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| From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjl1rA0QQgrrCAlVq2CtNhbpjZ0IJgdT6K1aL_IIyr1Z3Ic96z_mUd3zV8VNRzJHJczlKapUXPxAxxmsdJZZaXTOLwl6BC0rdt3uoiWflSkFlQ3HaX-zfzywTUEUxdCkzSZKmEbsD7PhsWS/s1600/movie5.jpg |
Dir. Federico Fellini
France-Italy
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| From http://www.sensesofcinema.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/la-dolce-vita.jpg |
If cinema is left to be mere museum
pieces under the titles of ‘classic’ and ‘masterpiece of art’, then we’ll leave
it to become fossilised when it should breathing with life continually. A ‘canon’
of filmmaking should be vibrant for the sake of the viewer, naive and obsessed,
not the death sentence it feels for me. Citizen
Kane (1941) cannot be viewed as an actual film, rather than an academic
essay project, thanks to this botching of the code of filmic history. The paparazzi
in Fellini’s film could be remade
into overeager film writers, stripping off the cinematic magic of certain films
by overexposing them without good taste. There is a fine line between showing
these films in cinema studies classes and in retrospective writings, and merely
making them technical and glossary showcases when they are great films for
being cathartic, heart stirring and entertaining too. My viewing of Bicycle Thieves (1948) for the first
time this year, the start of a loving relationship with Italy along with all
the grubby trollops of joy of their genre filmmaking, made me realise this
horrifying paradox fully. All I knew of this film was that it was an important film
for Italian neo-realism and that, before Citizen
Kane, it was number #1 on the first Sight
& Sound poll. That is a crime that should be forced upon all of us film
connoisseurs in that no one has - from what I’ve read as a regular film buff to
educate myself - talked about its humour, its emotional power, and how even
now, especially now, it’s portrait of a man desperate for work only for fate to
go against him is still relevant. What place has Bicycle Thieves been put into however? A mere archival piece, a
footnote of importance in history for Italian and global cinema which people
only see, like myself, when they are on their ‘going through the classics
before you die’ binge. It’s pathetic that, just like in literature, music and
art, we still neuter the majesty of films like this by making them academic
studies only, and while I adored my school academic routings through the
library DVD collection, dear God we give these films worse fates than being
fully forgotten. The forgotten ones get found again, released by a DVD company
like Masters of Cinema and loved as
if they are new and still films that grab us by the throats.
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| From http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-AI0XtK1mbaA/TzU9vXp9RSI/AAAAAAAAFF0/Vqkhb2zKkj8/s1600/ladolce3.jpg |
La Dolce Vita is another Italian film that has suffered from this. It
is known as one of the best films made by director Federico Fellini and is known for its sequence with Anita Ekberg in a water fountain, but
what is the film actually about? It’s about a man, played with a considered
grace even at his character’s most detestable by Marcello Mastroianni, played with consideration but able to break
down when his world does, who is stuck in life. He could become a great writer,
even a great one in journalism his existing trade, but is too intoxicated by
the celebratory hedonism he and the swarm-like proto paparazzi celebrate to
step back from it. He has a devoted fiancée, but cannot stay with her and
sleeps around, and cannot leave her either. He cannot become more than a
hanger-on at drunken parties even though he has a masculine beauty, charm and
intelligence to win in life if he used them. Regardless of class, he is a
representative of all of us, working to high class, any ethnicity, even any
gender, who can have it all but is either scared to move in any direction or
has no idea where to go. He as a character, with this film, is also still
relevant in this day and age beyond that obnoxious chime of it being just being
‘one of the best films of all time’ without no connection to why it go this
title in the first place. It’s also more than just the image of the busty and
fleshy “doll” of American bubbliness,
played wonderfully by Anita Ekberg in
respect to her part, who graces all the posters and clips of the film, as she
is part of a vast array of characters and events which make up the film and are
all important within it.
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| From http://www.amieflanagan.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/dolcevita4.jpg |
Following Mastroiannai’s character through his travels and courses, the film
is truly cinematic but shares a tone only seen in literature and this kind of
classical cinema, where it presents itself as events and images but needs the
viewer to do the footwork to bring their own meanings and emotional context to
the film to connect them and get the most from the results. Even the best genre
and pulp work, even schlock to fairytales, need the viewer to do this to get
the most from them, but La Dolce Vita
is a prime example of the sort of cinema far from the infantilism we’ve had
shoved down our throats for my generation of twenty something year olds (and
the generation after us). The Rome depicted in the film is extravagant and passionate,
but is in a stupor and lost. Intellectuals who could help the world are just
intellectuals stuck in their middle class homes away from the poverty filled back
streets, and people still cling onto spirituality, wonderful at first in a
vignette of a miracle taking place Mastroiannai
goes to report, but perverted by the media and the desperation of the
believers. Far from a cynical view on my part, it is more sadness of how
lacking people are that a simple, perfect symbol, a sapling tree, is decimated
by a mass of people grabbing for holy charms unable to control their despair. Mastroiannai’s Marcello is the same,
having the ability to use his fly-on-the-wall nature to see the world more
fully than others, but too liable to shrink in his corner instead anywhere he
goes unless he is blind drunk or destructive. His father, before the after
celebration drop, is able to juggle a luridness with grace and tenderness when
he goes to a club with his son and charms one of the female dancers, but
Marcello is only able to show himself fully to a person, a paparazzi friend who
tags along, when his father is on the dance floor and he is almost by himself. The
‘Sweet Life’, as the title translates into, is besieged by hesitation and fear
of directness.
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| From http://image.toutlecine.com/photos/d/o/u/douceur-de-vivre-1960-54-g.jpg |
The film is a visual feast around
this as well; despite being before his full blown delving into the baroque and
dreams, it still straddles the line, in evocative black and white, between the
odd and realistic for Fellini,
opening with the startling image of the Second Coming of Christ by means of
helicopter. It perfectly conveys the world Marcello lives in, a place of excess
and urban carnival that is beautiful in his highs, like the sad trombonist and
his sentient balloons, but ugly and off putting when he is at his lowest. Fellini’s admiration for all –
prostitutes of all kinds, the drunk, the heavily made-up and down-and-out – is admirable
and humanistic to the greatest extent, able to show a glamour that warms the
viewer’s heart while never neglecting the down trodden and showing their pride
and charisma. And it adds to the idea I gained from the film, of people stuck
in their positions, unless they were already happy, who like Marcello are
unable to move in a new decade but do not have the existential crisis he had. Unfortunately
for one, as Marcello finds out, there are worse that he could have felt. When he
stares into the eyes of a mirror image dragged out of the ocean in the last
scene, as a warning to him or a sign that he is too late to be able to change,
the sign of where Fellini would go
with his obsessions with the surreal would take over is shown but he at least
knew how to use it properly.
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| From http://clothesonfilm.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/La-Dolce-Vita_Marcello-Mastroianni-sunglasses-top-11.jpg |
Never view films like this as a ‘classic’;
if its fifty or more years old, it does not matter as long as you are taking in
by it or not. We as film obsessives and scholars, worse than the person who
dismisses viewing these movies because they are black-and-white and in another
language, can destroy these films far more brutally by shelving them into ‘Best
of Cinema’ lists and auteur dissection without thinking of the primal joys or
sadnesses one feels for films like this. It is not merely one of the best films
by Federico Fellini, it is a great
film because it is from a director who knew how to craft something passionate
and thoughtful, that should be shown on any TV station, not just BBC4, because
anyone could fall in love with it. Elitist attitudes to cinema will kill the
darlings rather than for them to be dismissed as ‘old’ by the apparent mainstream
who watches films while texting on their phones; the over nerdy, pedantic
intellectualism, rather than vital film education, will drain the life out of
cinema that could survive any neglect because of the viewers who would keep
them alive and relevant regardless. Being on the greatest films ever list is
probably a worst fate for a film like La
Dolce Vita now because we can pretend to have seen it, as we view
it, and believe it to be great rather than see them as the creations of others
we can adore. La Dolce Vita,
alongside Bicycle Thieves, are films
I adore now on these first viewings, and even if I write lists where they are on
them, it’s just a surface sign to how I admire them as wonderful films.
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| From http://stopglobalairwaveabuse.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/la-dolce-vita-paparazzi.jpg |
