Word: fellinis
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directed by Federico Fellini...
Guilietta Masina is charming as the wide eyed Gelsomina, who seems unable to get angry over others' cruelty to her. Masina's Gelsomina gazes at the world with wonder, although there can be little wonderful about its realities for her. Fellini offsets her timidity, which practically amounts to a social stupidity, against her purity of spirit. The combination gives her a childlike, saintly aura...
...film won the 1954 Oscar award for Best Foreign Film. In addition to suberb acting. "La Strada" is visually stunning. Fellini uses warm sepia-washed black and white film throughout, and alternates between a soft and hard focus lense filter. Very rarely does he use either pure black or white. In a Bergmanesque fashion, he places the camera strategically to strengthen the film's allegorical strains. Gelsomina is always seen from slightly above, as if she were being watched by a guardian angel. During an Easter parade the camera looks upwards, circling around the massive crosses to emphasize their grandeur...
Dream of a garden painted by Rousseau, under the canopy of a huge Tiffany lampshade and inhabited by creatures from Fellini's or Tim Burton's wittiest musings. In this Day-Glo, candy-cane fantasia, the whole food chain is on display. The roustabouts wriggle like worms; some of the featured artistes are dressed as tigers or lizards. The clowns could be from a Greenwich Village Halloween parade: Munchkins and bathing beauties, Road Warriors and samurai. This is a circus even Madonna could love -- commedia dell'arte as restaged by surrealists in a birthday-party mood...
LONG BEFORE THE LITERATI INVENTED Magic Realism, the people who worked in movie studios were living it. On back lots all over the world, the harshly practical has always confronted the giddily romantic. In his faux documentary INTERVISTA (Interview), Federico Fellini imagines a fictional Japanese television crew interviewing him as he shoots an equally fictive movie version of Kafka's Amerika. The result is not so much a self-portrait as a sentimental-satirical vision of back-lot life, a jazzy juxtaposition of past and present, star egos and bit-player frustrations, epic pretensions and commercial hackery...