Word: fellini
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Robert Benchley once divided the world into two kinds of people: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who do not. Director Federico Fellini (La Dolce Vita, Satyricori) is firmly in the first category. In his new film, The Clowns, Fellini separates mankind into two classic species of fool: Pierrot and Auguste. Pierrot is the familiar circus clown in floppy white and conical hat, elegant and haughty. The clown Auguste is an eternal tramp, crumpled, drunken and rebellious...
...escapes. Picasso and Einstein, says Fellini in a published exegesis of the film, are Augustes. Middle-class parents are Pierrots; their children Augustes. Hitler: a white clown. Mussolini: an Auguste. Freud: a white clown. Jung: an Auguste...
...Fellini's 14th film, like all of the maestro's visual operas, is a flamboyant search for self. This time he prowls the enchanted place of his youth, the circus, but the spectacle of childish memory is a specter to the mature man. The circus has changed or vanished, the clown acts are,diminished beyond recognition...
...Fellini journey, reality is only a pebble in the shoe. He turns the world into his circus and, in a liberated, quasi-documentary style, resurrects some of history's great pagliacci with their cornucopia of practical jokes, smashed hats, pulled chairs, popping balloons and squirting flowers. Fellini's pretense is to restore the icons of his youth for the pleasure of today's children, but beyond the easy delights is a philosophy clearly aimed at adults...
...appropriately wretched and includes such Deathless Words to Live By as "Life is made up of small comings and goings." This wisdom was provided by Herman Raucher, co-scenarist of Anthony Newley's Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe, etc., who now has apparently forsaken fake Fellini for pseudo Salinger. Give him one thing, though, he's the equal of Erich Segal - in art, if not in commerce...