And the Ship Sails On

And the Ship Sails On is a maddening, obtuse failure directed by Federico Fellini in 1983.  Notwithstanding its flaws, the film is remarkable and weirdly prescient as well.  I write this note on November 21, 2015, eight days after a terrorist attack on Paris, an event that has prompted some 36 American governors to belligerently (if unconstitutionally) announce that they will not allow Syrian refugees to enter their States.  The final third of Fellini's film involves a group of Serbian refugees who have fled tyranny in their homeland.  The refugees have attempted to escape by sea and a great luxury cruise-liner comes upon their beleaguered and over-crowded raft in the stormy Mediterranean sea.  At first, the bedraggled Serbians are kept on the second (lower) deck of the huge vessel.  Later, they wander throughout the ship, offending the upper class aristocrats and artists who have specially commissioned the cruise-liner to carry the ashes of a prima diva to the island of her birth, a tiny volcanic place, shrouded in mist called Erimo.  The Serbians are ultimately confined, kept in a roped-off enclosure on the deck, much to the dismay of the more humane Italians and Germans on the ship.  Demagoguery has prevailed:  one of the security forces exclaims:  "Among those you so kindly define as refugees there are lurking professional assassins."  And, indeed, this turns out to be broadly accurate:  a bomb is thrown and much mayhem ensues.  It is July 1914 and, soon enough, as presaged by the events on the cruise liner, the Gloria N., the Great Powers will be engaged in fratricidal world war with one another.  The film has great power because it is hard-wired into Fellini's own dreams and fantasies -- in a famous sequence in Amarcord, the villagers of seaside resort go out in small boats at night to watch a great luxury liner cruise by them.  And the Ship sails On imagines what was taking place on that beautiful and remote vessel.

Summaries of And the Ship Sails On suggest that the film is a sort of political allegory, a fantasia about the events leading to World War One.  In fact, this is not the case.  The movie is actually an extremely complex meditation on the nature of art and the role of the artist in the modern world.  At the film's outset, the imagery is shot in sepia, soundless except for the noise made by an antique projector, and we see the principal characters gathering to board the huge ship.  These scenes are shot in a way that convincingly replicates old newsreels from before World War One -- we see curious interlopers entering the frame to gaze into the camera and there are crowds of children, stevedores, and servant women wandering around as big sedans arrive to disgorge the elite men and women boarding the vessel.  As the image slowly morphs into color, a man directs the extras like an orchestra conductor and a great chorus is sung as the cast, in a ceremonial procession, boards the ship.  It seems that the greatest opera singer of all time, Edmea Tetua, has died and the people on the vessel intend to participate in her obsequies at the isle of Erimo, more than three days cruise from this port.  One of Fellini's greatest strengths is his casting and the aristocrats and artists on the ship all have extraordinary physiognomies -- everyone looks like a figure in one of Edward Gorey's more sinister graphic narratives:  the men wear high-top coats with ermine collars or tuxedos and they have their hair wafted into the most remarkable ornamental hair-styles - and they have names like Sir Reginald Dongly.  The women have sphinx-like faces, many of them veiled, and they wear immense plumed hats.  There is a putty-faced silent film comedian, a Russian bass who can sing so low as to paralyze chickens, a child prodigy, a famous fat tenor who looks like the Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, a wild-eyed Byronic poet who seems to have aspired to be a lover to the dead woman, a very plump, pale and androgynous Grand Duke who wears a Prussian Pickelhaube; this Grand Duke, who is a teenage boy, travels with his Aunt, with whom he seems to have a sexual relationship -- the Aunt is played indelibly by the very great Pina Bausch, the formidable director the Wuppertal Tanztheater.  At first, the film doesn't really cohere -- a master of ceremonies with a remarkably expressive face, Signor Orlando, explains what is going on and there are a number of peculiar and amusing, if inconsequential, episodes -- the singers compete for the attention of the sweaty musclemen shoveling coal in the great ship's boilers, a rhinoceros in the hold is sick with love (the rhino looks nothing like a real animal -- the great brute is modeled after Duerer's emblematic, heavily armored beast.)  There are love affairs, a séance that is genuinely very scary, and various musical interludes -- a seagull flutters around in the dining hall to the music of the Blue Danube waltz.  Mr. Orlando falls in love with a beautiful blonde girl but, of course, is much too old for her and doesn't declare his love -- she later becomes enamored of a handsome Serbian lad, Mirko.  There is a remarkable sequence involving translation -- Mr. Orlando is interviewing the Grand Duke who says in German that "we are living near the Schlund of a mountain."   A dispute arises about what "Schlund" means -- should the word be translates as "edge" or "mouth of a crater."  In the end, the Grand Duke settles the dispute by mimicking an explosion:  "Pum, pum, pum," he says.  The film darkens when the Serbian refugees appear and things become very grim, indeed, when an Austria-Hungarian battleship, a vast grey floating ziggurat approaches and demands that the Serbians be turned over to them.  By this time, the Serbians and some members of the crew have begun to fraternize and there has been a kind of wild gypsy dance involving most of the upper class tourists on the cruise liner.  In the end, as with the Titanic, the great ship goes down.  As the ship sinks, the camera tracks back to reveal that we have been watching an enormous machine, rocked to and fro by hydraulic stanchions and we see dozens of grips and lighting technicians and men holding smoke pots and Fellini himself, hidden by a camera, that is tracking across the huge set.  This shot is preceded by a sinister overhead image of people fleeing across the deck, the motion cranked fast and so, a bit accelerated and jerky like silent documentary -- the footage bears an uncanny resemblance to overhead shots representing the Russian revolution with agitated crowds scattering this way and that.  As the ship settles to the bottom of the ocean, Mr. Orlando notes that he will escape and that rhinoceros milk is "very nourishing" -- in the last image, we see him adrift with the big rhinoceros on his little life-boat.  Mr. Orlando has suggested four possible endings to the film -- the Prussians and Austria-Hungarians are touched by the beauty of the funeral for the great singer and depart without demanding transfer of the Serbians or the people on the cruise-liner valiantly refuse to surrender the refugees or, of course, the contrary:  they give the Serbians to the soldiers on the German battleship.  There is another alternative suggested by the meta-fictional images of the Cinecitta studio where the movie is being shot -- it is, after all, all opera, but like opera not indifferent to realism and life, but representing life at its most essential, that is opera representing life as it should be.  The film's incoherence is evident in the last couple shots -- Fellini means everything to be whimsical, light, nonchalant, even improvised.  But the huge hydraulic apparatus manipulating the obviously plywood and paper-mache ships is anything but casual and improvised -- rather, the film founders on its own gravitas.  It is not so easy a thing to share a life-raft with a huge, armor-plated rhinoceros.  But, notwithstanding these reservations, this film is truly extraordinary in many respects -- one shot in which a scheming Archduke kisses the Grand Duke's Aunt and we see her red-rimmed blind eyes upturned to the Archduke's closed ones is eerie and terrific enough to justify the whole quixotic enterprise.