Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/06/24

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, September 6, 2024

La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960)

Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita

Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimee, Yvonne Furneaux, Magali Noël, Alain Cuny, Annibale Ninchi, Walter Santesso, Valeria Ciangottini, Riccardo Garroni, Alain Dijon, Lex Barker, Jacques Sernas, Nadia Gray. Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, Brunello Rondi. Cinematography: Otello Martelli. Production design: Piero Gherardi. Film editing: Leo Catozzo. Music: Nino Rota.

La Dolce Vita was among the celebrated international films that challenged Hollywood's hegemony in 1960, including René Clément's Purple Noon, Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura, Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers, and Yasujiro Ozu's Late Autumn. It established Federico Fellini as one of the world's most important filmmakers. I was very young when I first saw it, and it dazzled me with its nose-thumbing satire of a shallow, hedonistic culture. I remember being impressed particularly by the scene at the home of Steiner (Alain Cuny), the ill-fated intellectual whose life and ideas also made their mark on Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni), Fellini's protagonist, a journalist with ambitions to become a "serious" writer. What I missed at that time was that Steiner was as much a target of satire as the movie stars, aristocrats, and hucksters that swarm around Marcello's Rome. Steiner's soiree is as empty and sterile, as decadent in its own way as the scenes of boozing and party-hopping and religious mania. But at least there's an energy to those scenes that keeps the film alive. Even though Steiner's story is tragic, La Dolce Vita is a profoundly anti-intellectual movie. And of all the films I just named, despite its technical prowess, it seems to me the least impressive, the one most touched by the passage of time.