Word: fellini
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Fellini unifies these disjointed variations on a chamber music theme with pure showmanship, with extravagant, baroque, visually stupendous theatrics. The curtain rises, as it were, on a magnificent Venetian mosque on the Grand Canal. As fireworks explode above the Rialto and gondolas pass below, the huge head of a woman is hoisted out of the canal. Suddenly--a rope breaks, poles fall, masquers scream and the vast shape sinks back under the dark green water. The camera focuses in on one costumed mannequin, dressed in white, with his hair pulled back off an amazingly high forehead. The stage...
...Fellini's visual dramatics are alternately hilarious, grotesque or ritualistic. Every situation, every object, every character is extreme. One court is full of unbelievably rich, unbelievably ugly old duchesses, another revolves around a loathsome insect-like homosexual, the epitome of perversion. A third is the scene of bear-pit debauchery; here Casanova wins this contest: how many times can you came in an hour of fucking...
...FELLINI DELIGHTS in showing us how he has made this artificial world, like a slyly smiling magician revealing the secrets of each of his tricks. And this master is such a consummate artist that his revelations are more marvelous than the tricks were. The stage-set world is fascinating because it is visibly cardboard; Casnova and the other characters are intriguing because they are caricatures, marionettes...
...Fellini's Casanova is not a person, but the sex puppet of fantasy. He makes love as though he were doing push-ups; it is a mechanical performance, a physical feat. Only once does this figure meet a female from whom he appears to take pleasure. She is a miracle of art, a mechanical doll made of china. Casanova screws her differently, with a new harmony. They are two freaks of a kind. Casnova's lovemaking is artifice, aptly symbolized by the mechanical golden cock he carries into each bedroom, winds, and sets going to accompany his pulsations with...
...Fellini's marionette show the music-box bird rusts among busts of Homer, and the aged Casanova dreams surrounded by books in a northern court. His dreams are the stuff his myth has been made out of: Venetian splendour, glittering women coming towards him, or running coquettishly away. But in his dream he dances with only one lady, on a frozen Grand Canal under the Rialto; the porcelain doll and Casanova revolve to the music of his golden cock, in a world made only of illusion, creations of self-conscious...