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Fellini Finale: Ginger and Fred (1986)

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Over the last two years, I’ve been making my way through Criterion’s Essential Fellini box set. Starting with Variety Lights (1950 or 1951, depending on where you check) and ending with Intervista (1987), this beautiful set included most of Fellini’s films – though not all, skipping for instance the acerbic English-language Fellini’s Casanova (1976), in which a bewigged, increasingly ridiculous Donald Sutherland fornicates his way across Europe, getting further and further away from anything approaching happiness, or even pleasure, in the process.

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Forever Fellini: Intervista (1987)

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And there we are: the final film on Criterion’s Essential Fellini box set, Intervista. It’s not Fellini’s final film: the director would go on to make The Voice of the Moon, released in 1990 and starring Marmitey Italian comedian Roberto Benigni, but even if the decision not to include that one was down to rights issues, Intervista feels like the right end point, seeing how it is about filmmaking, memory and finding that decades have passed and all of a sudden you’re an old man.

Also, quite literally and more than any other film by the director, Intervista is about the man himself: Federico Fellini.

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Forever Fellini: 8 1/2 (1963)

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Watching Fellini’s 8 1/2 for the first time in 2024 is a strange experience: it is so clear that this film has inspired many directors who’d go on to make films of their own that are very much inspired by Fellini’s. From Bob Fosse’s All that Jazz via Tom Di Cillo’s Living in Oblivion to Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York and Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth – and that’s just some of the movies that, like 8 1/2, focus specifically on artists in a protracted state of crisis, trying to produce a work that, to all extents and purposes, is the film we’re watching.

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The Rear-View Mirror: Benny Hill (1924)

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Each Friday we travel back in time, one year at a time, for a look at some of the cultural goodies that may appear closer than they really are in The Rear-View Mirror. Join us on our weekly journey into the past!

1924 was a good year in culture. James Baldwin was born, author of the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), the collection of essays Notes of a Native Son and If Beale Street Could Talk, which Barry Jenkins adapted into a beautiful movie in 2018, and much, much more. So was Marcello Mastroianni, the archetype of the disaffected Italian playboy, and Hollywood icon Lauren Bacall. The composer Gabriel Fauré died (you’ve certainly heard the sublime “In Paradisum” from his Requiem), as did Franz Kafka – and indeed Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin. Thomas Mann’s novel Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) was published, as well as E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India.

In other words, there would be a lot to write about with respect to 1924, so honestly, there is little excuse for… this.

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