Sunday 24 February 2013

A Loving Review of...Fellini’s Roma (1972)

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3WIUEk8Tv4Du6fEcBe1Oy2EryeWVZV1dyHl-DIcLQXenfCw8M_kBsp-u7EZayiyX0i-MM-s1QttoI5bN9oq1Ohg23bI2XZuLs4Hc_QQ-J8uuTcbXmhGtHl-_9jULQvLRQF1VPnWiwopn7/s1600/roma1.jpg


Dir. Federico Fellini
France-Italy

From http://img2.imageshack.us/img2/6719/felliniromaimg1.jpg

In many ways one’s autobiography would have to include the place you had grown up in. This has been a small streak within cinema from Fellini’s films to Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (2007). Both films thought, alongside others like Terence Davies’ Of Time and the City (2008), have had to tackle within the running times what it means to be born in a certain country as well to explain this – My Winnipeg is as much about Maddin being Canadian as Of Time and the City is of Davies being a Briton of a certain generation as well as a Liverpudlian. Federico Fellini’s Roma however is completely upfront about this aspect. Roma has no clear narrative. It is a series of interconnecting, or separate, segments about Rome. It shares aspects of classic history of the previous theatrical film to this Satyricon (1969) and his childhood under the rule of Benito Mussolini that would be tackled more in his very well regarded Amarcord (1973), but tackles it in a further grandness even compared to his other work in explaining what Rome means to him as a place.

From http://image.toutlecine.com/photos/f/e/l/fellini-roma-1972-02-g.jpg

It is an exceptionally well made film, one that could only be made within the seventies sadly, able to juggle classical period scenes, usually with a young representation of Fellini within it, and the current Rome with the same grandeur. It has within itself the old Rome, the real one of ancient history and culture, against the new Rome of rebellious students and alternative culture. Fellini himself shows a key issue of the film by having an older man desire from him to not make a film about the lowlifes, prostitutes and ‘tranvesties’ that he felt would make Rome look bad to the world, and then immediately after it students wanting him to show the political and poverty issues of the city, placing the various separate and divisive aspects of the city together in one varying image of it. Fellini is a baroque classicist, showing the period of World War II as a time that, despite the war, people could still function as joyful human beings. That he shows the rightwing propaganda of the Mussolini reign at the time alongside these warm, jubilant scenes is not a troubling concept as it could have been. Not only did Fellini undermine the image of Mussolini greatly in Amarcord, including a bizarre sequence with a giant head, but in this film he shows the period with honesty, growing up within it, and how the fascist ideology was going to fail in hindsight. A scene at a vaudeville show, a standout within a film consisting of standout scenes, shows a lovingly hilarious and bawdy series of moments that is undercut by both a bombing of the city, and within an air raid shelter, a man who believes Mussolini and Nazi Germany will win the war against one who doubts the war completely.

From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cwkM0jdVSWc/TBKTSjwisuI/
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Technically, Roma is a masterpiece as well as in its content. Breaking away from conventional cinema, and being meta about the filmmaking as well, it keeps the film’s content within a consistent framework by the quality of its making. A masterful sequence on a Rome highway, following a vehicular crane with a film camera on it, also being filmed from another car, shows exceptional skill with the use of filming, editing and sound as it shows the numerous drivers and vehicles on the roads. And Fellini makes sequences like these more than mere technical exercises by having humour, vibrancy, life, and in his obsession with full, heavily made-up women with large bosoms, a virile sexuality to certain moments. It is also more than a nostalgic view of the past as Fellini is certainly aware of the problems of the time it was made in. He sympathises with the new generation and their hippy culture, and in a bravura sequence, shows that ancient history, of the most beautiful, can be lost by the badly planned incursion of modernism and urbanisation. Then there is the ecclesiastical fashion show sequence dubbed by the late Amos Vogel to be a parody of ‘the wealth, commercialisation, and corruption of the contemporary Church*. With roller-skating priests and freakish skeleton displays moving across a catwalk, it is an inspired and surreal twisting of Catholic iconography that was clearly made by a director who has a lot of admiration for Christianity but has the foresight of a critic, and the weight as a great director to get away with it, to slam the state of the Vatican church this mercilessly.

From http://image.toutlecine.com/photos/f/e/l/fellini-roma-1972-13-g.jpg

In comparison to another Italian film about a director’s life and the world around it, Giuseppe Tornatore's Baarìa (2009) about three generations from his home village, which was sluggish and had the tone of a Hovis Bread advert rather than a film that tackled the director’s childhood, Italian politics including socialism and World War II, Fellini’s film Roma is way and above it, reminded of its failures in comparison to a film that is willing to break beyond the conventional narrative arch in favour of showing the life of Rome, good and bad, in a mass collage of images. Ending with a breathtaking sequence of a mass of youths on motorcycles and scooters in unison on the streets of Rome, driving place iconic architecture like the Coliseum, it is a loving film of the city while also reframing from being a musky, lazy ode that lacks the passion to do the task properly. Instead it ends with a jubilant picture of the future Romans of the time taking the streets, no end credits needed to spoil the power of this image.

From http://www.ffffilm.com/uploads/dan/snapshots
/2009/12/shots/03885ef78edb0c57febba946098830bd3036833a-700.png

*Quote taken from Vogel’s exceptional book Film As A Subversive Art. Find it and read it. 

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