forever fellini

Forever Fellini: Nights of Cabiria (1957)

Matt3 Comments

Just like Fellini used to be a big gap in my filmography – something this series, with a little help from Criterion, is supposed to address -, I’ve not seen all that many films by Pier Paolo Pasolini. The ones I have seen are an eclectic bunch: Mamma Roma (starring a magnificent Anna Magnani), The Gospel According to St. Matthew, and the Greek tragedies: Oedipus Rex and Medea. Based on having watched these, it’s difficult for me to get much of a grip of who Pasolini was as a filmmaker – but tonally he definitely seems to be a fairly different, much more overtly political storyteller from Federico Fellini.

Which makes Nights of Cabiria, on which Fellini collaborated with Pasolini, an interesting blend of the two men’s styles and preoccupations. The role of Pasolini, who was one of altogether four co-writers, was to help with the dialogue of the 1950s Roman demimonde of pimps, prostitutes and their tricks, giving it more authenticity. The world of Nights of Cabiria doesn’t actually seem all that far removed from that of Mamma Roma, who, like Cabiria, is a sex worker dreaming of a different life. However, while the director and his writers evoke a believable world that is earthy, that lives and breathes, this world isn’t what defines the film the most, instead providing a background to the central performance. As in La Strada before it, the star of the show is undoubtedly Giulietta Masina – who may be even better as Cabiria than she was as Gelsomina.

Continue reading →

Forever Fellini: Il Bidone (1955)

Matt2 Comments

In films, we’re used to con artists being the heroes. Not always, obviously, but more often than not, cinema presents swindlers as appealing trickster figures, with charm and charisma up the wazoo. At first, Il Bidone, the Fellini film that followed La Strada, looks like it might be one of those movies. Carlo (Richard Basehart) has a face that radiates a childlike innocence (as it did when Baseheart played the Fool in La Strada) and Augusto (Broderick Crawford) is the experienced, paternal figure of the gang, with only Roberto (Franco Fabrizi, whose character feels like he could have walked out of I Vitelloni, in which Fabrizi played one member of the central group of friends) being presented as something of a rotter. Il Bidone also sounds like one of those films, with Nino Rota’s score, a lilting tune, reinforcesing our first impression: these characters are fun con men, tricking rubes with a twinkle in their eyes, and all of this is supposed to be a lark.

Which makes it all the more jarring when the film uses scene after scene to show that the rubes being tricked are desperately poor and living off scraps. They are not greedy: if they are eager to make a quick buck, it’s because they don’t have much to begin with and need money fast. When the con men promise them wealth, they bite because they work day after day just to break even. The swindlers sell them hope at extortionist rates. And we watch our protagonists ply their trade, swindling Italy’s post-war poor out of what little they have, while Rota’s jaunty music plays.

Continue reading →

Forever Fellini: La Strada (1954)

Matt3 Comments

If I Vitelloni was the first of the films in Criterion’s Essential Fellini box set that justified the director’s reputation, La Strada more than confirms it. This is a beautifully made, heartrending film that deftly balances its tendencies towards the sentimental with a nuanced characterisation and an empathy that extends to those who may seem least deserving of it. And Giulietta Masina as Gelsomina steals the film, even though the main roles are all excellently played. Her performance is rightly remembered as iconic.

Continue reading →

Forever Fellini: I Vitelloni (1953)

Matt4 Comments

It was bound to happen sooner or later. I was somewhat lukewarm on Variety Lights and The White Sheik; both films had things to like about them, but neither made me look forward to watching the remaining dozen films in Criterion’s collection dedicated to Federico Fellini. The third film in the collection, I Vitelloni, didn’t immediately seem like a big step up. As in the previous two films, we get men behaving badly (towards women, but not only), feeling entitled to all the best life has to offer and feeling sorry for themselves when they don’t get it. They’re more grating because of how the film plays a lilting Nino Rota score that suggests we’re to consider all of this as a lark: boys being boys, that sort of thing. But then, around the halfway point of I Vitelloni, something changes: a note of desolate sadness creeps in, a despair underlying the laddish performativity of it all, slowly but surely becoming the film’s dominant tone.

Continue reading →

Forever Fellini: The White Sheik (1952)

Matt4 Comments

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.

Continue reading →

Forever Fellini: Variety Lights (1951)

Matt5 Comments

Ladies and gentlemen, step right up! The time of drily ironic Swedes grappling with existentialist despair and God’s extended silence, indeed His existence, came to an end earlier this year. It’s taken us a while to move forward, but we have finally arrived at our destination: Essential Fellini, Criterion’s gorgeous box set including fourteen of the Italian director’s most important films.

Continue reading →