#FedericoFellini100 #LaDolceVita60
Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, Jan 17 2020:
"...Fellini is also the great divider. “La Dolce Vita” was the film most loved by Roger Ebert, for whom it was transformed with every viewing, whereas Pauline Kael likened Fellini’s efforts to “poking your head into a sack of fertilizer and then becoming indignant because you’re covered with excrement.” The director, she said, was “shocked and horrified” by the antics of the idle rich that he surveyed. If so, the shock has not survived; what lingers, after sixty years, is a lazy amusement at mortal foibles, which are scarcely confined to the wealthy. It is the poor who flock to a strip of wasteland where a couple of kids, for a giggle, claim to have beheld the Virgin Mary. Any hint of holiness is wrecked by a rainstorm, and by the glare of the arc lights under which TV cameras hope to catch the miracle, yet Fellini does not rage at our credulity. He smiles...."
'Shallow people demand variety -- but I have been writing the same story throughout my life, every time trying to cut nearer the aching nerve."
Strindberg
(quoted by Marathi writer G. A. Kulkarni as epigraph to his book 'Pinglavel', first published in 1977)
जी. ए. कुलकर्णी ज्यावेळी हे उद्धृत करतात , त्यावेळी असे वाटते की हे (एकच गोष्ट पुन्हा पुन्हा सांगणे) त्यांना मान्य आहे. त्यांच्या मते कलावंताच्या दुखऱ्या नसे पर्यंत जायचा तो एक राजमार्ग आहे.
पण सत्यजीत रेंना ते मान्य नाही. फेल्लिनी तोच सिनेमा कायम काढत आले असे त्यांना वाटते. त्यांची ह्याला नापसंती दिसती आहे.
Shawn Levy, 'Dolce Vita Confidential: Fellini, Loren, Pucci, Paparazzi, and the Swinging High Life of 1950s Rome', 2016 :
"...Federico Fellini was starting to be
recognized outside of Italy, and Michelangelo Antonioni was gaining a
significant constituency of his own.Antonioni was, in many ways, the
anti-Fellini, cool and austere where Fellini was gregarious and cluttered,
taciturn and intellectual where Fellini was garrulous and fantastical. The two
respected each other and got along well professionally, but they were destined
to run on parallel tracks, never intersecting and, at least in the eyes of the
world, always competing with one another: an auteurist incarnation of the civil
wars between Vespa and Lambretta, Coppi and Bartali, Loren and Lollobrigida....
Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita (1960)
Credit: Astor Pictures Corporation
Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, Jan 17 2020:
"...Fellini is also the great divider. “La Dolce Vita” was the film most loved by Roger Ebert, for whom it was transformed with every viewing, whereas Pauline Kael likened Fellini’s efforts to “poking your head into a sack of fertilizer and then becoming indignant because you’re covered with excrement.” The director, she said, was “shocked and horrified” by the antics of the idle rich that he surveyed. If so, the shock has not survived; what lingers, after sixty years, is a lazy amusement at mortal foibles, which are scarcely confined to the wealthy. It is the poor who flock to a strip of wasteland where a couple of kids, for a giggle, claim to have beheld the Virgin Mary. Any hint of holiness is wrecked by a rainstorm, and by the glare of the arc lights under which TV cameras hope to catch the miracle, yet Fellini does not rage at our credulity. He smiles...."
Satyajit Ray, interview to Cineaste magazine, 1981:
“I think I achieved maturity at a pretty early stage. It has
been my preoccupation to achieve as much density as possible within a
superficially simple narrative structure. I don't think of the Western
audiences when I make my films. I am thinking of my own audience in Bengal. I
am trying to take them along with me, and this I have succeeded in doing. At
the beginning, this audience was extremely unsophisticated. They were used to
trash or the naive Bengali film. You had to take them along slowly. Sometimes
you took a leap as in Kanchenjungha or in Days and Nights in the Forest, and
lost them. These kinds of risks, especially in relation to their audiences,
haven't been taken by Bergman or Fellini. Bergman is fairly simple, although he
can be very austere and rigorous, and he is often aided by some marvelous
photography. As for Fellini, he seems to be making the same film over and over
again. There is a lot of bravura in his films, in spite of the fact that he's
not so interested in the stories, and people go to see that bravura. I can't do
all that Bergman and Fellini do. I don't have their audiences and I don't work
in that kind of context. I have to contend with an audience that is used to
dross. I have worked with an Indian audience for thirty years and, in that
time, the general look of cinema hasn't changed. Certainly not in Bengal.
You'll find directors there are so backward, so stupid, and so trashy that
you'll find it difficult to believe that their works exist alongside my films.
I am forced by circumstances to keep my stories on an innocuous level. What I
can do, however, is to pack my films with meaning and psychological inflections
and shades, and make a whole which will communicate a lot of things to many
people.”
'Shallow people demand variety -- but I have been writing the same story throughout my life, every time trying to cut nearer the aching nerve."
Strindberg
(quoted by Marathi writer G. A. Kulkarni as epigraph to his book 'Pinglavel', first published in 1977)
जी. ए. कुलकर्णी ज्यावेळी हे उद्धृत करतात , त्यावेळी असे वाटते की हे (एकच गोष्ट पुन्हा पुन्हा सांगणे) त्यांना मान्य आहे. त्यांच्या मते कलावंताच्या दुखऱ्या नसे पर्यंत जायचा तो एक राजमार्ग आहे.
पण सत्यजीत रेंना ते मान्य नाही. फेल्लिनी तोच सिनेमा कायम काढत आले असे त्यांना वाटते. त्यांची ह्याला नापसंती दिसती आहे.
Shawn Levy, 'Dolce Vita Confidential: Fellini, Loren, Pucci, Paparazzi, and the Swinging High Life of 1950s Rome', 2016 :
...Fellini was also cagey about his
relationships with his films, claiming that his creative impulse wasn’t one of
joy but loathing, agony, struggle. “I make a film as if I were escaping,” he
once said, “as if I had to avoid an illness. . . . when I am overcome by
hatred, when I am full of bitterness.” And when it was over, he continued, his
feelings about the finished work were rarely positive: “With each one of my
films . . . our relationship is one of mutual dislike. I feel like a criminal.
I want to leave no traces of what a film has cost me. I destroy everything.”...
Worse, still was his attitude toward the
film business. “The movie business is macabre,” he would often say. “Grotesque.
It is a combination of a football game and a brothel.”And worse yet, worst of all, were
producers. Fellini would tell anyone who would listen to him—dinner guests,
journalists, waiters, psychotherapists—about the wars he fought against
producers over film subjects, casting, budgets, salaries, sets, props, music,
editing, publicity: everything. He loved to share pointed anecdotes about
producers and damning jokes, like this one about seeking financing for Le Notti
di Cabiria: “The producer says, ‘We have to talk about this. You made pictures
about homosexuals, you had a script about an insane asylum, and now you have
prostitutes. Whatever will your next film be about?’ . . . I respond angrily,
‘My next film will be about producers!’...
(Anita) Ekberg was the very type of woman that
Fellini was always drawn toward with an almost infantile eroticism:
big-bosomed, blonde, glamorous, unattainable. She was, as he said, a creature
from his imagination or from a movie screen, descended to Rome in mortal form:
“healthy as a shark,” Fellini said of her, “emanating the heat of a summer
day.” “Oh my God,” concurred Tullio Kezich,
Fellini’s friend and biographer, who had permission to witness firsthand the
gestation of the new movie, from the script stage through production and
editing to the release, “her splendor was incredible, her outsized, totally exaggerated
beauty!” To marshal a bona fide sex goddess into the film—with all the personal
trappings and implications she bore—was, in many ways, the very point, as
Kezich would later say, of what Fellini was doing: “The idea for the film is
inseparable from the idea of Anita Ekberg.”
And yet, at some deeper level, the film was
unimaginable without Marcello Mastroianni in the central role. Mastroianni had been a front-row spectator
as his frequent costar Sophia Loren launched a Hollywood career right when the
two were devloping a truly delicious on-screen rapport. The actor would recall
his costar going home to study English every night after shooting, a habit that
he, inveterate lazybones, took to be an enormous waste of time. “They wanted me
to go, too,” he recalled. “But I couldn’t imagine for what. What was I supposed
to do there, play a Hollywood cabdriver?” (He understood, too, that Loren was
always going to be a bigger draw at the box office and, thus, earn more than
he. “It’s only fair,” he told Time. “Bosoms are bosoms.”)..."
एकबर्ग यांचे स्फोटक, उन्मादक सौन्दर्य 'ल डोलचे व्हीटा' साठी किती महत्वाचे आहे हे वरती आलेच: “The idea for the film is inseparable from the idea of Anita Ekberg.”... big-bosomed, blonde, glamorous, unattainable... “her splendor was incredible, her outsized, totally exaggerated beauty!”
एकबर्ग यांचे स्फोटक, उन्मादक सौन्दर्य 'ल डोलचे व्हीटा' साठी किती महत्वाचे आहे हे वरती आलेच: “The idea for the film is inseparable from the idea of Anita Ekberg.”... big-bosomed, blonde, glamorous, unattainable... “her splendor was incredible, her outsized, totally exaggerated beauty!”
Anita Ekberg in the Trevi Fountain scene of La Dolce Vita
Photo courtesy: ALAMY
Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita (1960)
Credit: Astor Pictures Corporation