MY VOYAGE TO ITALY

I've been preparing for a trip abroad by reading books and watching films. It's pretty easy to get me to do these things. I'm reading my way through the Dark Ages, the late Medieval Period, and the Renaissance...and zipping through Netflix watching Italian movies, new films, travelogs, and some old favorites. There is a risk in revisiting things you loved when you were younger ("The Catcher in the Rye," for example) but some things seem to get better with age--take Fellini. Watching La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2 again, I'm astonished. Especially with the latter, since I've seen La Dolce Vita several times over the years but I hadn't seen 8 1/2 since my twenties. Time plays its tricks. The film is identical, frame for frame, to what I saw back then but I've changed and grown and lived a good stretch of life since then and from this vantage point watching the film is an entirely new experience. Heraclitus had a point.

While everyone is rushing out to see the new Star Trek, stay home. Think up an excuse. Then pop La Dolce Vita into the box. Or 8 1/2. Take a deep breath and open your eyes for a lesson in cinema as well as life. Keep it to yourself. If you tell some people you like Fellini they might think you're putting on airs, or you're pretentious, or that you couldn't possibly understand what he was getting at. These people are fools. They have no poetry in their souls. You're better off without them.

Martin Scorsese talks about 8 1/2 in this clip is from his excellent documentary on Italian cinema, My Voyage to Italy.

Part 2 is located here.

CIAO, TULLIO

Tullio Pinelli passed away Saturday in Rome at age 100. You probably never heard of him, even if you're a film fanatic. Pinelli was responsible for co-writing several of Federico Fellini’s best films, including I Vitelloni, La Strada, La Dolce Vita, Nights Of Cabiria, Juliet Of The Spirits, and 8 ½.

Federico Fellini, actor Leopoldo Trieste, and Tullio Pinelli

Pinelli didn’t start writing until his late 30s, when he and Fellini met at a newspaper stand, reading two sides of the same newspaper clamped to the kiosk. They loved movies, and had similar ideas about the possibility of infusing life and energy into the grim neo-realism that dominated Italy’s post-war cinema. Drawing upon childhood memory, myth, and a boundless artistic imagination they created a cinema of fantasy, dreams, memory and desire.


Marcello Mastriani in "La Dolce Vita"

In "La Dolce Vita," Marcello is a gossip columnist who chronicles "the sweet life'' of fading aristocrats, second-string film stars, aging Romeos and working girls. Marcello is cynical and exhausted, and he navigates this decadent world in a rumpled suit and shades. He's torn between making something serious of himself, and drifting along in an empty stream of affairs and a profitible--yet meaningless--life as a hack. Sylvia, a giggling American actress, comes to town, and he's enchanted. They drive around Rome at night. In this classic scene, they come upon the Trevi Fountain. Is this his shot at redemption, or complete surrender?

--"La Dolce Vita"