Fellini!

Federico Fellini's work is another theme that I've started in my film viewing. This takes the "genius director" thing in another direction, I guess, cause I think that becoming acquainted with directorial styles outside the Hollywood studio system is an interesting endeavor.

Anyway, I've started with the following. They weren't watched in close proximity -- I doubt this would be useful because they're all very lush films with so much going on!

1. 8 1/2 -- I've known about this film's reputation for several years but never got down to watching it. if I were forced to say something about it that encapsulates my current theoretical interests, I would definitely say that the film is a great text for demonstrating numerous aspects of psychoanalytic theory. Of course, this gets away from the film somewhat but ... It's about a director trying to make a film (!!) And the various social and sexual memories that the process condenses emerges through Fellini's distracted fragmented story-telling. It's highly entertaining with lots of humorous moments.

2. Satyricon -- This was a more stressful film to watch, not only because it was shot in a riot of color against drab stone settings, but because the episodic nature of the film really stretches one's ability to follow the arcs of desire (which is probably the point). The two main characters are Roman students who end up in a range of adventures (like fighting over a slave boy, becoming slaves on a boat and kidnapping a hermaphrodite demi-god ...) The body is on parade in all its splendor and wretchedness in this film. With so many bodies on display, in all shapes and sizes, it's hard to think of "surface" in the same way after this film.



3. Juliet of the Spirits -- A middle aged lady living in comfort gets her life disrupted by her husband's adultery and strange dream-like visions. The juxtaposing of the most ordinary indoor life of a housewife against the fantastically quirky moments where the repressed past haunts her, makes for interesting and disorientating film watching. As part of these three Fellini films, this would place in the middle of the other two in the way it disrupts linearity, with 8 1/2 being somewhat more conventional (though it gets away with that because the premise, a director struggling to make a movie, already alters one's expectations of a conventional story line) and Satyricon being the strangest of the lot. In an inversion of 8 1/2, here the female lead is confronted with her childhood.