Word: fellini
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Most directors are content to Xerox the world. Federico Fellini created his own world on film, and it has taken the rest of us a lifetime to appreciate the acuity of his vision...
...times are surreal enough now; we can appreciate Fellini as a prophet and documentarian of every cultural excess of the late 20th century. There's no question that Fellini was in part satirizing his milieu. But because he was incapable of a stillborn frame of film, his pictures celebrate what they criticize; they amount to a cautionary blueprint for survival in the atomic age. If you've been very lucky or very naughty, then life for you is like a Fellini movie...
...Fellini really did run away to join a traveling circus. He was sent home within a few days, but his heart stayed there. In a Fellini film, life is a circus without surcease. Come inside, children of all ages, where (in Amarcord) the snowflakes are as fat as pancakes, where (in The Nights of Cabiria, 1957) streetwalkers dance like schoolgirls and (in Juliet of the Spirits (1965), God may be waiting for you in the attic...
...Fellini once played God: he was the vagabond whom a peasant (Anna Magnani) mistakes for Jesus in Roberto Rossellini's The Miracle (1948). For Fellini, however, God was a goddess and woman was the world -- everything in the world that excites and frightens, forbids and enchants. To Marcello in La Dolce Vita, woman is "mother, sister, daughter, lover, angel, home." How small and sad and funny men are in comparison! At one end of the spectrum they are like the midget bluenose in Boccaccio 70 (1962) overwhelmed by Anita Ekberg as a sexual giantess -- it's the attack...
Brattle Theatre. 40 Brattle St., Harvard Square. 876-6837. "La Strada" on Oct. 28 at 4, 6, 8 and 10 p.m. Fellini's early masterpiece and the film that brought him international acclaim, "La Strada" has been out of distribution since 1988. The timeless story of an innocent peasant girl employed and seduced by an itinerant circus strongman. Giulietta Masina is outstanding as Gelsomina the waif, and Anthony Quinn and Richard Basehart's performances equal hers as the two men in her life...