The order in which you watch, read, listen to things matters. It changes how you experience these things. Criterion’s Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema was organised thematically first and foremost. Even if a clear delineation wasn’t always possible, you’d get a set of films about marriage and relationships, followed by some movies about actors and performers, and then you might get a couple of films about crises of faith. Even though many of these themes pop up across all of Bergman’s films, there was still the sense of thematic focuses. And after watching Scenes from a Marriage, other stories about relationships gone sour would always have a certain subtext; Through a Glass Darkly would be lurking in the background when watching, say, Winter Light.

In contrast to this, Criterion’s Essential Fellini box set is ordered chronologically. This comes with pros and cons: you lose the thematic unity (that may be imposed or at least reinforced by the curators to some extent), but it’s easier to concentrate on how Fellini develops as a director if you’re watching the films in the sequence in which they were made – but with Bergman I was glad that we didn’t have to watch a whole slew of his early films first. Crisis and A Ship to India, to mention just two, certainly show some promise, but if Bergman hadn’t turned out pretty okay at this whole directing thing later in his career they’d probably be forgotten by now, and for good reason. And that’s the sense I get of these early Fellini films: that they were made by someone who’s talented, but whose talent isn’t fully in evidence yet. But boy, there’s some stuff here that hasn’t aged well at all, there are comedic bits that would have been lazy and clichéd at the time already, and those things don’t sit well with this idea of a timeless filmmaking genius.

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