This is a preview of a paper to view the full text you need to signup and login.
|
Fartknocker
|
|
|
Boston Review: For more film reviews by Alan Stone, click here or choose from a list of 8 1/2: Fellini's Moment of Truth Fellini's last great film has baffled a generation of critics. Alan Stone explains why. Alan A. Stone Out of the ruins of Italy after the Second World War came an astonishingly impressive film industry with a sobering but passionate vision -- neo-realism. Led by such directors as Rossellini, Visconti, and DeSica, Italian filmmakers without resources or established stars quickly earned a respected place in the forefront of post-war cinema. Within months of the Axis surrender, Americans were sitting in movie theaters empathetically watching the plight of Italians who had been their enemies. What is more, Italy had regained a measure of its national dignity. There can hardly be a more convincing demonstration of the importance of film, the uniquely 20th century art form. Working as a jack-of-all-trades with that first generation of great Italian directors was the enterprising Federico Fellini. He would eventually have the opportunity to create his own quirky version of neo-realism, matching the material poverty of provincial Italy with the spiritual loneliness of its inhabitants. His predecessors had featured the raw voluptuous sexuality of Anna Magnani and the statuesque beauty of Sophia Loren. Fellini's heroine and his wife was the childlike, almost physically stunted, Giulieta Masina. He made her a star and established his own international reputation as a filmmaker with La Strada (1954), which paired the diminutive Masina with the brutally masculine Anthony Quinn. La Strada earned Fellini his first of four Best Foreign Film Oscars and a devoted American following. La Strada is the story of a young woman, not quite right in the head, who is sold by her mother to a circus strong man. At another level it is a parable about Italy under fascism and the possibility of Christian Salvation. The Catholic Church applauded the film while the intellectual left criticized it as a betrayal of neo-realism. Filmgoers all over the world argued about the moral of the story, but there was a clear and coherent narrative structure; everyone thought they understood what they had seen and knew what they were arguing about. Fellini claimed that this was exactly what he had wanted to achieve. His credo was that film should ask questions not give answers. Less than a decade later, in 1963, Fellini made 8 1/2, a film that juxtaposed dreams, visions, fantasies, and realities in a cinematic version of the director's own stream of consciousness. Moviegoers had to guess what was real and what imagined, with little help from the director. Almost no one knew for sure what they had seen after one viewing. Not only were there no answers, audiences could not agree about the questions. Even the title was an obscure insider's reference to the number of Fellini's films. But 8 1/2 is so beautifully made and so filled with unforgettable images that one can just lean back and enjoy the phantasmagoria. Indeed, Pauline Kael tells us that this was one of the first films that people intentionally went to stoned. Fellini's 8 1/2 was not simply an acid-head's delight. It was the culmination of the director's narcissistic turn, in which he severed his roots in neo-realism. Fellini was becoming more interested in symbolic images than coherent ideas, more concerned about his actors' faces than their acting, more preoccupied with his own psychological ruminations than with politics or reality. His films became a series of tableaux seemingly dredged up from the unconscious. 8 1/2 was described at the time of its release as a "spectacle of the spirit," but in retrospect it was also the moment of creative implosion when Fellini lost his way in a maze of Jungian archetypes, Freudian fixations, and Sartrean despair. Even La Strada had its mysteriously memorable scenes, but they were effectively woven into the plot. And Masina, though a diminutive waif, was much more than a freak of nature. Fellini's symbolism began to overstep the boundaries of his narrative. The huge statue of Christ carried by helicopter above eternal Rome in the opening scene of La Dolce Vita is memorable, but no one really knew what it meant.
|
|
|
To link to this page, copy the following code to your site:
|
|
Paper Information
|
|
|
Title: Fartknocker
Words: 3430
Rating: None
Pages: 13.7
submitted by: aasimon
If you think this paper shouldn't be here then
|
|
|
|
|
Signup & Login
|
|
|
If you don't currently have a login then Signup here
|
|
|
|
|
Pre-Written Papers
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Custom Papers
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
