The Nitrate Stock Guest Blog

Today I'd like to welcome friend and fellow film aficionado Saevar Halldorsson as the site's very first guest blogger. Halldorsson grew up in a movie theater in a small fishing village in Iceland. Passion for the cinema led him to New York to study directing, and then to write, produce, and direct for television. He shares with us his Pick of the Month.

FIFTY SHADES OF FELLINI

Sitting down in a darkened theater to watch Fellini films that came out 40 years ago is like looking into a mirror of today’s culture, obsessed with paparazzi-hounded celebrities, reality TV, and porn. Five of Fellini’s films have more relevance for today’s audience than ever before.

With La Dolce Vita Fellini said goodbye to Italian Neorealism to become the mythical ‘superstar director’ he is known as today, and introduced to the world, for better or worse, the word paparazzi. A nostalgic tale of life in the fast lane that attacks the decadent lifestyles of Italy’s bourgeoisie and the corruption of the Catholic Church. The film’s criticism of the newly rich in the post war era created controversy that led Italy’s congress to consider banning the film. This aided the film’s box office performance and furthered its notoriety. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Oscar for Best Costume Design and Oscar nominations for art direction, director and screenplay. Might I add it also has an incredible score from frequent collaborator Nino Rota.

La Dolce Vita came out 53 years ago, but could easily take place today. Just like Kim Kardashian, Anita Ekberg plays a voluptuous starlet chased around Rome by scooter riding paparazzi gangs. Mastroianni epitomizes the shallow playboy journalist rubbing elbows at parties with the rich and famous while looking for the latest gossip, and you are just waiting for him to stop by at the TMZ offices to give them the run down.

Fellini shows us superficial culture disconnected from reality and hooked on technology. In one scene Mastroianni’s father puts on headphones to listen to nature sound recordings from the farm he grew up on, to remove himself from reality and reminisce about the past, a common theme in Fellini’s films. In quite the same way people use earbuds today to block out the noise around them and disassociate from other people.

As La Dolce Vita is a hedonistic and superficial search for pleasure in post-war Rome Satyricon is its perfect companion piece, the decadent tale of two men’s quest for sexual gratification in ancient Rome. A gratuitous, gaudy visual style supports the film’s fragmented narrative structure, as a plethora of characters enter and exit the story line. This is one of Fellini´s most provocative films and definitely not the Rome you learned about in history class. The films visual opulence was heavily copied by Pasolini in “The Decameron” and “The Canterbury Tales,” and by Tinto Brass in “Caligula.”

With today’s emergence of same sex marriage equality, the depiction of homosexuality in Satyricon has more relevance with today’s audience than it did to audiences in 1969. As one state after another legalizes marriage equality, Fellini has one of the male lead characters marrying another man mid way trough the film. Homosexuality was still a big taboo when Satyricon came out, but Fellini treats it with respectful matter-of-factness. Even though we are in ancient Rome, love and pursuit of happiness feel as real today as it did when this film came out in the volatile sixties.

In Roma we find Fellini himself making a documentary about Rome with inserted narrative segments about his arrival in the eponymous city as a young man. Again he uses a fragmented narrative style as in Satyricon but fits it together in a more fluid storyline that creates a larger mosaic of the eternal city. Seemingly every television and cable channel today is blighted by one reality show or another, but before these shows’ cursed existence Fellini documented the modern day reality of Rome in 1972 and made himself part of the film’s reality. He drops in on the famous movies stars, writers, and journalists from that time and place to get their takes on the reality and/or UNreality the city created for them. Fellini travels through Rome with his giant camera rig to interview passersby on the street and even the highways to show how we are all actors in one big reality show in the city we live in.

Even though they where made seventeen years apart, 8½ in 1963, City of Women in 1980, they feel like a continuation of the same story line, like a möbius strip bending into infinity. Both films explore one man’s perceptions of women through a dreamlike narrative with no resemblance to reality. In 8½ Marcello Mastroianni, standing in for Fellini himself, plays a creatively blocked director reminiscing and dreaming about the women in his life. In City of Women Marcello falls asleep on a train and dreams that he follows a woman off the train to a city full of women, then wakes up on the train in front of his wife. This ending was the original ending for 8½, but Fellini changed the earlier film to a happier merry-go-around scene, where he is surrounded by everybody that matters to him in his life.

Women today devour the mommy porn best seller “Fifty Shades of Gray” by the millions, exploring their S&M fantasies with the domineering Mr. Gray and desperate to figure out what makes him tick. They might get some satisfaction from watching Mastroianni work the bullwhip on a parade of women in 8½ and then trying to rape him in City of Women. While “Fifty Shades” illustrates the shallow characteristics of the male psyche, City of Women and 8½ digs deep by exploring how all the women in one man’s life mold his psyche and sexual fantasies, and man’s eternal quest for the perfect woman that embodies the mother, the virgin and the whore.

Like all classic works of art Fellini’s films holds up a mirror to our selves, and reflect back our combined humanity through time and place. If you have the guts to look into Fellini’s mirror and experience the surreal circus we call life, then head on over to the NYPL’s Mid-Manhattan Library and catch World Auteurs retrospective.

-Saevar Halldorsson