Il Maestro
February 16, 2021 2:42 PM   Subscribe

 
One of my favorites: Vatican Fashion Show - Federico Fellini (Roma)
posted by robbyrobs at 4:11 PM on February 16, 2021 [2 favorites]


Marty's continuing devotion to the idea of Cinema being separate, as a matter of art, from Movies, is one of the things I love about him. I think he's right, even as it becomes both more difficult and less difficult to discern the difference.

Never been a big Fellini fan myself, but I have spent a lot of time immersed in Greenaway movies, which are also much more Cinema than they are Movies.
posted by hippybear at 4:33 PM on February 16, 2021 [5 favorites]


In 2021 I don't know what the experience for capital-c Cinema is going to be, it isn't dead, Steve McQueen's Small Axe series is proof of that, but it is a vastly different thing, both in terms of experience and influence to what Fellini had in his heyday, and not say when he was trying to get The Voice of the Moon shown in America circa 1990. Say Covid is over this year and things go back to "normal", the Small Axe films would get showings in maybe 1 or 2 independent/rep cinemas in any given city. Maybe after an impressive showing at the Oscars or Golden Globes it might get some wider release but the MCU has films in the can waiting to be seen as do the other franchises and they're going to get all the screens at your local multiplex. I agree with Scorsese that something has been lost because of this and I say this as someone who's never seen a Fellini film.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 5:06 PM on February 16, 2021 [1 favorite]


I love Scorsese as a filmmaker but I almost love him as much when he's being a film geek. He's just so uncynical and enthusiastic about film as art and it always brings me so much joy to hear him rhapsodise about another artist's filmography.
posted by octothorpe at 5:34 PM on February 16, 2021 [11 favorites]


...The subway tunnels and the drilling equipment were also built and shot on Stage 5. Fellini had initially thought of filming on location, and Rotunno remembered doing some shots there, but during the reconnaissance led by the chief engineer, Fellini said, “We need to redo everything in Cinecittà. We can’t set up the lights here.” Light, Zapponi said, was essential to Fellini’s style; it was his syntax. As reconstructed in the studio, this sequence is one of the most haunting in all Fellini’s work. After the drill pierces a wall with a hollow space behind it, the engineer and camera crew enter a buried Roman villa. As they look at the frescoes painted on rectangular columns, with the sound of howling wind coming from the tunnel, the colors fade before their eyes and ours. The effect was obtained by applying a transparent varnish over the paintings that turned white when high-power resisters inside the columns were switched on and emitted heat. The scene is a condensed encounter between two Romes: ancient civilization and modern technology. Those freshly painted faces remained sealed from time, but on contact with modernity they are immediately destroyed.
Roma: Rome, Fellini’s City
posted by y2karl at 5:46 PM on February 16, 2021 [4 favorites]


It seems unfair that Scorsese is such a good writer and such a good film critic in addition to being a fine filmmaker in a variety of modes. (He's also a smuggler; people think he makes movies about gangsters and low-lifes but in reality his movies are consistently about morality, faith and the possibility [or impossiblity] of redemption.) In addition, he does consistently good work arranging for the financing to preserve and distribute neglected works of world cinema. Yes, his Film Foundation may center American cinema, but it has restored and preserved films from Indonesia, Morocco, Senegal, Iran, Turkey, Mexico ...

I've seen several of Fellini's films and haven't really clicked with any of them, save for Nights of Cabiria, but I think this gorgeous piece has inspired me to take another pass at his filmography.
posted by Mothlight at 6:14 PM on February 16, 2021 [4 favorites]


Paywall?
posted by Ideefixe at 6:24 PM on February 16, 2021


Yeah, I had to go to a third browser before I was able to read. I wish the paywall situation were... somehow different.
posted by hippybear at 7:25 PM on February 16, 2021


people think he makes movies about gangsters and low-lifes

I know this is tangential to your comment, but it really does crack me up that there are people who think of Scorsese as "the guy who makes mobster movies." The dude's made 26 feature films, 5 of which involve organized crime.
posted by brundlefly at 7:26 PM on February 16, 2021 [1 favorite]


26 feature films, so many of them SO excellent.
posted by hippybear at 7:28 PM on February 16, 2021 [2 favorites]


Thanks for this.

This got me, and a few things clicked together in my head:

Fellini’s absolute visual mastery began in 1963 with 8½, in which the camera hovers and floats and soars between inner and outer realities, tuned to the shifting moods and secret thoughts of Fellini’s alter ego, Guido, played by Marcello Mastroianni. I watch passages in that picture, which I’ve gone back to more times than I can count, and still find myself wondering: How did he do it? How is it that each movement and gesture and gust of wind seems to fall perfectly into place? How is it that it all feels uncanny and inevitable, as in a dream? How could every moment be so rich with inexplicable longing?

Sound played a big part in this mood. Fellini was as creative with sound as he was with images. Italian cinema has a long tradition of nonsync sound that began under Mussolini, who decreed that all films imported from other countries must be dubbed. In many Italian pictures, even some of the great ones, the sense of disembodied sound can be disorienting. Fellini knew how to use that disorientation as an expressive tool. The sounds and the images in his pictures play off and enhance one another in such a way that the entire cinematic experience moves like music, or like a great unfurling scroll.

posted by mandolin conspiracy at 9:43 PM on February 16, 2021 [4 favorites]


Thanks for the article link, it is sometimes really good to just see someone who cares deeply about a subject talk about it in a informed way, regardless of one's own considerations on the subject.

To some of the larger points discussed, I also don't think there's any going back to the kind of "cinema" Scorsese rhapsodizes about, the internet has changed all that, but I don't think that means there aren't still filmmakers who are making those kinds of films, they just don't get the same kind of attention for the omnipresence of Hollywood blockbuster marketing and for the audience being split among so many different streams of options. Some "cinema" still gets noticed and garners momentary attention and acclaim, Parasite winning an Oscar shows that, as does the smaller scale, but still notable buzz around movies like Portrait of a Lady on Fire or the Small Axe series.

There is no shortage of gifted and talented filmmakers, given some of the changes in how movies are able to be made now, there may well be more than ever, but their market is often a niche where they compete primarily against each other for the more limited audience attention. It isn't that it's only a certain group of film snobs that like or would like many of these movies, it's more that the mass audience has limited time and wants to see the spectacle driven entertainment as well as some "cinema", which makes any investment in the latter one of less information going in, as there isn't the marketing around clear simple "content" blockbusters enjoy, making it more a whim of appetite when people are in the mood for something "arty" or "serious" or just "different" selected from a vast deep pool of narrowly classified alternatives. The whim of taste and wide array of alternatives constrains "cinema" in some ways as much as it opens the door to new options.

Regarding Fellini, I have some sense that he is a filmmaker not entirely well served by this new model of widened viewing possibilities, where one can dip in at random into a filmmaker's career without any consideration for how that filmmaker may have developed over time or even necessarily needing to consider the era of the film at all. For Fellini this can be a problem both because his body of work has an odd sort of trajectory to it, with his most celebrated films being somewhat early in that history and his later works being less well received save for how they continue to show Fellini's talents or respond to his earlier films. Watching Satyricon before 8 1/2, for example, might draw out more emphasis on Fellini's more self indulgent side and make that seem more defining and harder to adjust to than coming from the other direction of having watched I Vitelloni first.

At the same time, there is something about that sense of dreamlike self examination that is finding a harder time reaching some younger film buffs who aren't interested in making movies themselves (would-be filmmakers seeming to love the movie more wholeheartedly), in part perhaps because that element has been so eagerly taken up by later filmmakers and used in so many ways that are often self-indulgent in a worst sense, that it has lost something ability to awe as it had when the experience was fit to the era and felt more entirely unique or new. Add in some of Fellini's more questionable peccadillos and he loses some impact, even as the vitality and skill shown in his films should still remain undiminished if the viewer can invest in the filmmaking.

But I'm not free from bias here myself as 8 1/2 was never a particular favorite of mine as a whole, though undeniably impressive in parts, but La Dolce Vita did have that stronger effect on me that Scorsese talks about, Amarcord fits into a warm spot for being on of the earliest "foreign" films I saw and for capturing the world of its group of characters so well, and I appreciate La Strada, Toby Dammit, I Vitelloni and Satyricon all were appreciated to varying degrees as well, while some of his other shorts and features much less so. But, dang it Marty, I'd have hoped you of all people would at least give some mention to Il Bidone, which was made between La Strada and Nights of Cabiria as that one never gets enough notice, maybe because it's a bit low key and less showy, but still...
posted by gusottertrout at 1:40 AM on February 17, 2021 [3 favorites]


Yes, thanks for this. 8-1/2 is my favorite of all films. I have seen it probably 15 or 20 times and it is always a mesmerizing experience.
Guido tells the cardinal that he’s unhappy, and the cardinal responds, simply, unforgettably: “Why should you be happy? That is not your task. Who told you that we come into the world in order to be happy?” Every shot in this scene, every piece of staging and choreography between camera and actors, is extraordinarily complex. I cannot imagine how difficult it all was to execute. Onscreen, it unfolds so gracefully that it looks like the easiest thing in the world. For me, the audience with the cardinal embodies a remarkable truth about 8½: Fellini made a film about film that could only exist as a film and nothing else—not a piece of music, not a novel, not a poem, not a dance, only as a work of cinema.
Yes, exactly this.
posted by vacapinta at 3:05 AM on February 17, 2021 [3 favorites]


Haven't seen 8-1/2 in a while but we just watched La Strada last week and it's just gutting.
posted by octothorpe at 4:48 AM on February 17, 2021 [2 favorites]


Hmm.

I think Scorcese is right that there is a difference between "content" and "cinema". However, I think the mistake he makes is to suggest that there was ever a point at which "cinema" was more prevalent than it is now. The kind of art masterworks he's talking about have always had to compete with a bunch of mass-market cheap brain-candy films which were quickly forgotten and designed simply to put butts in seats.

For instance - 8-1/2 came out in 1963. That same year also saw the release of the following "un-cinematic" films -

The Sun Of Flubber
The Day Mars Invaded Earth
Follow The Boys
Operation Bikini
The Courtship of Eddie's Father
It Happened At The World's Fair
The Nutty Professor
The Girl Hunters
Island of Love
Captain Sinbad
Jason and the Argonauts
Tarzan's Three Challenges
Gidget Goes To Rome
Beach Party
Flipper
The Three Stooges Go Around The World In A Daze
X: The Man With The X-Ray Eyes
Under The Yum Yum Tree
Gunfight At Comanche Creek
Take Her, She's Mine
The Pink Panther
Who's Been Sleeping In My Bed?


I'm totally on board with Scorcese gushing about Fellini's work, and how he got to see some amazing artistic films as a younger man. My only concern is that I suspect he's forgotten the other stuff that was around at the same time - which is understandable, as much of it was designed to be forgotten - and may have a more rose-colored filter over what "The Movie Scene" was like back then. In the past he's compared the current movie landscape to what he remembers of the past, and I am questioning whether he has considered whether his memory might be just a tiny bit selective, and whether he's forgotten whether he was rolling his eyes at Under The Yum-Yum Tree back then just has hard as he's rolling his eyes at the MCU today.

The cheap crap has always been around, and it will always be around.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:40 AM on February 17, 2021 [3 favorites]


I think you're missing his point, EmpressCallipygos, because he's certainly not claiming that we've fallen from a mythic historical Golden Age of Pure Cinema where only auteur masterpieces were made. He'd be the first to tell you that there's always been dreck at the movies.

He's saying that the way we as a society think about film has changed with the rise of streaming. Yes, there were always the Son of Flubbers, but there was also the idea of cinema as an art that could do more. He's saying we've lost this idea, that it's all been collapsed into the concept of "content" where all film is interchangeable material existing simply to meet demand. We're being trained to think in corporate speak of brand and IP and content and not about the actual artistic merit of the works, they're just products to be sold.
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:57 AM on February 17, 2021 [5 favorites]


I vote La Strada and Casanova, but they're all good.
posted by ovvl at 9:22 AM on February 17, 2021


Star Gentle Uterus - that's not actually the read I get on his statements, although I will admit I am interpreting them alongside his earlier comments that MCU films were "Not cinema". Even in your comment, you seem to be speaking of "the idea of cinema as an art that could do more" as being a retired notion, an idea whose time has passed or is being overlooked.

And my point, in calling up the lesser-known dreck from 1963, is more to state that just as there has always been dreck, there has also always been art, and the two have always existed side-by-side, and always will. Case in point - here is how I could rewrite Scorcese's opening today, if I were writing about myself:
CAMERA IN NONSTOP MOTION is on the shoulder of a middle-aged woman, riding an east-bound B54 bus in Brooklyn. She is scrolling through the TIME OUT NEW YORK web page about current film releases, flipping between that and the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Rose Cinema calendar.

The bus rounds the corner past the Alamo Drafthouse; she can't see the marquee, as she is focused on the screen on her phone - where she notes that BAM is playing both Jordan Peele's sophomore effort Us and The Last Black Man In San Francisco. She wants to see both....but which one? Or is there something more?

The bus reaches her stop and she gets off the bus, continuing to review her options. Jarmusch's The Dead Don't Die will be coming to the Nighthawk in Prospect Park next month, she notes; as well as Midsommar, but she is more likely to see the Jarmusch film. The Farewell looks like a promising option, however.

She stops in her tracks suddenly, reading news of a new film from David Eggars, The Lighthouse, starring Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson as 1890s lighthouse keepers. Advance word praises the acting and the cinematography in particular. It's not due in the US until October, but it is definitely on her radar now.

She gets a text from her roommate as she stands there - his Korean buddy has a lead on potential tickets to an advance screening for a film called Parasite. Is she interested? She considers this as she starts to walk again....
All of the films I mentioned up there existed side-by-side with plenty of other popcorn stuff. But I still had no problem finding the films that treated cinema as an art that could do more - in the very same year, I note, as Scorcese made his first statements about how streaming and content conflation was killing cinema. In my experience this isn't the case, is all.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:04 AM on February 17, 2021 [2 favorites]


I think there's some truth in both takes on the subject. EmpressCallipygos isn't wrong in suggesting Scorsese is looking at this through somewhat rose-colored lens, not just because there were, as always, so many other films that drew big office numbers, especially outside the big cities which were mostly where films like 8 1/2 were shown, but because the sixties and early seventies were the real outliers in US film history for movies from outside the US to get wide spread attention due to the decline of the US classic studio system and slightly delayed post war boom of European and Japanese film industries as they rebuilt and went in different and exciting directions from US filmmakers. (But suggesting Scorsese would think some of those listed films weren't "cinematic" just won't do at all. There's no way Scorsese's gonna knock The Nutty Professor, Courtship of Eddie's Father and X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes, just for a start.)

At the same time, the way the US film industry has gone in recent years is still another thing entirely, where it isn't just that blockbusters are getting made, but that they are taking up all the air in the conversations around movies as "mid-tier" films get increasingly knocked out of production as the battle is over franchise films and everything else is left to fight amongst themselves for the scraps. Big name stars and directors sign on to the blockbusters not just for the big paychecks alone, but because that gives them some chance of then making a movie they want to film by using the accumulated fame to get that rare financing. It's a changing market and Scorsese is raging against the dying of the flickering light a bit, but the fight for films that don't fit ready genre expectations is a good one so I won't begrudge him using his own fame to try and keep his beloved "cinema" going.
posted by gusottertrout at 10:16 AM on February 17, 2021 [1 favorite]


I just thought of a very good argument in favor of streaming, and how it can benefit cinema.

In both Scorcese's memory of being a young film fan in 1963, and my own rewrite of being a film fan in 2019, in both cases you're talking about someone who has the advantage and benefit of living in a major city, where there are an abundance of film houses, both big and small, both franchises and indie. But in smaller towns - like the one I grew up in, or the one where my parents live today - there's maybe one multiplex in town, or it's a couple towns over, and you just plain don't have the same kind of access. When you're in a town where the population is only 3,900 and the closest theater is a four-screen multiplex three towns over, your options are going to be limited. There's a not insignificant chance that the more cinematic releases will only be at the Heritage Inc. Movie House for a brief window, if they're even there at all, and so odds are that you'd miss out.

If you supplement that with streaming services, however, suddenly you have access to all of those films that the Heritage House never got, or which were only there for a week. And even better, maybe you can see them a year after the fact, especially if your daughter who lives in fancy-pants New York City was raving about a particular film and urging you to see it but it never showed up; but hey good news, it's a whole year later but you see that it's on Netflix and you remember "hey, our daughter was talking about this" and now you can see it after all. (That's how and why my parents ended up seeing BlacKkKlansman on Netflix just last week.)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 10:39 AM on February 17, 2021 [2 favorites]


Yah, individually there's never been a better time to be a cinephile, with so, so many films available to view that many could never have easily seen in a time not that long ago. I take the main crux of Scorsese's disappointment to be more in the place certain kinds of films have in our collective consciousness, where the vast array of choices can make non-blockbuster viewing feel a more isolated experience, and in how Hollywood is so completely corporatizing the main body of the US industry where Scorsese and other directors once were able to make more personal films.
posted by gusottertrout at 10:48 AM on February 17, 2021 [2 favorites]


Marty did grow up in NYC where there were a ton of theaters showing all kinds of things. I grew up thirty miles west in a town with two theaters that only showed the current hits and as a young cinefile, I had to wait for things to show up on TV and then watch them in 4:3 edited with commercial interruptions.

I now have access to the Criterion Channel for $8 a month that has almost every art-house movie that I could ask for in high-quality and with commentary tracks and video essays (often by Scorsese).
posted by octothorpe at 11:27 AM on February 17, 2021 [1 favorite]


I'm not a Scorsese fan, but I'm really enjoying him as a director/presence in the Fran Lebowitz vehicle "Pretend It's a City" on Ntflx.
posted by sneebler at 5:13 PM on February 17, 2021


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