fascist mindset. This results in one of the strongest currents in Fellini’s work, determining both the extreme subjectivity of the framing of his stories – particularly the directly autobiographical ones – and providing the “excuse” for the over-the-top aesthetic, the parade of grotesques, the “Felliniesque”, the need and imperative to shock his viewers out of complacency. Read More:http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2003/book-reviews/fellini_lexicon/
ADDENDUM:
Benjamin Halligan: The writers seem undone by an inability to pinpoint the jouissance of the Fellini universe, or outflanked by Fellini’s plundering of the coordinates of both high and low art. He placed himself in the tradition of the great European modernists – Kafka and Beckett, Joyce and Bartók, Mann and Eliot, Brecht and Grosz, Proust and Tadeusz Kantor – and so could dissemble away, riffing off childhood memories, fantasies, dreams, all shot through with (well announced) residual Catholic-Fascist guilt and chauvinism, nod to former collaborators such as Roberto Rossellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini and court the contemporary intelligentsia, all safe in the knowledge that everything ultimately came to achieve a certain socio-political “relevance”. And so it did; Fassbinder wasn’t the only idiosyncratic auteur able to address European terrorism in the late 1970s (in the immediate aftermath of the Baader-Meinhof deaths, in Germany in Autumn); Fellini did so to, in Orchestra Rehearsal (1979), in relation to the kidnapping and execution of Aldo Moro. Even late period Fellini is vibrant enough to deliver a precise warning of what was to come – that which would be manifest in the shape of Silvio Berlusconi (a deregulation huckster and worthy successor to his colleagues in Il Bidone [1955]) – in Ginger e Fred (1985) (which only Umberto Eco seems to have taken seriously at the time). Read More:http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2003/book-reviews/fellini_lexicon/
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