Word: fellini
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...Grolier bookshop, not otherwise philistines, have recently admitted that they don't read poetry the way they used to. Too difficult, they argue; takes too much patience. There's too much of it, and most of it isn't applicable to our lives, anyway. Rather see a Fellini movie or listen to a rock orgy on the radio...
BRATTLE Sept. 22-288 1/2 Federico Fellini La Viaccia Mauro Bolognini Sept. 29-Oct. 5 Elvira Madigan Bo Widerberg Morgan Karel Reisz Oct. 6-12 Persona Ingmar Bergman Devil By The Tail Phillippe de Broca Oct. 13-19 The Seven Samurai Akira Kurosawa Oct. 20-26 Boy Nagisa Oshima Weekend Jean Luc Godard CENTRAL SQ. Oct 13-16 The Big Store Marx Brothers A Day at the Circus Oct. 17-19 Ninotchka Greta Garbo Anna Karenina Oct. 20-23 Lolita Peter Sellers The Night of the Iguana Richard Burton Oct. 24-26 Captains Courageous Spencer Tracy Mutiny on the Bounty...
...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...
From time to time, the camera breaks away from the center ring to inspect clowns in senescence, brittle little men who recall Falstaff's lament: "How ill white hairs become a fool." In the midst of unabashed gaiety, Fellini ushers in bitterness: an Italian lion tamer who trains his beasts in German because "it is the only human language that they understand." The film's zenith is a funeral staged con brio-the spectacular obsequies of a clown, his hearse drawn by men in horse suits, his widow a clown with pendulous breasts, the orator a grotesque...
...Here Fellini insists on the last laugh. If the human condition is a melancholy joke, he implies, then death is its punch line and hilarity the only proper response. The film maker pretends to have no "message" in The Clowns; when an actor asks him the meaning of his film, a bucket drops over the director's head in mid-reply. But absurdity itself is a commentary. It is also the perpetual delight of this indelible, grieving comedy in which the viewers, Pierrots and Augustes all, are the stars...