Fellini is old, but the depressed adolescence is endless

Since the middle of last month, most of the news from Italy has been related to the spread of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, and under the pressure of epidemic prevention, Fellini's birthday commemoration has passed silently. If it weren't for fellini's "The Liar" screened in the Classic Retrospective section of the Berlin Film Festival, most people except hardcore film fans would remember that January 20 this year is the centenary of the Italian director's birth.

The writer Calvino wrote a "Memoirs of the Audience" for Fellini as a good friend. At the beginning of the article, Calvino defines the film as "an escape" that "satisfies my yearning for a foreign land and focuses on another space." But Fellini's films are different because they "no longer provide distance, but the feeling of the exact opposite, where all things are all around us, clinging to us". All his life for that one, Fellini's entire creation is an uninterrupted autobiography, and the film is his memoir. Since "Eight and a Half Parts", the axis of his creation has been the analysis of the self, and before that, with "La Dolce Vita" as the boundary, when he was still willing to face the outside world, he wrote the experience from the individual and the perception of Italy at that time into a myth about the depravity of human nature - "The Liar" happens to be a pivot of the past and the future, connecting this part of his work.

Fellini's earlier works, The Liar, not the most prestigious, was completed in 1955, sandwiched between The Great Road and The Night of Kabylia. The success of "The Great Road" led the Italian producers at the time to chase Fellini and ask him to "have another Jessomina (the name of the female clown in "The Great Road")". Fellini was careful not to abuse the charm of actress Julieta Massina, who only showed her face a few times in The Liar. However, some tidbits during the filming of "The Liar" contributed to the subsequent "Kabylia Night", which became Julietta's acting skills. Naturally, Italian producers chased Fellini for "more Cabilla," and he summed up the first half of his life with a controversial "La Dolce Vita."

"The Liar" is between two "Julietta masterpieces", in fact, in terms of plot, it is closer to the continuation of "Wandering Child", on the spiritual temperament, it is the laying out and rehearsal of "Sweet Life". The idle lad is old, old, and the depressed adolescence is still endless. "The Liar" opens with a ridiculous hoax in which three scammers pretend to be clergy and use their pompous acting skills to scare a poor peasant and swindle them out of all their savings. And when the three returned to Rome with a full load, in the flashy world of sound and color, they became despised and bullied ants. The tricksters' clumsy tricks are repeated again and again, forming a desperately dramatic closed loop: in the Italian era, the wine smelled of meat and the road had frozen bones.

The end of The Liar has a strong moral admonition, but Fellini at this stage is not a critical realist in the traditional sense. Although he describes several of his works beginning with "Spring and Autumn of Selling Art" as "film notes", recording "the towns I glimpsed from the windows of the third-class carriages or the side curtains of the puppet show stage, the small villages hidden on the top of the hill or surrounded by thick fog in the dark valleys, the little people wandering between the sand-blowing streets and the old towns, their wanderings, their encounters, their lives." And these notes were never photographic reproductions and reproductions. Calvino was keenly aware of the impact of Fellini's experience as an illustrator on his lifelong creation before he entered the film industry, "There is continuity between fellini the cartoonist Fellini and the filmmaker Fellini, that is, the relationship between illustrated comics and post-war Italian cinema. "The wandering artists in "Selling Art spring and autumn" and "The Great Road" and the nihilistic youth in "Wandering Child" and "Liar", they have become marginal people of that era for different reasons, and they are also different groups. The power of Fellini's cinematic picture is rooted in the disharmony of pictorial images, as Calvino summed it up: populism, romanization, deliberate vulgarity, almost crude brushstrokes, excluding any reassuring vision.

Fellini's memoirs in his later years mentioned the nightlife he encountered when he returned to his hometown: "In the middle of the night, the crowds flowed endlessly, and they came from all over the world. Illuminated by neon lights, these yellow, red, and green faces come to buy dyed ice cream, fish shipped from Spain, and pizza that is hard to eat. People never slept, shouting songs and electric guitars rumbled throughout the season. Day occupies the night and night occupies the day, without rest. Four long days like the Arctic. "It was the night of the small town of Rimini in the province of Romagna, the night of the ruined roman suburbs after the war, the Night of Rome where Augustus (The Liar), Kabylia and Paparazi (La Dolce Vita) had encountered. The picture created by Fellini is the transmission of the experience of the times and the arrangement of the inner atmosphere of the characters, and in these "first film notes", the countryside of the wandering youth and the rome of materialistic flow are the same world, the same layer in hell, and the peaceful land of happiness

Asked by reporters "what is Rome," Fellini said his mind had only fragmented imagery — fragmented skies, backdrops on the opera stage and sad colors. This is the world that Fellini saw and recorded before he fell asleep: between the worlds of intense sorrow and sorrow, insignificant life suffered an endlessly cruel and ugly fate, people were dominated by inner desolation and unknown guilt, a collective hysteria, the italian hysteria of that era.