Thursday, June 23, 2022

8-1/2

The Mother, the Whore, and 15,000 Extras

1/2: Luci del varietà [Variety Lights] (co-directed with Alberto Lattuada)

1-1/2: Lo sceicco bianco [The White Sheik]

2-1/2: I vitelloni [The Loafers / The Fellas]

3: Un giornalista racconta: Agenzia matrimoniale [A Journalist Reports: Matrimonial Agency]

4: La strada [The Road]

5: Il bidone [The Swindle]

6: Le notti de Cabiria [The Nights of Cabiria]

7: La dolce vita [The Sweet Life]

7-1/2: Le tentazioni del Dottor Antonio [The Temptations of Doctor Antonio]

8-1/2: 8-1/2

Like Nabokov's crowning and final Russian-language novel Dar / The Gift, Fellini's 1963 8-1/2 ("otto e mezzo") is a work about itself and its own creation, and represents the grand, outstanding achievement of the first portion of the maestro's œuvre. It's not a summation-culmination per se as are Bergman's Fanny and Alexander and Saraband, but surely some familiarity with Fellini's psychography helps the viewer appreciate the experience that much more richly. Ironic then that it is often the entry-point for many young cinephiles to this body of work — I think it was my own when I was 17 — if not in fact to the European cinema in general. And why shouldn't it be? 8-1/2 is a deeply personal and inspired film, an infectious opus that places each viewer in the psychology of its two main protagonists — Mastroianni and Aimée —and their mutual sense of aspiration and resignation.

The Dream and the Cure





The hero of the movie, film-director Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni), is stuck in his car in logjam traffic beneath an overpass. The vehicles surrounding him are filled with individuals from his own life and, most generally, from the crew of the film whose production he's about to embark upon. This is too much an alone space, Guido's car interior — claustrophobic: he needs out. As smoke infiltrates the cabin, he's able to escape out the newly descended driver's side window, and arms akimbo takes flight like the martyr Christ in the opening sequence of La dolce vita. Guido has stymied himself over what this film (8-1/2) he's embarking on is supposed to... less represent, rather be — less thematically than somatically. And thus: this traffic sequence, a dream from which Guido will awaken with an arm outstretched to God.

Inside the lush bedroom of a first-class hotel within the vicinity of Guido's movie set and the site of a restorative "mineral water cure," the director awakens and is surrounded immediately by members of the production alongside other affiliates, pecking about this or that, prepared to answer Anselmi's directives if only he would reveal them.

He ventures outside, and among the geriatric crowd of attendees he spies Claudia (Claudia Cardinale), the most attractive of the cure administrators, an angelic vision of purity, an earthly Virgin — "the mysterious apparition," (literally so we'll soon infer) according to Daumier's (Jean Rouguel's) 'notes' — this, expounds the French intellectual invited to set to 'give notes' to Guido's design for the film, is the worst of Guido's symbols. I'll return to Daumier as this note proceeds.

But Guido can't get by without the presence of a magic woman. Signal the arrival by train of Carla (Sandra Milo) at the director's own invite — for the purpose, of course, of diversion — all mommy-nurturing and gratification. Carla is fleshy from being pandered to, her millinery "peluche," and her sedevacantist's chin-mole, beckoning. She relies on the pet-phrase, "Sgulp!" E quindi —

Asa Nisi Masa



A foul-faced magician reads Guido's mind and traces the phrase "Asa Nisi Masa" onto a blackboard. Guido's own formulation takes him back to this childhood, an 'imaginary' sequence (the film itself, Fellini's eighth-and-a-half-conception, an imagination) in which siblings and cousins are given a metaphorical baptism by wine as they help to crush the grapes and indulge in the jam between toes. Once the children are dried off and put to bed, the eldest, a girl, sits straight up to remind her roommates that the eyes of the painting in a corner will in the middle of the night move, and their gaze will indicate the location of "the treasure" so long as the incantation be intoned: "Asa Nisi Masa... Asa Nisi Masa..." Someone once pointed out the first syllables of each word: "A - NI - MA"... One could expect, that for Guido, the moving eyes on the painting, in concert with the chant of "Asa Nisi Masa," forge an infant alphabet for the elements, the type-setting, of Anselmi's/Fellini's future cinema.

Shortly after Guido clicks back into the present, Barbara Steele implores her fiancé Mario Mezzabotta, "Play 'Mystification'..."

Saraghina





The adolescent Fellini always loved being under the kitchen- or dining-room-table and watching and inhaling the legs of the women in his family pounding the outer ridge of the structure. Likewise, for Guido the sight of a woman during his meeting with the cardinal takes him back in memory to his and his schoolfriends' encounters with Saraghina (Eddra Gale), the plus-size town prostitute. She lives in a more desolate version of the seaside shack we witnessed in The Nights of Cabiria. They pay her to dance, to shake, to reveal her shoulders. Another origin of Anselmi's directorial predilections. Two monsignors drag Guido off, and he faces an inquisition of butch lesbian priests. Exasperation and shame. Blasphemy and bliss.

The Sheik of Araby






The towels will be transposed to the spa steam room. The perspiration and detoxing of guilt.

All Guido can do is chew his nails, ineffectual observer, at the side of his wife Luisa (Anouk Aimée) and her presence which looms over him. The Anselmis attend a convention, an auction, more or less. 

Snap into Guido's transparently auto-psychoanalytic fantasy: All the women in his life past and present occupy a two-floor home consonant with that of Guido's prepubescent wine-bath rituals — when one's looks falter with age, she is relegated to the upstairs. Guido imagines a revolt against his authority, presumed masculine supremacy, and the whipping spectacle begins. Proposition: The cinema does not begin and end with the cinema — its end result is desire, is not cinema, but rather is the accolades, devotion, connections, reconciliation (wish-fulfillment), etc. In the harem, Luisa is the voice of calm and order, scrubbing the floor on her knees: another elevation, which I'll soon examine.

The Screen Tests




Time to watch the screen tests and for Guido to select the actresses he wants for his film (already cast to perfection in Fellini's framework-film / Guido's life). He's accompanied by Daumier the doctrinaire — who muses upon "clearly defined faces" — and who is clueless as to the kind of fantasy realm that Guido inhabits. The director summons two workers, who hood Daumier and summarily hang him in the aisle of the screening room. Wish-fulfillment.

There is something to this film — about elevation, and Guido's head. All the chambers and the factions. The repeated rise to the stop of the rocket-scaffold, to the top of the wine cask, to the top of screening-room, and so on. Luisa scrubbing the floor on her knees. Psychoanalysis thrown on screen like with Hitchcock. It's torture for Luisa. It must have been torture for Fellini's wife, Giulietta Masina. Guido has insisted after all that Luisa arrive, as though he has forgotten what she'll be put through, and hazards the chance meeting — which comes to pass — between his wife and his mistress Carla, whom only a day earlier he painted up like a whore. "Luisa, I love you."

Claudia shows up at the screen tests after Luisa has already walked out in disgust. She 'marries' Carla and Luisa, enacts the ideal of Guido's. But he "doesn't know how to love." All is fleeting.

The Circular Dance







"There are so many superfluous things in the world today — no need to add chaos to chaos."

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Friday, June 10, 2022

Julee Cruise, 1956-2022

 

"The World Spins"

music by Angelo Badalamenti

lyrics by David Lynch

Moving near the edge at night
Dust is dancing in the space
A dog and bird are far away
The sun comes up and down each day
Light and shadow change the walls
Halley's Comet's come and gone
The things I touch are made of stone
Falling through this night alone

Love
Don't go away
Come back this way
Come back and stay
Forever and ever

Please stay

Dust is dancing in the space
A dog and bird are far away
The sun comes up and down each day
The river flows out to the sea

Love
Don't go away
Come back this way
Come back and stay
Forever and ever

The world spins...

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Wednesday, June 08, 2022

La dolce vita

From Their Mouths to Christ's Ears

La dolce vita [The Sweet Life, 1960] by Federico Fellini became one of the most celebrated films in all of cinema. Why should that have been? Leave it to il boom!, the Sixties moniker that recalls the economic upswing in the years following the Second World War. If you watch Fellini and this movie in particular, it's apparent that parties and bacchanal were the primary outlet of nightlife self-entertainment. Meaning more, one could find themselves on the dancefloor or at a neighboring table to take in the paganistic brouhaha and lumpily reside as a spectator with polite claps as a Thai clown shakes his palms in anxious excess. This was il boom: here 2 hours and 56 minutes is the time over which Fellini lets fully loose, with greater films still to come. Why did Fellini make this one in particular? Out of celebration for the new way? I'd propose he made it out of partial disgust, via that ability that can find beauty and trash at once and reconcile it...

The word is "kitsch." There's nothing in life quite like that Dylan lyric that perceives "flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark." La dolce vita opens with the flesh-silver body of Christ flying over the city of Rome, dangled from a helicopter to bring the Word to... the silverfish bodies of rooftop tanners? — no, it's going to il Papa. Fellini equates the flying Christ of Catholicism to paganism, a reverse invasion, or inversion if you will, — an invasion upon the (film) world itself, where down is the new up. Just check out the apartment buildings being erected, non-descript, like "la région parisienne" in Godard's 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her or the relocation of Fontaínhas's denizens to the white-dry-walled projects of Costa's Colossal Youth. The disembodied dubbed voices of Italian cinema of the era only underscore the disconnect between what is seen and what is heard, a "hearing" that exemplifies the gap between the reality 'on the ground, all around' and that which is projected in the bacchanalian enclaves of Roman nightlife, or rather Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) being both 'in' and 'out' of the subjects of his paganic 'journalism,' capturing in words — accompanied by Paparazzo's (Walter Santesso's) on-the-fly images — the photo-roman (cf. The White Sheik) that will enchant the outskirts' readership.

Sylvia (Anita Ekberg) is so distracted, both in and out. The Trevi Fountain does shut off after a while. Nico and company haunt the haunted chateau. Can't it be said that La dolce vita launched the 1960s?











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