Still ...

Despite beginning intensive French classes, I've managed to keep up with educating and occupying myself with more movies. It's a funny thing, these brief comments about film are really just a counter to remind myself what I've been viewing. It must also harken back to the advice that my English tutor in JC gave about film watching -- always write about whatever you watch -- that way your parents won't get on your case for 'wasting' your time at the movies. Of course, that was before DVD ...

Anyway -- the list, as far as I can remember:

1. More Felini: I went and looked up some of his earlier work. "La Strada" (The Road) is supposed to be the last film that Fellini did before breaking out of very conventional story telling. Apparently its succcess at the box-office allowed him more control and freedom over the kinds of experiments that he wanted to do in his films. It's shot in austere black and white with post WW2 Italy, its dusty country roads and scattered villages providing the backdrop of the film. It follows the fortunes of a travelling 'strongman' (ie he's a gypsy entertaining small village crowds to make ends meet) and his companion, a young girl who is 'sold' to him by her poor mother. It's tragic and pretty conventional though there's a tinge of sadness in every scene, even in the comic burlesque and Chaplin-like clowning that the young girl brings to the film. Another Fellini film: La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life) is apparently the film that made popular the term "paparazzi". As this suggests, the film deals with the glamorous and decadent life of actors and celebraties and their numerous escapes into hedonistic abondonment. Most of the film tracks the late night activities of these individuals, all tied together by a writer, Marcello. Definitely highly stylized, with great control of light and dark spaces. It's almost a more coherent (and semiotically familiar) version of Fellini's later work, "Satyricon".

2. We just can't shake out the Merchant Ivory. Three films that deal with British / post-British India. "Heat and Dust", which was supposed to be the film that launched Greta Scacchi's career. White women falling in love with Indian men and screwing everything up. Pretty much in tune with the next film "A Passage to India", which paid more attention to inner struggles and the clash between cultures (though it isn't a Merchant-Ivory film but one by David Lean). Of course, I'm pretty biased about what a good film version of this book should look like cause I studied it pretty intensely for the A levels. It placed a lot of emphasis on the first portion of the book and really squeezes the working out of important implications to a rushed last half-hour. Still, this probably explains why I'd make a terrible script writer. Last on this part of the list, "Shakespeare Wallah", an old Merchant-Ivory production (60s?) that traces the fortunes of a company of Shakespearean actors that tour India after 1947, their dwindling audiences (over taken by Bollywood, of course) and a return, to England. Of course, the daughter (young English girl who has lived all her life in India) of the company's director, falls for a rich, young Indian ... Profoundly moving though, and some excellent snippet stagings of several Shakespeare plays (in a very 18th/19th C 'affected' manner).

3. I've also started watching the Black Adder comedies. The first series, which re-writes the history of pre-Tudor England has been the most enjoyable so far. The second series, which deals with Elizabethan England has its moments (and mad queen!) but there seems to have been an attempt to make adjustments to the series so that it caters for a different audience. The dialogue is just silly at points, instead of a clever and allusive re-working of historical (and dramatic via Shakespeare) givens.

4. And let's not forget the book. I also managed to sneak in "Arthur and George" by Julian Barnes. I fall into these moods where I realize that I haven't read any contemporary fiction in a while so I got this (a nice brand new hardback for seven bucks including postage ...) because I really like Julian Barnes. I must so it was very engaging and had some interesting tense shifts. But it definitely pales in comparison to "A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters" and "Metroland", because it tries to hard to depend on a mystery plot, when the materials at hand can't sustain a dramatic revelation. Anyway, that's probably a reaction to feeling a little let down by how it winds to a close. The earlier bits that track class and racial tensions in early 20th C England, were very nice. And the strange use of the SIMPLE present tense, and how that often shifted unnoticeably into a more conventional past tense of recounted events and reported speech, immensely disorientating and disturbing: it was as it the 'facts' were slipping out of one's hands, all the time.