First of all, it should be explained that this is a large manuscript of nearly 10,000 words, and you need to be patient.
Secondly, this is a sincere work of veteran fans remembering the master;
This is also a cry from old movie fans calling on the film industry not to go astray.
The old fan is Martin Scorsese.
01
Exterior view of 8th Street approaching the evening of 1959
The camera kept moving at shoulder height to photograph a young man, approaching 20 years old.
He walked westward on the busy Greenwich Village Boulevard.
He had several books in his armpits and a copy of The Sound of the Village in his other hand.
He walked quickly, past men in coats and hats, past women with bibs wrapped around their heads and pushing foldable shopping carts, and hand-in-hand couples, poets, bastards, musicians, and drunkards.
He also kept passing by drugstores, liquor stores, delicatessens and apartment buildings.
The young man's attention was all on one thing—the sign on the eaves of the art theater.
Here are screenings of John Casavetti's [Shadow] and Claude Chabrol's [Cousin].
[Shadow]
He jotted down the information, then crossed Fifth Avenue and continued west.
He walked through bookstores, record stores, recording studios, and shoe stores until he reached the 8th Street Theater.
[Flying Geese South], [Love of Hiroshima] and Jean-Luc Godard's "Exhausted" are about to be released.
The camera still follows him.
He turned left on Sixth Avenue and wandered past restaurants, more liquor stores, newsstands and a cigar shop.
He crossed the street just to take a good look at the canopy sign of the Waverley Theater—
[Ashes and Diamonds] is being screened.
[Ashes and Diamonds]
He turned around and walked east to West 4th Street, past a messy bar and a Judson Memorial Church on the south side of Washington Square.
There, a man in a shabby suit is handing out pamphlets — Anita Eckerberg in fur, painting [La Dolce Vita] at the Orthodox Theater on Broadway.
Reserved seats are available! The price of Broadway repertoire!
He walked across La Guardia Square to Bleecker Street.
He passed the Village Gate nightclub and the Endgame Rock Club to the Bleecker Street Cinema.
It's showing [In the Mirror], [Shoot the Pianist], and [Twenty-Year-Old Love].
[Night] has been screened here for three consecutive months.
[Night]
He lined up behind the line of Truffaut's film, opened The Village, and flipped to the film section.
Clusters of good films jumped out of the newspaper and circled around him.
[Winter Light], [Pickpocket], [Devil's Eye], [Falling into a Trap], Andy Warhol Exhibition, [Pigs and Warships].
Film Archive screening of works by Kenneth Anger and Stan Brahag.
[Eyeliner], and the most prominent and obvious of them, Joseph M. E. Levin is highly recommended [eight and a half parts].
As he reads carefully, the camera lifts up to photograph him and the waiting crowd, as if floating above a stream of excitement and longing.
[Eight and a half]
02
Time has moved on to the present, and the art of cinema is being systematically squeezed out, devalued, and degraded until it becomes the lowest standard.
It's just "content".
Back 15 years ago, people only mentioned the word "content" when discussing movies very seriously.
It is used to compare and measure with "form".
But gradually, those who control the media companies also began to use the word —
Although most of them don't know anything about the history of this art form, or even think about it, they should know about it.
Thus "content" became the business term for moving images:
A David Lane movie, a cat video, a Super Bowl commercial, a SuperHealth sequel, one episode of the series.
Of course, they have nothing to do with the cinema experience, but with home viewing.
David Lane
Home viewing on streaming platforms has taken over the cinema experience, just as Amazon has taken over brick-and-mortar stores.
On the one hand, it's a good thing for filmmakers, including me.
On the other hand, it creates a situation where all the moving images are presented to the viewer at the same height.
This may seem democratic, but it is by no means the case.
If your [what to see next] is suggested by [what you've seen] through an algorithm.
And these suggestions are only based on the theme or genre of the film, what impact will this have on the art form of the film?
"Curating" is not undemocratic or elitist.
The word has been used so frequently lately, causing it to lose its original meaning.
It is an act of generosity in which you share what you love or inspire your work.
(The best streaming platforms, such as Critterion Channel and MUBI, or traditional channel Turner Classic Films, are curated based on curation, and their films are curated through curation.)
The "algorithm", as the name suggests, is based on calculations, which only treats the audience as a consumer, and has nothing else to ask for.
Amos Vogel of Grove Press, in the 1960s, made those decisions as distributors, not only generous, but often very brave.
Dan Talbot, a projectionist and curator who founded New Yorker Pictures to distribute his beloved films, Wasnaldo Bertolucci's "Eve of the Revolution" was not an insurance option.
[Eve of the Revolution]
The reason why those films came to the United States and won their own shining moments was due to the outstanding contributions made by these distributors, curators, and exhibitors.
The circumstances of being able to create these moments of brilliance are gone forever, from the dominance of the cinematic experience to the excitement of sharing cinematic possibilities.
That's why I dream back to the past so often.
I feel fortunate that I was once full of energy and open-minded about everything.
Movies have always been far greater than content, and it always will be.
So for years, when those films were released around the world, we talked to each other and redefined the art form every week, as evidenced by that.
03
Essentially, these great artists have been working to solve the question "What is cinema?" " question.
They will always throw questions into the next work and answer them.
No one is talking, everyone is responding to everyone, everyone is nourishing everyone.
Godard, Bertolucci, Antonioni, Bergman, Masahira Imabamura, Nicholas Ray, Casaveti, Kubrick, Varda, Warhol, all of them reinvented cinema through new photography and editing.
Inspired by this creation, veteran filmmakers such as Wells, Bresson, John Houston, and Visconti were inspired.
At the center of it all, there is a well-known director whose name is the symbol of cinema.
The mention of this name reminds people of a certain style, a certain attitude of waiting to see the world, and the name is an adjective.
Suppose you want to describe a surreal atmosphere at a dinner party, a wedding, a funeral, or some social event in which the whole world seems to have lost its mind, you just have to say "Fellini", and others will know it.
In the 1960s, Fellini was much more than just a filmmaker.
Like Chaplin, Picasso or the Beatles, he was more powerful than his art.
In a way, his creation is no longer a problem with this film or that film, but rather a matter of combining all works into one, with a grand brushstroke through the galaxy.
Going to See Fellini's movies is like listening to Maria Callas sing, watching Lawrence Oliver act, or watching Nuriyev dance ballet.
His films even fit in with his name, like [Fellini Satilicon] (i.e. [Love Myth]) and [Fellini Casanova].
[Love Myth]
Another example is Hitchcock, but there are some differences, Hitchcock is a "brand", a self-contained genre, fellini is the master of cinema.
Today, he has been gone for nearly 30 years, and the era when all cultures seem to have been influenced and infiltrated by him is gone.
That's why last year, on the occasion of his centenary, the CC version of the Fellini set became so popular.
Fellini's visual "hegemony" began in 1963 [eight and a half parts].
The camera wanders between entry and exit, reflecting Fellini's other self, the director Guido played by Marcelo Mastruani in the film.
Those wandering emotions and secret thoughts, how many times I watched the movie, I myself can't count the passages, kept asking myself:
How did he do it?
How do you make every movement, every movement, even a gust of wind perfectly where it should be?
Why is everything like a dream, both mysterious and reasonable?
Why is every minute filled with a longing that cannot be described in words?
Sound plays a big role in this, and the sounds in Fellini's films are as creative as the picture.
Italian cinema has had a tradition since mussolini's time that imported films must be dubbed.
So in a lot of movies, even some classic movies, the audio tracks that are added to it will look very strange.
Fellini is very good at using this "strange", in his films, sound and picture are intertwined, emphasizing each other, the audience's experience of watching the film is like listening to music, but also like watching the scroll open in front of the eyes.
04
Today, state-of-the-art cinematic technology allows audiences to be as dazzling as possible.
Lighter photographic equipment, more elaborate post-production techniques like image deformation and stitching, don't make a movie for you, they only provide you with options when you create a work.
For a master artist like Fellini, nothing is a small thing, everything is important.
I'm sure he'll be pleasantly surprised by the light and portable photographic equipment he has now, but it will never change his rigor and pickiness in his aesthetic choices.
One very important thing, Fellini began with neorealism, but it is interesting that he was on the opposite side of neorealism a lot of times.
He, along with his mentor Roberto Rossellini, actually co-founded neorealism.
I was still excited by that era, and its impact on cinema was so profound that I even wondered if the creation and exploration of 1950s and 1960s films would not have had a foothold without neorealism.
This cannot be described simply as a film movement, a group of filmmakers, in their respective lands, in their own lives, responding to an incredible moment.
After more than twenty years of fascism, after cruelty, fear and destruction, how should we move forward as individuals and nations?
In the works of Rossellini, Desika, Visconti, Zavatini, Fellini and other directors, aesthetics, morality and spirituality are intertwined and play a vital role in allowing the world to see Italy's self-redemption after World War II.
Fellini was involved in the writing of the scripts for [Rome, the Undefended City] and [The Flames of War] (it has been reported that Fellini was also involved in the filming of the Florentine part during Rossellini's woes).
[Love] was also co-created by him and Rossellini, who also starred in the film.
Although Fellini's early artistic path was not the same as Rossellini's, they maintained their love and respect for each other to the greatest extent.
Fellini once said a very cunning sentence:
The so-called neorealism exists only in Rossellini's films and nothing else.
Aside from [the man who stole the bicycle], [the tears of the wind], [the earth is fluctuating], I think Fellini meant that Rossellini was the only one who had a lasting trust in humanity and simplicity, and the only one who let life tell its own story as much as possible.
In contrast, Fellini is a hipster, a fable, a magician, a storyteller, but the experience and morality he inherited from Rossellini are crucial to the spirit of his films.
05
I grew up in fellini in a time when I was developing and maturing as an artist, and many of his works are precious to me.
Almost 13 years old, I watched [The Great Road], a film about poor young girls being sold to charlatans, and it touched me in a special way.
Set in post-war Italy, the story is like a medieval ballad or a more distant art, the beginning of the ancient world.
I think [Sweet Life] is the same way, but it is a panorama, a "feast" of life and spirit in modern society.
Released in 1954, the "Great Road" is a smaller pattern, it is a parable of the elements first: earth, sky, innocence, cruelty, affection, destruction.
For me, it has a special meaning.
The first time I saw this movie was on TV with my family.
In the story, it is the real experience of the grandparents, which is the hardship of their stay in their homeland.
[The Main Road] was not popular in Italy, and for some it was a betrayal of neorealism (many Italian films at the time were judged by this criterion).
I think that setting such a harsh standard within the framework of fables is too strange for many Italian viewers.
In other countries, the film was a huge success and really made Fellini famous.
This seems to be the film that Fellini has spent the longest time on and has made the hardest.
His script is 600 pages long and detailed.
Towards the end of the production, fell into a psychological breakdown.
I believe this is probably the first time he needed psychological counseling to finish the film.
It was also the most recent film of his life.
[The Night of Cabilla] is a series of fantastic stories made up of people wandering the streets of Rome.
(This is where the Broadway musical "Melody of Life" and Bob Fox's film of the same name came from))
This film consolidates Fellini's statement.
Like everyone else, I also feel that this film is very emotional.
The next great Fellini work is [Sweet Life].
At the beginning of the film's release, watching it with a large audience was an unforgettable experience.
In 1961, [La Dolce Vita] was released by Astor Picture and screened as a special event at the Broadway Theater, with reserved mail-order seats and high-priced tickets, just as it was when the Biblical epic was screened.
We sat still, the lights went out, and we were all deeply shocked by the magnificent movie pictures on the screen like murals.
This is an artist who manages to express the anxiety about the nuclear age, that nothing matters anymore, because everything, all people, can be turned into powder in an instant.
We were impressed by it, and we also felt Fellini's love for film and art, and the love for life itself.
This feeling is also traced in rock 'n' roll, with similar anxiety and despair in Bob Dylan's first electronic album, and later In White Album and Let It Bleed, but at the same time it was a shocking, transcendent emotion.
Ten years ago, the restored version of [La Dolce Vita] was screened in Rome, when the appearance of Bertolucci brought a special atmosphere to the screening.
He had a hard time moving, even in a wheelchair, but he said he had to be there.
After the film was screened, he told me that [La Dolce Vita] had set him on the path of cinema in the first place.
I was really surprised because I had never heard him talk about it, but when I heard it, I thought it wasn't strange.
The film has a stirring power, like a shockwave, that can sweep across an entire culture.
06
The two Fellini films that had the biggest impact on me and really impressed me were [Wanderings] and [Eight and a Half].
It's [Wandering] because it captures real and valuable experiences that are closely related to my experiences.
And [eight and a half] redefines my thinking about movies—
What can a movie do?
Where can movies take you?
It was released in Italy in 1953 and in the United States three years later.
It was Fellini's third film, his first truly great film, and the most personal of his own.
The story takes place in Fellini growing up in Rimini, a fragment of the lives of five young people in their twenties that make up the whole of the film.
Alberto Soldi as Alberto,
Leopoldo played by Leopoldo Trieste,
Moraldo, played by Franco Interrange (another of Fellini's egos),
Fellini's younger brother plays Ricardo, and Franco Fabriczi plays Fausto.
Their day is to play billiards, chase girls, stop and go, and tease others.
They have grand dreams and plans.
They act like children, their parents also when they are children, and life goes on like this.
I want to know these guys from my own life, between my own neighbors.
I can even recognize some of the same body language, the same sense of humor.
In fact, at some point in my life, I was one of these guys.
I understand what Morado has experienced, his eagerness to flee.
Fellini captures all of this very well, such as immaturity, vanity, boredom, sadness, to explore the next insanity, to find the next wave of excitement.
He immediately made us feel warmth, friendship, jokes, sadness and inner despair.
[Wandering Child] is a sad lyrical and at the same time bittersweet film, it is a key source of inspiration for "Poor Streets and Alleys".
This is a great movie about hometown.
Point to anyone's hometown.
As for [eight and a half parts]:
Everyone I knew who tried to make a movie in that era had a turning point, a personal touchstone.
My touchstone, and the touchstone that has always been there, is [eight and a half parts].
What would you do when you made a movie like "La Dolce Vita" that took the world by storm?
Everyone is paying attention to your every word and deed, looking forward to what your next work will shoot.
That's what happened to Dylan in the mid-1960s after his album Blonde on Blonde.
For Fellini and Dylan, the situation is the same:
They have touched countless people, and everyone seems to think they know them, understand them, and often feel that they have them.
So, (people like Fellini and Dylan) are under a lot of pressure.
These pressures come from the public, from fans, from critics and enemies (and fans and enemies often feel like they are one).
Pressure allows them to produce more work.
Pressure takes them farther.
The pressure comes from within yourself and from the pressure that carries it on you.
For Dylan and Fellini, the answer is an inner adventure.
Dylan sought what Thomas Merton called mental-sensory simplicity, and he found it after the motorcycle accident in Woodstock.
He produced the album The Basement Tapes in Woodstock and wrote songs for the album John Wesley Harding.
Fellini started with his own situation in the early 1960s and made a film about the artistic analysis of the self.
In doing so, he's on the unknown —
His inner world was an adventurous exploration.
Fellini's self-projection "Guido" is a famous director who is suffering from the equivalent of a writer's creative obstacles.
As an artist, as a human being, he was looking for a refuge for peace and confusion.
He went to a luxurious spa sanatorium to "heal" his mistress, his wife, his anxious producer, his hopeful actors, his crew, and a group of avid fans and followers.
Fellow spa goers quickly integrated into his convalescent life, with one critic declaring that his new script "lacked a central conflict or philosophical premise," tantamount to writing "a series of useless plots."
The pressure intensified, his childhood memories, longings and fantasies came day and night, but he was still waiting for his muse—
In the form of Claudia Katina, he came and went in a hurry to "create order" for him.
[Eight and a half] is an embroidered drapery woven from Fellini's dreams.
Just like in a dream, on the one hand, everything seems solid and clear, on the other hand, it seems uncertain and short.
The tone is constantly changing, sometimes even drastically.
He actually creates a visual stream of consciousness that keeps the viewer in a state of surprise and alertness, and this form is constantly being redefined as it goes on.
You're basically witnessing Fellini making a film in front of you, because the creative process is the image structure.
A lot of filmmakers have tried to make films along that line, but I don't think anyone else can do what Fellini did here.
He has the courage and confidence to use every creative tool to extend the plasticity of the image to the level that everything seems to exist at some subconscious level.
Even the most seemingly neutral picture, when you're really close to the view, there are elements in the light or composition that shock you, because in some way it infuses Guido's consciousness.
After a while, you no longer want to know where you are, whether you are in a dream, a flashback, or an ordinary reality.
You just want to stay lost and wandering with Fellini, surrendering to the authority of his style.
The picture culminates in the scene where Guido meets the Cardinal in the baths, a journey in search of the oracle and a journey back to the dirt where we all originated.
Throughout the film, the camera is moving: restless, hypnotic, erratic, and always moving toward something inevitable and revelatory.
As Guido walked downstairs, we saw from his perspective a succession of people coming toward him, some suggesting how he would cater to the cardinal, others begging him for help.
When he entered a steam-filled vestibule and walked toward the Cardinal, the Cardinal's retinue held up a tulle shield and draped it over the Cardinal so that the Cardinal could take off his clothes, and we could only see the Cardinal's shadow.
Guido told the Cardinal that he was unhappy, and the Cardinal replied briefly and memorably:
"Why should you be happy? That's not your task.
Who told you we came into this world to be happy? ”
Every shot of the scene, every part of the set and choreography between the camera and the actors is extremely complex.
I can't imagine how difficult it would be to execute all of this.
But on screen, it unfolds so gracefully that it looks like the easiest thing in the world.
For me, the audience with the Cardinal revealed the extraordinary truth of [eight and a half parts]:
Fellini made one that could only exist as a film, not in any other form.
It is not a piece of music, not a novel, not a poem, not a dance, it can only be a film work.
07
When [eight and a half films] were released, people debated it:
The effect is so dramatic.
Each of us has our own interpretation, and we talk about this movie all the time—
Every scene, every second. Of course, we've never reached a definitive interpretation —
A dream can only be explained by the logic of a dream.
The film doesn't have a clear interpretation, which bothers a lot of people.
Gore Vidal once told me that he said to Fellini, "Fred, the next time you dream less, you must tell a story." ”
But in [Eight and a Half], the lack of interpretation is correct, because there is no interpretation of the process of artistic creation:
You have to just keep it up.
When you're done with it, you'll have to do it again, like Sisyphus.
As Sisyphus discovered, pushing boulders up the mountain again and again becomes the purpose of your life.
The film had a huge impact on filmmakers:
It inspired Paul Mazursky's "Dramatic Life", in which Fellini also appears as his deity;
Woody Allen's [Stardust Past];
There's also Fox's [Jazz Spring], not to mention the Broadway musical Nine.
As I said, I've watched [eight and a half] times, and I can't even talk about how much it affects me.
Fellini shows us all what it means to be an artist and the super demand to create art.
[Eight and a half] is the purest expression of love for cinema I know.
After [La Dolce Vita]? difficult.
After [eight and a half parts]? I can't imagine.
With [Damn Toby], a medium-length film inspired by the story of Edgar Allan Poe (the final third of a platter film called "Ghost in the Shell"), Fellini elevates his hallucinatory imagination to a sharper level.
The film is an instinctive descent into hell.
In Fellini's [Myth of Love], he creates something that has never been done before:
A mural of the ancient world, as he puts it, "reverse science fiction."
[Amarcord] is his semi-autobiographical film set in the Fascist Rimini, and is now one of his most beloved films.
(For example, Hou Xiaoxian likes this movie very much)
Although it's nowhere near as bold as Fellini's earlier films.
But it's still a work full of extraordinary visions.
(I was surprised by Italo Calvino's particular appreciation of the film, which he thought was a portrayal of Life in Italy during Mussolini's time, which I really didn't expect at all.)
After [Amarcord], each fellini film has brilliant passages, especially [Casanova].
It's an icy film, colder than Dante's deepest layer of hell, and its style is extraordinary, bold, but truly a grim journey.
This seems like a turning point for Fellini.
And in fact, the late 1970s and early 1980s seemed like a turning point for many filmmakers around the world, including myself.
The camaraderie we all felt so deeply, both real and imagined, seemed to be shattered, and everyone seemed to be an island of her or his own, fighting for the next film.
I know Federico and are good enough to call him a friend.
We first met in 1970, when I took a group of short films of my choice to Italy for a film festival.
I contacted Fellini's office and I got half an hour to meet him.
He was so warm and so gracious.
I told him that on my first trip to Rome, I had left my visit to him and the visit to the Sistine Chapel until my last day.
He smiled. "Look, Federico," said his assistant, "you have become a monument to boredom!" ”
I assured him that boredom was something he would never be.
I remember asking him where I could find delicious lasagna,
And he recommended a great restaurant – Fellini knows all the best restaurants everywhere.
A few years later, I moved to Rome for a while, and I started to meet Fellini on a regular basis.
We would visit each other and eat together.
He was always a performer, and those performances never stopped.
Watching him direct a film is an extraordinary experience.
It's as if he's conducting a dozen orchestras at the same time.
I took my parents to the set of [Woman City].
He is running around, coaxing, pleading, performing, sculpting, and adjusting every element of the image to the last detail, realizing his vision in a constant whirlpool of motion.
As we left, my father said, "I thought we were going to take a picture with Fellini." ”
I said, "It's already done!" ”
Everything happened so fast that they didn't even know what was going on.
In the last years of his life, I tried to help his film [Moon Yin] be released in the United States.
On this project, he and the producer are in a difficult moment -
They wanted a Fellini-style big production, but Fellini gave them something deeper and more melancholy.
I was really shocked that no distributor wanted to touch the film, including any major independent theater in New York, that they didn't even want to show it.
Those old films, yes, but this new film, no, turned out to be the last film he directed.
After a while, I helped Fellini get some money for a documentary project that Fellini had previously planned, a series of people who made the film:
Portraits of actors, cinematographers, producers, location supervisors (I remember in the outline of that episode, the narrator explained that the most important thing was to organize expeditions so that the location was close to a good restaurant).
Sadly, he died before he could start the project.
I remember the last time I spoke to him on the phone.
His voice sounded so faint that I realized he was fading away.
I was so sad to see that incredible life force fade away.
08
Everything has changed —
Cinema and its importance in our culture.
Of course, it's not surprising that artists like Godard, Bergman, Kubrick, and Fellini, the great art forms that once guided us like gods, will eventually recede into the shadows over time.
But in the moment, we can't take everything for granted.
We can't rely on the film industry to take care of the art of cinema.
In the film industry, that is, today's mass visual entertainment industry, the emphasis is always on the "industry" itself, and the value always depends on the revenue volume of any particular property right:
In this sense, from "Sunrise" to "The Great Road" to "2001: A Space Odyssey", it is now only dried up in the "art movie" channel on streaming platforms.
Those of us who know about the art of cinema and its history have to share our love and knowledge with as many people as possible.
And we want to make it clear to the current rightful owners of these films that their value goes far beyond property that is exploited and then locked up.
They are one of the greatest treasures of our culture, and they must be treated as they deserve.
I think we also have to refine our concept of what is and what is not in cinema.
Federico Fellini is a great place to start.
There are many opinions you can say about Fellini's films, but one thing is indisputable:
These films are cinematic works.
Fellini's work has made a significant contribution to the definition of the art form of cinema.