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| From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3WIUEk8Tv4Du6fEcBe1Oy2EryeWVZV1dyHl-DIcLQXenfCw8M_kBsp-u7EZayiyX0i-MM-s1QttoI5bN9oq1Ohg23bI2XZuLs4Hc_QQ-J8uuTcbXmhGtHl-_9jULQvLRQF1VPnWiwopn7/s1600/roma1.jpg |
Dir. Federico Fellini
France-Italy
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| From http://img2.imageshack.us/img2/6719/felliniromaimg1.jpg |
In many ways one’s autobiography
would have to include the place you had grown up in. This has been a small
streak within cinema from Fellini’s
films to Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (2007). Both films thought,
alongside others like Terence Davies’ Of Time and the City (2008), have had to
tackle within the running times what it means to be born in a certain country as
well to explain this – My Winnipeg
is as much about Maddin being
Canadian as Of Time and the City is
of Davies being a Briton of a certain
generation as well as a Liverpudlian. Federico
Fellini’s Roma however is completely upfront about this aspect. Roma has no clear narrative. It is a
series of interconnecting, or separate, segments about Rome. It shares aspects
of classic history of the previous theatrical film to this Satyricon (1969) and his childhood under the rule of Benito Mussolini that would be tackled more
in his very well regarded Amarcord
(1973), but tackles it in a further grandness even compared to his other
work in explaining what Rome means to him as a place.
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| From http://image.toutlecine.com/photos/f/e/l/fellini-roma-1972-02-g.jpg |
It is an exceptionally well made
film, one that could only be made within the seventies sadly, able to juggle
classical period scenes, usually with a young representation of Fellini within it, and the current Rome
with the same grandeur. It has within itself the old Rome, the real one of ancient
history and culture, against the new Rome of rebellious students and
alternative culture. Fellini himself
shows a key issue of the film by having an older man desire from him to not
make a film about the lowlifes, prostitutes and ‘tranvesties’ that he felt
would make Rome look bad to the world, and then immediately after it students
wanting him to show the political and poverty issues of the city, placing the various
separate and divisive aspects of the city together in one varying image of it. Fellini is a baroque classicist, showing
the period of World War II as a time that, despite the war, people could still
function as joyful human beings. That he shows the rightwing propaganda of the Mussolini reign at the time alongside these
warm, jubilant scenes is not a troubling concept as it could have been. Not only
did Fellini undermine the image of Mussolini greatly in Amarcord, including a bizarre sequence
with a giant head, but in this film he shows the period with honesty, growing
up within it, and how the fascist ideology was going to fail in hindsight. A scene
at a vaudeville show, a standout within a film consisting of standout scenes,
shows a lovingly hilarious and bawdy series of moments that is undercut by both
a bombing of the city, and within an air raid shelter, a man who believes Mussolini and Nazi Germany will win the
war against one who doubts the war completely.
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| From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cwkM0jdVSWc/TBKTSjwisuI/ AAAAAAAABTY/j2c591ZThuU/s1600/FelliniRoma.jpg |
Technically, Roma is a masterpiece as well as in its content. Breaking away from
conventional cinema, and being meta about the filmmaking as well, it keeps the
film’s content within a consistent framework by the quality of its making. A masterful
sequence on a Rome highway, following a vehicular crane with a film camera on
it, also being filmed from another car, shows exceptional skill with the use of
filming, editing and sound as it shows the numerous drivers and vehicles on the
roads. And Fellini makes sequences
like these more than mere technical exercises by having humour, vibrancy, life,
and in his obsession with full, heavily made-up women with large bosoms, a virile
sexuality to certain moments. It is also more than a nostalgic view of the past
as Fellini is certainly aware of the
problems of the time it was made in. He sympathises with the new generation and
their hippy culture, and in a bravura sequence, shows that ancient history, of
the most beautiful, can be lost by the badly planned incursion of modernism and
urbanisation. Then there is the ecclesiastical fashion show sequence dubbed by
the late Amos Vogel to be a parody of
‘the wealth, commercialisation, and
corruption of the contemporary Church”*.
With roller-skating priests and freakish skeleton displays moving across a
catwalk, it is an inspired and surreal twisting of Catholic iconography that
was clearly made by a director who has a lot of admiration for Christianity but
has the foresight of a critic, and the weight as a great director to get away
with it, to slam the state of the Vatican church this mercilessly.
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| From http://image.toutlecine.com/photos/f/e/l/fellini-roma-1972-13-g.jpg |
In comparison to another Italian
film about a director’s life and the world around it, Giuseppe Tornatore's Baarìa
(2009) about three generations from his home village, which was sluggish
and had the tone of a Hovis Bread advert rather than a film that tackled the
director’s childhood, Italian politics including socialism and World War II, Fellini’s film Roma is way and above it, reminded of its failures in comparison to
a film that is willing to break beyond the conventional narrative arch in
favour of showing the life of Rome, good and bad, in a mass collage of images. Ending
with a breathtaking sequence of a mass of youths on motorcycles and scooters in
unison on the streets of Rome, driving place iconic architecture like the Coliseum,
it is a loving film of the city while also reframing from being a musky, lazy
ode that lacks the passion to do the task properly. Instead it ends with a jubilant
picture of the future Romans of the time taking the streets, no end credits
needed to spoil the power of this image.
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| From http://www.ffffilm.com/uploads/dan/snapshots /2009/12/shots/03885ef78edb0c57febba946098830bd3036833a-700.png |
*Quote taken from Vogel’s exceptional book Film As A Subversive Art. Find it and
read it.
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| From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhko2qn2uQQgYAsK2GtZpwLmP_Gh085IZ-q8hKVwvU8ofIKd1v0v-xdZyikSMLkdUtoT5g4W0ZDBqJgroHoW6TS8VDZg47B3UZSRDmQpFkbgGEK1n5Q517lt9USRrmPzG6GqaYsTlsjTHt6/s1600/fellini-roma-1972-03-g.jpg |
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