ciao, marcello!
The dp sisters and I went to La Dolce Vita last night. It was great. It was big. Too big for me to get into. Instead, I give you:
Five things about Fellini
Fellini makes beautiful films. His images are gorgeous and glowing—especially in luminous black and white—and they just wash over you, flooding your senses, ranging from simple to ridiculous. Anouk Aimée leaning against a wall. Clown and balloons. Marcello Mastroianni driving a car. Seance-goers who might be possessed or might only be drunk. And then, throughout it all, there are the clothes, the makeup, the hats. Drink after drink and cigarettes constantly being lit.
Fellini does a great job of showing me Marcello’s eyes. They are playful and tragic and drunk and sorrowful. And beautiful. Of course.
Fellini sometimes makes me feel sort of stupid. It seems that everything, in every frame of every film, has all this tremendous meaning and weight and symbolism. And it’s easy for me to spend the movie worrying about the fact that I’m not getting it. I’m happier when I just let it go.
Fellini makes me homesick for Italy. It’s amazing how a fairly casual shot of a street or a shopfront can hit you with that wallop of longing. He makes me want to walk the streets of Rome late at night. He makes me want to sit at cafés, wearing sunglasses and reading the paper and propping my feet up on a chair.
Fellini introduces new words to English. I love this sort of thing. The character Paparazzo is a news/gossip/press photographer who ruthlessly and diligently pursues, corners, and shoots celebrities, the wealthy, the bereaved, and the fantastic. Paparazzo and a host of his fellows begin with the candid and frequently end by instructing their subject to pose just so, capturing a transformed reality on film. Paparazzo means “sparrow” in Italian. Fellini said that swarms of such photographers reminded him of hungry little birds.