1079 Fellini's Roma and Carmen Jones Carmen

Around1954/1955 I saw the film Carmen Jones for the first time with Dorothy Dandridge in the lead role. I was still at school and the aspect of the film which affected me was Pearl Bailey singing "beat out dat rhythm on a drum". It uncorked an attraction to wild music at least that is how I regarded jazz in the days before rock and roll, until I understood that considerable organised musicianship was required to create the spontaneity. I bought the LP as soon as I stated work and played and played until I knew all the contents.

I cannot remember when I first saw Carmen, the Opera, but I believe it was with the aunties locally in Croydon. I now have a number of versions on video, including three 90min recordings of the same production but with different lead singers. I also have the Regina Resnik, Joan Sutherland performance on CD;

I resurrected my interest in the past fortnight because a new production called CarMan is coming to the Newcastle Playhouse. I thought I had such a familiarity with the film because of the LP and seeing it on TV several times, and with the opera recordings and theatrical experiences that I decided to put myself to the test and write a film review before seeing the film, once more on mail order DVD. Of course I failed the test and had to resort to my reliable memory jogger, Wikipedia. I had known that Harry Belfonte had been dubbed, I had just forgotten the fact and the singer was Le Vern Hutchinson.
Fortunately my DVD player had not needed repair after all. I had gone to sleep in the afternoon while watching Fellini's Roma, and went to visit my mother leaving the disk in the machine and forgot about it and when I attempted to view again it would not load and I was too busy to arrange a repair as a I tried another DVD of my own without success. I decided to try the Carmen Jones Mail order library DVD and was able to watch the film, so it was not the machine. I soft wiped both the problem disks and they worked too, so belatedly for my piece about
Rome the city, I can now write about Roma, the film.
I like the film because it is a coherent and authentic work although set in the USA about Carmen who works in a parachute factory and where the bullfighter has become a prize fighting boxer.
Of course the music and singing in the opera is great but I have two reservations about most of the performance I have viewed. The first is the singing in French of a work about Spanish passion. This has always struck me an incongruous. Secondly, many of the female leads did not strike me as having that raw sex appeal which will make a man turn his back on a sweetheart, wife, family, and career, and then murder rather than accept he has been nut one more conquest for someone who like the bullfighter or boxer, likes the sport, and which has become a self destructive addiction.
I suspect more women, and men for that matter have the power within, irrespective of personal frame, but only dome project and then make use of what in the instance of Carmen was a lethal force. I only knew one Opera singer, who I was asked to drive to a Top of the Pops show because she knew he producer and he had promised that the camera would show her in the audience and for which she was wearing an amazingly short skirt even for the sixties, although the cameraman/ cameraman in those days had a titillating interest in young women in short skirts, or perhaps it was some visual editor or producer or director guiding to maintain and develop audiences. I digress, a little but this is an overall work about recreating past experience, and the image is appropriate for a Fellini film!
I have a greater recollection of when I watched Carmen Jones in a cinema theatre, than Roma which was issued in 1972 when I lived in Cheshire, and visits to the cinema were infrequent. Maybe I never have experienced at the cinema and it was a subsequent TV showing. I watched the film through this time without sleeping or a note book to subsequently work out the significance of images, having read some internet beforehand, I knew what to expect and look out for.
The main thrust of this documentary style montage without any story line, apart from inserting himself and his experiences, is to compare Rome of fascist wartime Mussolini with the sixties of hippies, bikers and when the buzz concept was alienation, and with references to Roman history and his own childhood.

It was one childhood experience which reminded of one of my own. Schoolteacher priests show pupils slides of ancient monuments and in the days before TV magic lantern shows were the thing, and I still have the one I acquired to show family event slides. In Roma, a slide of the bare back of a young woman, in bath costume, but this provoked a frenzied reaction from the boys who were told to avert their eyes. Around the same age the boys I went on school trip to a cinema at the park end of Oxford Street to watch a film about the life the previous Pope. It was a special morning show, we arrived late, and were accommodated in the managers viewing lounge at the back of the cinema. The film was a "Father Brown" story, I think, because I remember going to the Library for the books, except that the film was in French with subtitles and there was stunned silence at the time, although much commenting on the way back at a scene when a fly stopped briefly on a naked female breast. The contrast between the reaction of the Fellini schoolboys and the mixed audience of school children at the cinema sums up he difference between the English approach to sex and self expression and the Mediterranean people, and which includes the French.
Fellini has this attraction to bizarre looking women and brothels and in the film first draws an unkind picture of rampant men of all ages clamouring for their time with hard extrovert business women of the day and night, with two exceptions, the shyish, observing, rather bemused young man of himself, and the classy bright and sensitive "working girl" who agrees to going walk with him out, one morning, thus identifying himself as being different from everyone else. However his venom is focused on the hierarchy of the Catholic Church as an aging Italian Noble woman bemoans the loss of the previous relationship with the church, in a bizarre fashion of clerical habits thus indicating the belief that the church had become all fur coat and no knickers.

The film also confirms the belief which I expressed in the piece on Rome that Italians have nostalgia not for Mussolini the man or the brutality and acquiescence of the regime to Nazi doctrines, but for the sense of community and unit, and of getting things done which is government engendered. The film is rich in community activities and togetherness of war time activities and although there are interjected flashes of congregating hippies he appears to be sympathetic to police beating protestors and to an affluent diner who describes them as scum. The final sequence is a multitude of bikers roaring about the deserted streets of Rome making normal conversation impossible. It is evident that Fellini was not just reporting the alienation which many felt from society in the early seventies, he was expressing his own.

I have not researched or made any kind of special study, but it does seem to me that the Italians are more open and honest about what led and what happened in their country in the year of the reign of Mussolini than perhaps has been the situation in Germany, the UK and elsewhere in Europe, and we all have about the plight if other oppressed or starving, or sick people in other parts of the world since. I can never accept the indiscriminate bombing of non combatants by anyone in any circumstance. Did we really need to obliterate and maiming of German civilian populations, and when as now, we rightly condemn the former leader of Iraq for his use of weapons of mass destruction, does that put him in the same league as the US President who authorised the use of two atomic bombs, and would more have been used, if Japan had not surrendered? For those who argue that it is right to hold weapons of mass destruction as a deterrent and we would never use them in reality one has to accuse of being dishonest. If we have them we will use them in certain circumstances, and to argue that we have a God and one of his churches on our side. It is in the nature of Government, regardless of the form of government. I know it is irrational but I have a greater sympathy for a crazed for the behaviour of impulsively crazed soldier of Carmen, Carmen Jones and or in Iraq, Vietnam or where ever than I do for the Generals and Politicians who order them to unleash the devil

1013 Fellini's La Strada original

First the story line. A street entertainer with a strong man act breaking chains across his chest returns to the poverty stricken single mother to tell her that the daughter he has previously bought from her has died. He now takes the next daughter who is simple, trusting and curious. This was slave trading then and slave trading now.

He makes her his common law wife, although there is no indication that she has opposed this, and makes her a part of his act as well as requiring round the clock personal attention.

Her loyalty is quickly stretched by his unfaithfulness and periodic violence as well as jealousy when others show her interest and concern, and offer help. She spurns opportunities to break with him only to find that when she becomes sick he leaves her. When returns he finds that she has survived for a while but has died, this appears to mark the ending, or near ending of his life.

The film explores the nature of marital relationships between those with significantly different backgrounds and experiences. Anthony Quinn plays the street entertainer is essentially Anthony Quinn Anthony Quinn but the find was the wife of Fellini, Giuletta who is amazing and justifies all the praise that .Italy and the rest of the film world gave her. From interviews on the DVD. you can see she has the same romantic faith in life and I in others as she portrays in the film, but is also her own woman with her own interests and social life, while retaining the same warmth and open spirit. I will have to try and view other performances.

(I have been given the DVD and will re- experience and write an expanded response).

1012 Fellini's Satyricon

Having posted my re-experience of La Dolce Vita I will add my only other Fellini revisit to-date. His Satyricon set in pre Christian Italy. I had little recollection of the original cinema experience except the collapsing of tenements and leaving the theatre bemused.

I have no idea if the visual package is historically accurate or the language authentic, or simply an individualistic presentation of concepts, explored to the satisfaction of their creator.

The main character is distraught, revengeful, and desperate because the slave boy he abuses was taken from him by his best friend, partner, lover, fellow student and then sold off to a notorious actor, whose performance includes chopping off some ones hand or so it seems. Caesar arrives and intercedes for the main character and the boy is returned to him because the alternative is to risk losing the theatre and livelihood. Does anyone care?

Returning to their quarters the main character turns on his best friend and tells him to leave. The Jerry built tenements rising up like some tower of Babel start collapsing with terrible consequences but this was the norm for the times, as has been the situation in the Lebanon and Iraq and countless other places throughout subsequent time.

Then man and slave boy appear to set off and experience the sights and sounds of Rome in all their splendid colours of excess but to what point and where will it lead?

It leads o the valley of death a bleak sterile landscape where one character feigns death while the body of another is used to replace a hanging man who has been removed, and whose disappearance would cause death for the lover of the woman who is burying her husband.

At this point the main character, his friend's brother and their beautiful boy slave are captured by a marauding sea captain collecting young men for the pleasure of the diseased Caesar on his island, and during which voyage the main character is married as the wife the marauding captain in great ceremony. However fortunes change dramatically when a new Caesar with forces arrives to kill and depose the old Caesar and this frees the young men who are able to continue their travels which become a mystical odyssey.

They encounter a woman afflicted with nymphomania whose husband pays them to ease the problem while on the way to visit an oracle healer who is a pale girl boy child who for some reason the trio capture/transport to somewhere, with the consequence the being dies from lack of water and exposure to the sun. They then encounter a being with the head of a creature and the body of human.

The fake Minotaur leads the principle character into an arena where the nobles sit resplendent in their robes and metal headdresses while the young man looks on from high up on rocks as if all the people of his past are there to witness. However the gladiator listens to his appeals because he is a sensitive poet and not a fighter and in turn appeals to nobles to accept the young man.

The nobles explains that this is all a joke and everyone laughs and as a reward he is given a woman, and required to perform before the multitude he fails, and she scorns him and he is left in disgrace distraught again, and goes off again with his friend when he encounters a former friend who leads him to the garden of delights where at one point he is gently whipped by gentle women rhythmically but this fails, but he is revised after meeting an interesting female who has spurned a magician who retaliates by dowsing the village fires and then these can only be reignited from the loins of the woman. They then go off on further sea voyages, his friend dies but we do not know how. The film ends abruptly leaving his portrait in stone.

The film shocked and still shocks because of some of its excesses, but I remained bemused, wondering if I had nodded off and missed bits.

I looked for enlightenment in the reviews of others. The film is based on the segments of a work written at the time of Nero and Fellini intentionally made the film that way with disjointed inexplicable changes of scene which suggest the actual reality of history chaos theory coupled with Jung theories of the collective unconscious.

My memory was of a piece of self indulgent nonsense, adding nothing to any contemporary experience. I remain to be convinced that I am wrong. I also remembered Roma which I am yet to view.

So as with my one time reactions to contemporary art judgement had to be based on more experience with Amarcord, La Strada and others. And then I discovered Giulietta Masina, who he married, and something of why Fellini achieved four best foreign film Oscars.

1010 Fellini's La Dolce Vita

For five years ago, I saw La Dolce Vita either just before or while I was at ..Ruskin College. If it was before Ruskin, or out of term it would have been at the Academy in Oxford Street, while at Oxford it would have been at the cinema old Headington. I have watched a TV showing some and I may even have a video somewhere.

It is a film regarded as important at the time but not included in the Barry Norman 100 and my memory of previous viewing is that I failed to appreciate the significance originally and was not emotionally engaged, understanding more later. It was Saturday evening late for me tired and after a meal and therefore difficult to concentrate with perhaps a mini siesta along the way and therefore I decided on a second viewing with note book over lunch today.

The importance of the film now is that it introduced everyone to the world of celebrity and the paparazzi with the central figure an establish columnist and would be serious writer, played by Italian heart throb Marcello Mastrioanni an Italian Cary Grant or Ray Milland but without their laid back humour, and with angst.

At the time some did not like the film because there is no plot, no story but a series of scenes in which each explores the society of the Italian and European celebrity, film starts, aristocracy, intelligentsia with American and English voices and the actress French? This is a bleak film with desolate landscapes devoid of ordinary people and even the working class characters are a couple of ladies of the night and their gentlemen minders or a couple of girls, one from Paris who work in a night club.

The opening sequence is that of a helicopter carrying an outstretched statue of Christ, possible over the undeveloped ruins of old Rome, across the a post war development area of cold concrete post war flats for the working class and then to a rooftop penthouse playground with young women thrilled by the sight and the flirtatious telephone number seeking hero and his cameraman in the second helicopter signalling the chase for the next celebrity scoop, (the Vatican statue) and a spirituality of his own.

We are then transported to what our hero does best write about the trivia of the personality, a prince sitting with two women one a vacuous young woman bored with the implication that she is purchased company. Our hero learns that he is not eating snails but this neither may nor be accurate because he told the wine which is corrected by cameraman who we assume witnessed the bottle being taken to him. The Prince summons the invader and tells him what he thinks. Our hero then meets up with Anouk Aimme, a star of the time, with whom he has more than a passing relationship, despite she having more money than she knows what do with and he has only his journalist earnings. They encounter two ladies of the night with their gentlemen protectors and take one on them to her partially flooded basement flat in the city area of dead souls. They make love, spending the rest of the night, this is by implication, there is nothing explicit shown in this film of 1960, and it has to be presumed their hostess spends the night with her protector. But these are essentially night people frequently going home with the dawn.

The hero returns to his live in girl friend who has taken an overdose. Her role is to represent the mother type love of the traditional wife although it is evident that she is too self obsessed with her predicament and that he is never there except occasionally for bed, so that when she offers to make a ravioli she remembers that she is missing the salad. She recovers but he has to square the situation with the police for Italy is a post fascist (in theory) Catholic country and attempted suicide is both a crime and a mortal sin.

One reviewer of the film, Rumney Taylor makes the point that the opening sequence is intended to remind us of the pagan origins of Rome, and there are subsequent scenes of orgy although nothing of the order of those of Satyricon and Calligua which I remember well, but not the brother sequence of Fellini's film a decade later of Roma, while he suggests that the flying Christ is intended to remind that Rome remains the seat of Catholic power.

He then breaks cover from the night to join the pack for the arrival of a blonde film star who adores the publicity of the pack and has no problem ingratiating herself by eating from a platter of Italian meats, Parma ham, but I cannot be sure. This scrum scene ends with our hero chatting up airhostess for information or just chatting them up, although he has already set his sights on getting as close as possible to the star and he is seen hovering at as the euro film press corps are invited into her hotel suit where an English voice is heard asking Miss Rank if she is to make a film in England.

His attention is successful because we next see him and some of the pack, taking up to the top of the Dome of St Peters where dressed as a cleric she looses the hat overlooking St Peters Square thus revealing that long blonde hair showing what is behind the public pretence. By we are soon to see that she is nothing more than a media creation as we move to an odd spacious night club where she meets an American film actor friend also in Rome making a picture reminding of one of the Rat pack whose name I cannot immediately remember. His behaviour and that of our hero annoy the American boyfriend and co star of the actress but not as much as the flamboyant attention seeking antics of the actress. Our hero now whisks the girl away for a night tour of the city ending in the Trevi Fountains and could it be that he is smitten or is he just doing what the job demands to get that exclusive interview for he says things like you are the first woman of creation.

However he accompanied by his faithful live in girl friend Emma and the photographer we are off to the scene of the latest miracle where children who have seen the Virgin Mary are locked in the local police station for their safety. The media ensure a great circus of true believers from the dying praying for life to the woman who calls out for lottery win. The children return and rush off in all directions claiming they can see the Virgin and concluding at one point that this is where a church shall be by a small tree. As darkness descends a great storm threatens to explode the floodlights and in the crush an old man dies and once everyone is departed we see Emma praying that she will return every day barefoot if he marries her.

This the point when our hero encounters the first of the intellectual with wealth and public standing, sufficiently for him to be able to play the church organ as he wishes and he gives a rendition of the opening of the Toccata and Fugue. This contact reminds him of his idealistic artistic dreams and later we see him taking Emma to an evening soiree where at least two of the intellectuals English or is it a Dylan Thomas poetic type welsh accent, was it a year ago before or after coming hear that I did the work on Dylan? Some of the guests are talking pretentious nonsense but our hero is impressed. Emma sensing she is losing him says that he will one day have a flat and lifestyle as his host, but the damage has been done, despite the host warning when hero asks to visit more often because he feels secure, that great work will not emerge for order.

There is also a warning of the tragedy to come when the host says we should love each other outside of time. Our hero goes of to the seaside, perhaps out of season because he seems alone working with his typewriter as a pretty innocent young waitress lays out the tables inviting him to say for a meal as the food is good, but he is not working because he has spent too much time in the artificial world chosen for a living, and this makes him even rattier when Emma rings to enquire when she will see him again. The young has a significance which is yet to come. Is this when the tragedy first occurs, or his father arrives for the day in Rome because of a visit to the Ministry.

It is quickly evident that father and son know little of each other. We are taken to a night club where father has gone before and we sit through three acts, one involves a girl who our hero knows and Dad is interested so she is invited to sit with them. We learn that father once sold champagne to half of Italy. Father goes back to the girl's flat while his son, the ubiquitous photographer and a girl who shares the flat. Father is ill and decides to leave. His son wants him to stay and talk but father goes home having had his little adventure, to life in retirement where has the cinema to break the boredom. It is this point I lose my recollection of the subsequent.

There is a the scene perhaps after the pseudo religion event when Emma presses for marriage and a conventional life, they row the fight physically he abandons her in the middle of nowhere in the darkness but return saying he is sorry and they make love. Was it at this point that horror strikes?

They go to the castle home of the Prince the old building is a mausoleum of a place. This is the old order of power above convention and there are aspects of here which remind of Last Year in Marianbad

The group, if they were young we would say a gang, but I prefer a tribe because their behaviour is tribalistic. They need to party unable to bear the reality of themselves alone, and having already gone to party on party they are all seek a different kind thrill. The cause is the celebration of a new life for Anouk Aimee; they have broken into the property of someone who they believe is away and she is easily persuade to do a strip, with other rejected because they have done it before or considered too professional in approach. At the vital moment, shot at a distance, the owner returns and throws them out

The final scene is the party go to the beach, the same beach where he tried to write his great work. The go to see a giant fish that has been caught another experience, he then sees the waitress, at distance she is calling to him to join her, youthful idealism and hope for a better future, but he turns away, perhaps he understands and knows he is lost it is too late to turn back, perhaps he is already lost and does not recognise the opportunity that is being offered, the ending is ambiguous but for me he has become a dead soul not ready for redemption

However I have left to the end the scenes which sum up this film. On the visit to the home of the intellectual, he plays records of nature storms and birds and this awakes his two children who portrayed as two angels. I believe it was and it should be that he awoken from what may have become a marital bed by the news that the intellectual has killed his two children and then turned the gun on himself while his wife is away. The media is there, the other flat dweller it was now emerges to be a vast tall block of posh accommodation and I remember the phrase loving each other out of time, but we are left with no explanation or understanding of the state of mind but it appears to have been an cold calculated intellectual act not caused by some major event. Our hero goes with the family doctor to advise the wife who get off the bus amazed and flattered by having the paparazzi come to greet her. They have become ghouls unable to discriminate between events in search for the big picture to make then known world wide. For our hero who gets into the flat on the basis of being a friend but quickly distances himself from the police enquiry. He is not there to grieve but you feel he is still working and abandoned once and for all time so it appears he had disregarded and then forgotten the plea of the deceased, you must devote yourself to your true interests, to which I would add once you are certain, and even then be prepared to be flexible and for disappoint failure and further change and you change and circumstances occur over which to you have little control or influence…its is not therefore the interests that are important but being true, and with experience fearing, understanding and be prepared for the consequences. I heard recently the saying when the Gods decide to punish us they give us what we want.