FELLINI OUTSIDE TIME

giorgio de chirico

 

I've been in the Tropic of Torpor today, nothing in the mind, nothing I want to do. Take a nap, up for awhile, another nap, up for awhile, another nap. All the time awake I wanted to be asleep. Finally, I rose from the bed intending to stay up for awhile. It was after 8. Put in the movie of the day, Fellini's 8 1/2. Two nights ago I saw La Dolce Vita. Takes me back to the early 1960s. These two films were so very modern then, Italian chic, the new cutting edge in film. Then, they were as obscure to me as what goes on in a donkey's mind. Today, they retain their original obscurity. I've seen them both around five times, and none of those times did I feel like I got what was happening, but followed the stories well enough to stay with them, but what's going on behind the story is still a mystery. This time with them I watched as though sitting on the beach watching the waves come in, crash and fade to a wavering line on the sand. I did not want to figure them out. I wanted to see the stories as Fellini told them, leaving out mental static. First time I saw La Dolce Vita was in the auditorium at Wichita State U, maybe 1962. I think the art department put it on. It was new then and the talk of the cinema world internationally, making it an essential film to see for anyone interested in the art of film making, or simply art. It was my first art film. I'd never seen anything but Hollywood films before. It was my first experience reading subtitles. It was so modern it made me feel backwards. I've seen so many films over the last five or so years with netflix I've quit analyzing films. I receive them now as I believe they are intended to be received, riding the flow from beginning to end, seeing where it goes, immersed in the beauty of the visuals. In both these Fellini films he juxtaposed the modern with the ancient. Much of the outdoors scenes were against the ruins of ancient Rome that continue to stand in modern Rome.

 

giorgio de chirico

 

Perhaps the only scene in La Dolce Vita I recognized as having seen it before was Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni late at night in evening clothes standing in a Roman fountain, water to their knees, making out and talking silly nothings. I invited Lucas Pasley, English teacher at the high school, to watch it. We get together to watch a film a few times a year. He watched very closely with analytic mind full steam. We talked about the role of the paparazzi in the film. We came to see they were Marcello's grounding. He goes back to his fantasy life, lives in fantasy world of celebrities for awhile and the paparazzi arrive, grounding him. I'd have never seen that without Lucas waking up my analyzing mind. I've been out of school long enough to forget how to read and see films analytically, by weariness of it, finding I miss much of what is happening in a scene using mind to figure it out. Sometimes I feel like subtitles are a distraction from the beauty and will watch a foreign film without subtitles, to enjoy the beauty of the language, having learned just about everything is told visually. First time I saw Zhang Yimou's film, Ju Dou, it started without the subtitles and I decided to let it roll and see what happens. I've seen it three times and that was the most beautiful of all. The only thing I missed was names and names of relationships, like uncle, cousin, details in language. It's hard to watch, an extremely sad story, the kind only the Chinese do, devastatingly sad, and beautiful to the same degree. The story happens in a place where silk is soaked in pools of dye and hangs on rods to dry, flowing in the air, reds that are out of this world. The Chinese are the masters of the color red. Seeing the film and understanding the words spoken filled in some blanks, but by comparison gave the film a boring edge. I miss so many visuals reading, I've learned to read and look at the images simultaneously, multi-tasking. Am so free with subtitles now I use them on English language films due to so much muttering and whispering before an explosion, a gunfight, a bomb, a car blowing up. I despise turning up the sound to hear the whispering, then BAM, and turn the volume down as fast as possible, always too late.

 

giorgio de chirico

 

I was thinking about watching 8 1/2 again tomorrow without subtitles. The disk has a commentary with it, too. Thought I might watch it with commentary. I believe my preference would be without subtitles. Having read the script while watching it, I don't see I'll miss anything. None of the talking had anything to do with anything. It was chatter and distracting noise around Marcello's head. Marcello, an Italian film director, is about to begin a new film. Producers, actors, agents, girlfriends, wife, everybody appealing for his attention. He's driven nuts by demands on him from all directions. In the end he pops a cap in his head, then maybe he didn't. Maybe he did. Probably didn't. Probably did. It doesn't matter whether he did or not. The whole story was a dream. Did it happen, did it not happen? Doesn't matter. In one way of looking at it, I can say he died in the beginning of the film. He was in his car in a big traffic jam. His car started filling up with a gas, he banged on the windows trying to get out, then he was quiet. Next, he was seen crawling out a window onto the roof of the car, stood there arms outstretched and drifted away through the air, overcoat waving in the breeze, floating over the tops of the cars. Next, Marcello is up in the sky, a rope tied to his ankle held at the other end by a man standing on the beach. He jerked on the rope and Marcello fell into the sea. Then the story begins. I could say his spirit left the body and went through the review of his life, as they say happens upon leaving the body. The film was his review. It included scenes from childhood. The people around him were telling him what was wrong with him, pointing out his weaknesses, attempting to humiliate him. At the end of the story he pops a cap in his head and next we have a circus band and clowns, the people of his life, mother and father, walking by in a personal parade that includes him and himself as a child. Then the entire cast of the film enters the circus scene. I can very easily see it a vision of the spirit leaving the body, but will not draw that conclusion. I don't want to ruin it with a conclusion.

 

giorgio de chirico

 

Talking with Lucas about La Dolce Vita, no more than briefly in anecdotes while the film was going, and briefly when it was over, I saw much I'd have never seen on my own. He noted the turning point in the film. It had not registered to me there was a turning point. When I saw it, it was plain and right there, obvious. Marcello's only friend, whose name I forget, was an existentialist who waxed philosophical, and was Marcello's other grounding agent in his life in the fantasy world of celebrities, a man who had an air of sanity about him. He killed his whole family and himself. That knocked Marcello off his track. The paparazzi never appeared again, Marcello was lost in space in his world of less than trivial demands. I was glad Lucas pointed that out. I saw it, but it didn't register. I took the murder/suicide for a shit happens day. Perhaps I did not see that as a turning point, because I never think about things like turning points. I found his falling apart inevitable in the flow of the story. Lucas said he had a great deal to think about on the way home before he's satisfied with what he saw. I was in awe that I'd seen a film that totally blew my circuits. I was seeing the juxtaposition of the old world and the old ways against the new world of fashion, celebrity, lights, new cars, pretensions. This story of the trials of modern man was largely filmed in environments of another Age, while still in Rome. It gives the sense, too, that it is an ancient story in modern dress. Lucas and I were both struck by the attitudes of the men toward the women. Slut and whore were frequently repeated words in the script. I remembered the film was made when Women's Liberation was in infancy, and this was Italy, a different culture from ours. It was a little bit shocking, indicating that we, the people of Western Civ have changed in that regard over the last half century. Both films are 50+ years old. They are as if they could have been made this year. Both films were outside time. They continue to be two of my very favorite films.       

 

giorgio de chirico himself

 

 

*

 

  

ELSA & FRED THE MOVIE

     elsa & fred go to rome

Today's foreign film was ELSA & FRED, Spanish, made in Madrid. Elsa is a complex woman and Fred a man who worked the same job forty years. She's a bit of a dreamer and he's bound by pragmatic reality. In the beginning, Fred moves into an apartment across the hall from Elsa's eight months after his only wife had died. Elsa falls for him, commits indiscretions to spend time with him. He gradually comes to realize she's not always telling the truth in anything she says, she lives in a fantasy world of herself as Anita Ekberg in Felinni's LA DOLCE VITA. In Elsa's fantasy mind Fred is Marcello Mastroianni. He has a difficult time with her whims. She wants to charm him into falling in love with her and she does it. She charms him with her excesses, her spontaneity, her loco mind. He goes from calling her loco unto almost having a heart attack from the stress of his internal fury in reaction to her nutty behavior. He inadvertently fell in love and became her accomplice in following her loco fantasies. Such fantasies as taking him for lunch at a restaurant neither was equipped to pay the bill. She talked him into walking out with her and driving away. He did and he was hooked.


Elsa turned out to be such a terrific liar that Fred saw he couldn't believe anything she told him about her actual life with a son as a failure abstract artist and a stuffy son and daughter in law who were driven by money and appearances. The story goes on and I caught onto her lying as Fred was catching onto it. Fred's way of responding to her fantasies about herself was to appreciate it in her. He came to see that the dream was the real Elsa. Once he stepped through that passage Elsa became more fun than ever before. Both have their medical ailments and both are living in a time of their lives when any day is their last. They take pills, have doctor appointments, have grown offspring who believe their role is to control these old people. Both Elsa and Fred liberate themselves from that belief, while not alienating their kids either. They fall in love and their kids don't like it (naturally). They demand their freedom to live their lives as they will. Reluctantly the kids let them have their way, which they had already taken.


Watching Fred puzzle over Elsa's fantasies became the story for me. Finally, he discovers she really is loco and that's ok. In her dreams is where he found her. A couple of times he told her she was a teenager in an old woman's body and she thanked him for seeing it. Every minute throughout the story is a dance in the face of death. Two people in their last days refuse to give in to what is expected of old people. They will themselves to have happy times anyway. Who's to say old people can't be happy? This was also one of the questions entertained in the story. So they're a little bit silly in their giddy, sometimes childlike behavior. Sometimes they act like teenagers, laughing and cutting up in public whenever the whim strikes, getting a kick out of being seen in love. Elsa's successful son asked her what her purpose was with Fred. It was the first interjection from the world where Elsa and Fred are not understood, like teenagers. They had never entertained the question, as I had not either, of why and where it's going. For me, the viewer, it came as a kind of shock, because it was not a matter of consideration for them. The purpose is now. How could they explain that? They explained it by living it.


Neither Elsa nor Fred have much longer to live. They both know it. Her fantasies don't deny her dying. Her fantasies are about making the days entertaining, having fun, unconcerned about spending money. They were seizing the moment, living in the now. In love they had found the now. So what if Elsa lied about her past. In her apartment she featured a b&w photograph of Anita Ekberg from LA DOLCE VITA. She identified with the photograph, and it turns out she identified with Anita Ekberg and she was a knockout in her younger years. She wished she had been a star, but she had never come anywhere near being a star, but in her mind. Fred watched LA DOLCE VITA with his friend the doctor. It was funny for me hearing them comment on the brilliance of the photography, the sensuality of the fountain scene where Elsa visualized herself in Anita Ekberg's form. They talked like Europeans. It was notably not Americans talking in relation to a Fellini film. There are some, but not many. It had the subtlety only Europeans have access to, some Asians too, basically the subtlety of appreciation for art. 


Fred did not care about her past, did not want to know her past anymore. They didn't have a great deal of time left. She had never been to Rome, had never seen the fountain in the film. Fred's loser soninlaw had wanted a huge investment of cash to open a business that Fred reluctantly gave in to, having nothing else to do with his money. He came around to seeing the soninlaw was not worth the money that would be the same as thrown away. He put that money in plane tickets, hotel rooms and dining in Rome, the fountain the goal. Elsa waited until the third day to want to go to the fountain. By this time he had joined her fantasies as her partner. She wanted them to act out the scene, Anita and Marcello, standing in the fountain in evening clothes. They played their parts in such a way that it was Fred and Elsa as well as Anita and Marcello at the same time. It was done with incredibly subtle photography and editing. In the moment they were acting the scene, it turned into b&w like in the original. Their souls united in that moment. It stunned me to see how effective the transition in and out of that scene worked, how powerful the scene was. Even subliminally the viewer knows this is their moment ordained from when they first met.


The scene in the fountain was the purpose of their relationship to answer the soninlaw's question. His daughter, for apparently the first time in her life understood her papa for a day when he withdrew the money from his agreement to invest in their small business and take Elsa to Rome. Soninlaw complained he spent the money on that woman and daughter saw it as Fred and Elsa saw it, the money well spent for a priceless moment. The priceless moment was one of the themes that ran through the story to have its apex in the ultimate priceless moment for them. Early in their relationship she told him she was going to teach him to laugh and we see him finding occasion to laugh more and more until there comes a time he is laughing unselfconsciously out loud and in public. The actors, Manuel Alexandre and China Zorrilla, appear to have been well known acting in films in their younger years, he in Spain, she in Argentina. They were Anita and Marcello in Elsa's "teenage" mind, young and beautiful falling in love in a Roman fountain in LA DOLCE VITA. During the fountain scene I spoke out loud, "Beautiful movie!" in awe for every detail of the film and the story. It is about the ultimate heart movie that never even remotely fell into sentiment in its plunges into the depths of feeling that play all the strings of the heart.


 *