Lynchian. Hitchcockian. The Lubitsch touch. Transforming a filmmaker’s name into a qualitative term has been a common practice in tracking the style and influence of those who have contributed to the art form. But few proper nouns-turned-adjectives carry a greater reserve of meaning than Felliniesque.
Felliniesque can refer to a carnival style, one that bends and toys with supposed distinctions between reality and fantasy. The Felliniesque acknowledges the potential for life to reach orgiastic highs and desperate lows in one fell swoop, and finds adults constantly haunted by the memories, trials, and joys of childhood. The Felliniesque can see beauty in the mundane, and abject horror in the most fantastic of experiences. There are few filmmakers whose style has remained so distinctive through an array of transitions, from social realism to fantastic spectacles. He is a filmmaker of enormous influence – yet, as Paolo Sorrentino demonstrated with The Great Beauty, it is better to tip our hat and pay homage than to imitate the unparalleled.
So here is some free advice (for fans and filmmakers alike) from no doubt the most Felliniesque director.
Freedom Scares People
Fellini’s late career had witnessed a thorough embrace of bizarre and unrestrained subject matter by this point (he had recently released his Satyricon), so it was abundantly clear that Fellini used his cultivated directorial power to thoroughly explore what cinematic freedom really means. Ever a raconteur, Fellini’s career demonstrates the importance of confronting audiences with what they won’t admit truly scares them. Yet even in this respect Fellini perhaps saw himself as exercising restraint. In the edited collection “I’m a Born Liar,” Fellini is quoted as saying about artistic freedom:
“I don’t believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there’s one thing that’s dangerous for an artist, it’s precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and the rest of it.”
All Filmmaking is Autobiographical
“Even if I set out to make a film about a filet of sole, it would be about me.” (told to The Atlantic, 1965)Use whatever received platitude you like (“write from experience,” “know your characters,” etc.), but Fellini’s films take the writer/director as film subject to a whole new level, using the intricate, detailed experiences and affects of one’s daily life and biography as the palette on which to paint the cinematic imagination. Might this be the moving image equivalent of gazing at one’s navel, as Scott Beggs suggested in our discussion of 8½ ? Perhaps, but there’s no need to fear the narcissist when living in their head produces such incredible filmmaking. Fellini’s films are a transparent, fully devoted embrace of the filmmaker’s life – from his youth in I Vitelloni to the sweet life of La Dolce Vita to the bittersweet nostalgia of Amarcord – as a deep well of subject matter for films.
“Making a Picture is Mathematical”
Movies are Made Up of Dream Logic
“Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another. It’s a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.” (as told to Rolling Stone, 1984)The potential of cinema as a concrete manifestation of dream logic is not only an apt description of Fellini’s directirial approach but, as he suggests in the second quote, the lifeblood of realizing cinema’s potential as a unique art form.
“The public has lost the habit of movie-going because the cinema no longer possesses the charm, the hypnotic charisma, the authority it once commanded. The image it once held for us all — that of a dream we dreamt with our eyes open — has disappeared. Is it still possible that one thousand people might group together in the dark and experience the dream that a single individual has directed?” (“I’m a Born Liar”)
Don’t Look for Life Experience; Have It, Then Reflect
“Experience is what you get while looking for something else.” (“I’m a Born Liar”)Fellini’s output especially beginning with the early 1960s, can be accused of plotlessness by the most conservative type of moviegoer. But it’s the formlessness – or rather, the open approach to form and structure – that make his filmmaking unmatched. Whether exploring the decadence of ancient Rome, studying the rough daily life of a prostitute, or living the high life in the most hip city in postwar Europe, Fellini’s films are really about the quotidian, ephemeral moments of life that movies often leave out: the moments that are experienced but don’t seem to add up to something, if they can be evaluated at all. It’s in the plotlessness of life – the meandering, disorienting, or in-between moments – that the filmmaker can mine for the most valuable, overlooked experiences.
Moralism Isn’t Compatible with Aesthetics
What We’ve Learned: Watch Fellini’s Movies in Order
With the vibrant, exaggerated, fantastical style he became known for, it may seem that Fellini’s films abstract the viewer from his life – instead, they are records of his subjectivity, deep investigations of his emotional and psychological states of being. And what’s most important about Fellini’s life onscreen is that it changes, evolves, adapts, and shifts in priorities while remaining distinctive, unique, and honest. His is not a static identity, but one that grew and altered in many ways as his life did. Fellini may have been an evident narcissist, but he was also incredibly self-aware – a combination that makes for thoroughly autobiographical filmmaking. How Felliniesque.
No comments:
Post a Comment