From the Reports of Security Guards and Patrol Officers #1 (and XMAS in Moose Factory)

 From the Reports of Security Guards and Patrol Officers #1 is a deeply unsettling short film, less than eleven minutes long.  A young woman carrying a baby and with a toddler in tow stands in a train shed in some European city.  The movie is shot in grainy black-and-white.  The young woman and her children enter a construction site, pushing through a chain-locked gate.  Then, the woman tapes a poster to piece of machinery and begins to climb a ladder on the exterior of some sort of scaffolding.  The film doesn't use conventional establishing shots and, so, it's not clear what the woman is climbing or how high she will ascend.  The little boy climbs the ladder ahead of her.  She has the baby strapped to her belly and, also, carries a sheaf of papers in a bag.  After climbing for long time, the woman and her children rest on a precarious-looking grid of  metal girders.  The woman throws papers from her perch and they sail down to the muddy construction site.  The papers read:  "Last Attempt:  if don't have affordable housing by 6:00, we jump."  The woman, then, starts climbing again.  Her ascent is filmed from some location parallel to the ladder that she is climbing.  This time, the toddler is clinging to her body.  The woman climbs for a long time and, then, pauses at metal joint from which a sixty-foot boom extends.  Moving more slowly now, because the boom is exposed and provides limited handholds, she inches out to the tip of the iron machine.  A long shot shows her with the two children squatting at the end of the boom, revealed to be a part of an enormous and towering construction crane.

This short film is very frightening.  I don't know exactly how it was made, but the woman's frantic scramble to the top of the 150 foot construction crane seems to be shot in several long takes by a camera on some nearby crane that tracks her climb.  Neither the woman nor the two children seem to be tied-off in any way and their peril is palpable and breathtaking. We have a visceral sense of the height of the crane based on the woman's climb -- we see her ascend through a hundred rungs or more with the children clinging to her.  As she climbs higher and higher, our dread increases. The sequence in which she inches laterally toward the tip of the boom is heartstopping.  The final shot shows the woman and her children perched over a grey abyss.

A German feminist filmmaker, Helke Sander, made this movie in 1985.  It won a Golden Bear prize in Berlin for best short film.  It's an example of structuralist film making -- the movie is about climbing a very long and high ladder, filmed from a position parallel to the ladder.  The short subject acknowledges an important fact:  images of a woman and child climbing a metal ladder of this sort are as thrilling as Mission Impossible or an Indiana Jones movie.  The point, I think, is that being a homeless mother with small children is as dangerous, even potentially deadly, as being on the front lines in a war zone.   

Also on MUBI is a  short picture that is a polar opposite (pun intended) to From the Reports of Security Guards and Patrol Officers #1.  This is a little film produced by the National Film Board of Canada called Christmas at Moose Factory.  Moose Factory is a village in Canada's far north located on Moose Island.  The movie consists of close-ups (details) of crayon drawings by children of Christmas celebrations with a sound track in which the kids talk about presents, family gathered for the holidays, encounters with bears and rides on ski-doos (snowmobiles).  It's a charming short picture featuring the handsome cartoon coloring by the children.  A montage at the end shows the artists who seem to be very cute Indian children between the ages of three and eight -- the people in Moose Factory are Cree Indians.  

Rififi

 Moving pictures aspire to communication that is wordless.  This is why silent films remain the purest expression of the art.  Rififi, a French heist movie, produced in 1955 demonstrates this proposition.  About a third of this complex crime film is unencumbered by dialogue.  The wordless sequences in the film are its most indelible and gripping.  

Rififi is French gangster argot for a "ruckus", a melee, or "rough and tumble".  Even French bourgeois viewers would have trouble with the exotic word and, so, the director and screenwriter, Jules Dassin, contrives a night club scene in which a sultry chanteuse sings a tune explaining the term.  The picture is a pretty standard heist movie, except for the fact that this film (along with The Asphalt Jungle) more or less invented the genre and establishes its fundamental themes and imagery.  A hardened, laconic crook, called the Stephanois, gets out of stir.  His first objective is to punish his girlfriend for her treachery -- she informed on him, resulting in his conviction.  (He also sacrificed himself to keep a young accomplice who is a family man from being sent to prison).  The Stephanois finds his girlfriend, now a rival gangster's moll, at a tawdry night club called L' Age d'Or (homage to Bunuel and the film's set decorator Alexander Trauner who worked on the thirties' surrealist classic).  In a startling scene, the protagonist makes his girlfriend strip and beats her with a sort of chain, scarring her back --  the marks on her body trigger the series of catastrophes at the end of the film.  Stephanois is gaunt, still smoking, although he has a hacking tubercular cough.  He's a bit like Humphrey Bogart at the end of his tether.  The crook assembles a team of of criminals to burglarize a jewelry shop in central Paris.  The shop is equipped with a state-of-the-art safe and an alarm system set to a hair-trigger response to vibrations anywhere in its vicinity.  The burglars practice with exemplars of the safe and alarm system and, then, in a bravura scene execute their heist -- this involves breaking and entering, chiseling through floors, disabling the hair-trigger alarm, and, at last, boring through the thick iron walls of the safe.  (This is the first extended wordless sequence, silent except for the whine of drills and the tapping of chisels -- a sort of ballet that lasts about 30 minutes.)  Although there are some close-calls, the heist is perfectly executed and the crooks get away with 220 million dollars in gems.  But catastrophe follows immediately on the heels of the successful robbery.  The safe-cracker, a dapper little man who seems to be Italian (he's played by Dassin himself) snatches an emerald ring for his squeeze -- the safe-cracker is an inveterate ladies' man.  The rival gangsters at the L'Age d'Or immediately perceive that the girl is sporting a big, flashy ring and force her to admit the gem's provenance.  (The scarred back of the gangster's moll also is tip-off that the Stephanois is out of the slammer.) These gangsters, led by a suave thug named Grutter, include a dope addict and some other violent and menacing crooks.  They immediately scheme to waylay Stephanois' band of burglars with the plan to torture them into surrendering their ill-gotten gains.  A lot of brutal mayhem ensues.  Ultimately, Grutter kidnaps the family man's little boy.  Stephanois' mistress forgive him the beating that he administered to her -- apparently, kidnaping a child is a bridge too far for her and she informs the protagonist where he can find the rival gangster.  Stephanois hunts his adversaries down and, in a final gun battle at a villa under construction outside of Paris, manages to kill them.  But he's badly wounded -- like Sterling Hayden in The Asphalt Jungle, the hero drives desperately through country and town as he's bleeding out.  This is the second extended silent sequence -- the dying gangster has the four-year old boy that he has rescued in the car with him; the kid is dressed as a cowboy and brandishing a toy pistol in the convertible that the Stephanois drives swerving and careening into the oncoming lane into the very heart of Paris.  The little kid squeals with joy and points his gun in the air, an image of demonic, mindless violence. It's exhilarating and horrific at the same time.   

Dassin was an American director who had been blacklisted and, so, forced to work abroad.  Rififi takes its time with the heist scene, but once the gems have been boosted, the film roars into high-gear and the mise-en-scene is ferocious doom incarnate -- interestingly, the cops and the law have nothing to do with the destruction of the gang of burglars.  This film is font from which movies like Thief, Mission Impossible, and a thousand others derive.  The film is also a primary source for much of the imagery in Truffaut and Godard's early nouveau vague films.  It's raw, tough, and brilliantly made

Eureka

 Lisandro Alonso's 2023 Eureka begins with a pastiche of a spaghetti Western, cuts to a Frederick Wiseman style documentary about law enforcement on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota, and, then, ends among gold miners in the jungles of Brazil.  The film is a sonata of false starts and misdirection -- protagonists search for people in vain and narratives are truncated into meaningless fragments.  The picture is frustrating and unresolved -- this isn't an accident, not a "bug" as they say but a "feature".  I can't ascertain the point of the movie which is overlong and portentous, but the film's pointlessness is, apparently, what it is all about.  

In the opening scene, an Indian shaman is filmed on a rock coast, declaiming some sort of chant to the sun that rises through slit in the cliffs.  He walks along the beach.  (There is something intrinsically "wrong" or inauthentic about the way the Indian walks -- this is characteristic of the movie; the way people act and move never seems to be realistic, but isn't stylized either; it's like watching bad actors in a home movie.)  A "man with no name" is shown in a wagon, riding behind a woman dressed as a nun.  There's a baby's coffin the wagon with the gunman (played by Viggo Mortenson).  The nun tells the bad man that she can't take him into town and leaves him to walk through the desert, apparently sending him in the wrong direction.  (The situation channels the plot of Two Mules for Sister Sara, a Clint Eastwood "oater" directed by Don Siegel).  After being lost for while, the bad hombre finds the town, a miserable collection of frayed, tumble-down buildings where drunks are strewn in the muddy streets, naked prostitutes gambol at a trough, and perpetual gunfights cause the air to ring out with shots fired.  The nun turns out to be a whore and the saloon is full of topless floozies.  The gun man walks past a number of corpses of people shot down in the street, kills the sheriff who has rocked back in his chair like Henry Fonda in My Darling Clementine and, then, enters a hotel.  He spends the night in a room with two corpses with bullets in their brain pans wallowing in bed, waiting for dawn, when he shoots a couple more people and, then, bursts into a room where a villain is bathing in a zinc tub.  The gunman demands that the villain tell where his daughter is.  Someone mentions "El Coronel" and there is a bird feather on a table.  The villain refuses to talk but the daughter emerges from the next room, points her revolver at her father and says that she isn't going to leave the town and intends to stay.  This part of the film is made like a low-budget spaghetti western, or, perhaps, like Jodorowsky's El Topo -- it's over-the-top and seems intended to be ridiculous.  The image is formatted in an odd oblong and the film stock is black and white.  It turns out that we are watching a movie on TV in a modest government issue pre-fab house on an Indian reservation in South Dakota.  A handsome lady cop is suiting up for her night shift as a patrol officer for the Lakota tribal police.  Her niece Sadie is with her and says that she intends to go to the High School to practice basketball -- it turns out that Sadie is the coach of the local High School team.  This is at Kyle, South Dakota, the tribal headquarters for the Lakota-speaking Indians on the Pine Ridge Reservation.  A newscast informs us that a blizzard is coming and that it's 19 below zero.  The lady cop attends to calls to which she is dispatched.  First, she goes to a squalid house where everyone is drunk or stoned on methamphetamines.  An old man mutters about someone lighting his dog on fire and spouts drunken gibberish to the police officer.  There are lots of little kids in the house sleeping four to a bed and drunks sprawled all over the place passed-out -- the bodies lying on the floor looks similar to the carnage in the depraved town in the black and white movie.  The officer is searching for a missing child, McKenzie, but no one knows anything about her.  On the highway, the cop encounters a tourist whose car is stalled out -- a potentially deadly situation in the lethal cold.  The tourist is a French woman who has come onto the reservation to scout locations for a movie that she is involved in producing (presumably Eureka which, in fact, lists some French companies as producers).  The cop takes the French woman to the High School (why?) where Sadie is perfecting her free-throws in the basketball court.  The woman talks to Sadie and insults her with condescending comments about the reservation, and a wave of youth suicides.  Back on the snowy highways, the lady cop is called to a knife-fight between two women in another squalid trailer house.  She arrests one of the girls who says that she is pregnant and spends the next half hour harassing the officer about having to pee.  Driving to the tribal jail, the officer encounters a man so drunk he is passed-out in his car.  She arrests him as well and, then, proceeds to a casino, the Prairie Winds where there has been some kind of shoot-out.  A hotel room is badly vandalized.  The lady cop looks out the window and see the snow falling, blown in white sheets through the night by the icy wind.  Sadie, meanwhile, goes to the Law Enforcement Center at the tribal headquarters where she meets with her brother who is in jail.  She tells her brother that this will be their last meeting because she intends to go away;  The despatcher can't locate car 174, the call number for the lady cop, who now has gone missing.  He keeps trying to contact her by radio but she seems to have vanished.  It's dawn and Sadie goes to her grandfather's trailer house, another squalid shanty heated by a woodburning stove.  Her grandfather agrees to keep a promise he made to the morose young woman.  He gives her some herbal tea, goes out to tend to his ponies, and Sadie turns into a long-legged stork-like bird.  The bird flies away, pausing for a moment at the Crazy Horse monument sculpted into the side of the mountain near Custer, South Dakota -- the colossal carving makes Crazy Horse look like cross-eyed and mentally retarded -- near Custer,   In Brazil, some Indians in white robes are engaged in some kind of experiment with hallucinogenic drugs.  They explain their dreams to one another.  A girl named Lila is among the four or five young men.  (The crane from South Dakota is stalking around in the underbrush).  Two young men both dream about wooing Lila.  (We see excerpts from their dreams which are wholly realistic, not fantastical at all, and involve the boys swimming in a rock-girt pool next to a cascade.)  The boys fight over their dreamed encounters with Lila and one of the kids stabs the other to death.  The assailant,.then, packs up his little suitcase, incongruously located on top of a tangle of huge trees, and goes to work at a gold mine.  At the mine, by beginner's luck, the kid finds a number of gold nuggets -- he's allowed to keep some of the gold which he puts in a vial hanging around his neck.  The foreman tells the boy that two fellow workers are plotting to murder him for his gold.  So the kid, who now is sick with something like malaria, take his little brown suitcase and flees through the jungle.  He is told to go to the river and find someone called "el Coronel".  Half-dead with illness, the locates the man who loads him onto a canoe and, using a motor-boot engine, guides the little craft through narrow lagoons to a big river.  The kid can no longer walk and seems to be dying.  He is carried into a hut where a native healer, spits vodka on him, brushes his body with sage or some other sacred herb.  This turns him into a stork-like crane who then flies away.  In each of the three parts to this triptych, feathers make an appearance, presumably molted by the crane-like supernatural creature. 

Alonso favors shots with very long duration -- in these images, a character simply sits brooding on the mournful nature of things.  The pastiche of the spaghetti Western is somewhat amusing but not funny enough to be comical.  The lengthy sequence on the Indian reservation is shot in a scrupulously documentary style and seems highly realistic -- although the people walk around in deadly cold without hats or gloves.  The scenes in the Amazon jungle are interesting and there are intriguing glimpses as to the technology and practice of gold mining.  The device of characters turning into a stork and, then, simply flying away seems to be a cop-out, a way to engineer an escape from a plot impasse.  There is a dream-like consistency between the episodes -- people go missing and can't be found.  But there is no thematic thread connecting the episodes other than the rather mechanical presence of the huge reptilian bird, sometimes clacking its comically large beak as it stalks around like a spectral monster.  

Wild Boys of the Road

 William Wellmann's pre-code Wild Boys of the Road (1933) clocks in at 67 minutes.  The picture is made with the swift expressive editing and short cuts that characterized the fully mature style of silent films.  The movie manages to cram an enormous amount of narrative into its short running time.  An example of the movie's half-crazed efficiency is a shot intended to punctuate the narrative, establishing an end to one episode in the film: after a battle, we see an image of trampled mud and debris with a bedraggled prosthetic leg lying at the center of the still-life; it's a startling picture, painstakingly composed, and we fully expect the camera to linger on the tableaux -- but, in fact, after two or three seconds, almost before we can register what the picture displays, the screen goes to black.  The picture is so brisk and action-packed that it doesn't need to strain for effects or linger on even its most extravagant pictures.  The poignant imagery, even, if conveyed in telegraphic bursts is sufficient to carry the plot forward.  With most movies, particularly cable-TV series, there's too much on screen for too long -- Wild Boys of the Road is about the Great Depression, shot in a documentary-style, and seems impoverished itself -- you want to see more than the picture shows you; it's a morsel not a meal.

Two teenage boys, Eddie and Tommy are best friends.  We see them dancing with girls and flirting at the Sophomore Ball -- it costs 75 cents admission for boys, girls are free. The party seems merry but there are are disturbing undertones.  Tommy doesn't have any money and sneaks into the dance dressed as a girl.  (He gets busted and kicked-out.)  After some fairly explicit necking with the girls in Eddie's jalopy (it's decorated with gee-whiz rah-rah slogans), the young man goes home where he learns that his father has been fired from the cement factory where he works.  Tommy's mother is already in economic distress -- the widow has to take in a boarder to make ends meet and, in fact, there still isn't enough cash on hand.  Eddie sells his old jalopy and gives the money ($22 dollars) to his father.  They josh around but the tone is bleak.  Ultimately, the two boys decide to leave town to avoid seeing their families humiliated by poverty.  They hobo a ride on a train where they meet a girl disguised as a boy -- this is Sally who is planning on visiting her aunt in Chicago.  Things go from bad-to-worse.  The train is mobbed with desperate children who are beaten and harassed by the railroad dicks.  One of the thugs rapes Sally during a melee in which the children fight the railroad detectives.  Thirty or so boys swarm the rapist and seem to tear him to pieces -- his body is thrown out of the moving train.  When the trio (Eddie, Tommy, and Sally) reach Chicago, most of the other kids are sent off to some kind of concentration camp.  Our heroes, however, find their way to Sally's apartment.  It turns out that Sally's Aunt is a prostitute running a speakeasy.  The place gets raided just about 30 seconds after the kids are warmly welcomed by the older floozy.  Back on the rails again, the three kids are once more assaulted by railroad dicks with batons and clubs.  Someone points out that there are a hundred nomadic kids to the ten nasty RR employees and that they should fight back.  And, so, there is a pitched battle in which the RR dicks are stoned, pelted with eggs, and end up retreating.  In the course of the fight, Tommy gets knocked-out and falls onto the railroad tracks in the switching yard.  His leg is horribly mangled when a locomotive rolls over it.  Eddie gets a doctor because "Tommy's leg looks strange" and the limb is amputated.  The kids continue their journey to nowhere and end up encamped in a huge Hooverville or shanty town called "Sewer Pipe City" -- the hobo children are living inside pre-formed concrete sewer pipes in a dismal vacant lot.  Eddie steals a prosthetic leg for Tommy but it doesn't fit right and hurts him when he tries to walk with it.  An army of cops arrive and there's another pitched battle between hundreds of "wild boys" and the police.  The cops deploy a fire-house and ultimately drive the ragged children out of their impromptu village.  Tommy, Eddie, and Sally make their way to New York where they join the hordes of adults and children looking for jobs.  Some crooks trick Eddie into passing a terroristic note to a woman in the kiosk selling movie tickets.  All three kids are arrested and appear in juvenile court.  The Judge admonishes them.  Eddie replies saying that society doesn't even want to see these young victims of the Depression and that there is no justice -- the law is just a machine for pushing these children out of sight and out of mind.  This is where the movie ended in Wellmann's cut -- a paddy wagon comes and takes the kid's away while the Judge (who has a picture of his own son on his desk) looks out the window at their departure mournfully.  Reportedly, this was far too bleak an ending for Jack Warner, the studio head, and, so, the movie has been retrofitted with a phony happy ending -- the kids are sent to good homes and protected by the State.  In the studio cut, Eddie celebrates by hurling himself into a series of acrobatic somersaults and ends on his head, literally spinning on his noggin on the sidewalk.  

Wellmann's conceives the film as a war movie.  But it is an odd kind of war picture --the country is fighting its own children who have risen up in a kind of avenging, but, ultimately, helpless mob.  The scene, for instance, in which Tommy's leg is amputated is full of tough-guy talk that is revealed to be ultimately the panicked banter of frightened children -- the sequence would not be out-of-place in All Quiet on the Western Front.  The essence of the Depression is that the institutions in society have collapsed to the extent that they are making war on society's most vulnerable members, its children.  The pre-Code elements in the film are obvious in the implied rape scene and the vicious revenge that the children take on the assailant.  The battles are violent, disturbing, and chaotic.  In an early scene, a boy and girl are petting in the backseat of the jalopy.  The couple get up, filmed from an angle in which the girl's buttocks are pushed forward toward the camera -- Tommy slaps her ass hard to make his point that he's tired of "kissing and kissing and kissing" her.  There's one astonishing scene -- the kid who plays Eddie runs down an alley pursued by cops; there's a four-foot high ash bin along the side of the alley with an 18 inch diameter opening.  Eddie somehow levitates and hops right into the ash bin, performing this remarkable stunt at a full, dead run.  

I recommend this movie because it is moving, brilliantly made, and, certainly, an important historical document in itself.  The picture depicts how very close the US came to full-fledged fighting in the streets and revolution during the Depression.  When the harassed kids fight back, the picture takes on a weirdly exciting and triumphant aspect.  ( Eddie is played by Frankie Darro, a child actor who started his career as an acrobat in the circus; this was his most important role -- in later life, he worked in Hollywood as a stunt man.  Of course, he was injured many times in his career, used alcohol as an analgesic, and ended up as a drunk.)  

Firelai Baez at the Des Moines Art Center

 Whenever I am in Des Moines, I try to spend an hour or so at the city's Art Center.  The museum is architecturally significant consisting of three interconnected buildings, each designed by an important architect -- the original structure is a refined, a low-slung brick edifice with an elegant wood-walled entry designed by Eliel Saarinen (constructed 1945 - 1948);this opens into a monumental concrete gallery on two levels with a massive v-shaped roof supported between skylights with adjacent fountain (I.M. Pei, 1966 - 1968), and, finally, an ultra abstract construction by Richard Meier completed in 1985.  The Meier annex looks fragile, like something pieced together from pre-fabricated frames of gleaming white metal -- it's taller than it is broad and, to borrow a mordant phrase from Tom Wolfe, looks like a glistening, hyper-contemporary insecticide factory.  The bright interior of Meier's assemblage is successful notwithstanding the rather robotic appearance of the outside and the galleries are very well-lit with vertical spaces accessed by daunting stairways -- one of them is open between the steps and rather vertiginous.  For my money, the massive Brutalist Pei structure is one of the most beautiful spaces, both inside and out, that I have encountered anywhere -- it's a bracing pleasure to enjoy the great, serene expanses of concrete with an enormous two-story window opening out onto a rose-garden; the place is cool, hushed, with an ecclesiastical atmosphere and there's never really anyone in this big space.  I would guess that the acoustics in this suite of rooms are astounding and would like to see a string quartet or some other ensemble on that order performing in this place.  Entry to the museum is free and, I must confess, that I like to stop at this place mostly for the purpose of dipping into the cool, resonant Pei chambers -- what marvelous ruins they will one day make!

On display in the summer of 2025 is a large retrospective of works, mostly oil on canvas, by the Dominican artist, Firelei Baez (born 1981).  Baez' paintings are colorful and figurative.  She works in two principal modes -- large paintings of female figures in colorful turbans ("do-rags" that are called tignon) with large, alert and staring eyes but faces otherwise unformed and without nostrils or mouth; Baez also paints surrealist figures (women's legs sprouting fantastic garlands of flowers for torso and head) on enormous canvases silkscreened with maps, historic images, and architectural drawings.  In these large latter paintings, Baez contrasts the efflorescing female figures, exploding into elaborate, sculptural-looking bouquets of flowers, against rather staid schematics of bridge pylons, fastening hardware, sea-charts, and old engravings of the imagined inhabitants of the Caribbean, woodcuts of families of native folk happily picnicking on scraps of dismembered bodies (the Carib Indians were reputed to be cannibals.).  The point seems to be to contrast the embodied resistance of the native people against the mechanisms of colonialism (bridges and factories) that once oppressed these people.  The mouthless portrait figures with the elaborate turbans are close to kitsch -- they refer to a 1786 decree that all women on the island (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) be mandated to wear the tignon as a sign of their African or Creole blood.  Many of Baez' works have long Brechtian titles that are impossible to remember and difficult to interpret. Several of her pieces seem to be part of the Center's permanent collection -- there is an alcove in the Pei building with three large and brilliantly colored canvases that show a figure with a woman's legs and hips dissolving into radiant, lightning-like rays of light (this is called, for some reason, "Adjusting the Moon:  Waxing and Waning - the Right to Non-Imperative Clarities.")  A great tilted facade with an open doorway leans across the Pei building's heroically-sized hall -- you can walk through the thing which is covered with a sort of pale blue floral print, something that you might imagine as comprising one of the signature tignons adorning the women in the show.  Baez orchestrates these sorts of effects in an installation: "A drexycyen chronocommons:  To win the war you fought it sideways" (2019) - the space is like the interior of a large tent made of billowy blue fabric, translucent and lit from behind in several places, with open alcoves in which there are stationed Baez's big portraits of women without lips or mouths turbaned or sprouting orchids from their brow.  Lengthy and tendentious labels natter on and on about racism, colonialism, the history of the island of Santo Domingo -- but these hectoring texts don't really add anything to your appreciation of the work. 

The Center's permanent collection contains a Goya portrait, a lifesize image of a Spanish bureaucrat, posed next to a small brown pug dog with wet bulbous eyes. One of the most famous images in the world is in the Meier annex -- this is Francis Bacon's eerie and disturbing "Screaming Pope".  There's an Edward Hopper painting of a lone woman in an automat; she wears a white button of a hat over her compact creamy face.  A painting by Philip Guston shows the brutish profile of the composer Morton Feldman (called "M. F." in the scrawl on the painting)-- Feldman has a huge ear as befitting a composer, smokes a cigarette, and his flesh is the color of meat that you might see hanging in a slaughterhouse.  The museum owns a nice Basquiat and an interesting charismatic work of Art Brut by Dubuffet -- the Basquiat and the Dubuffet should be hung side-by-side since they echo and resonate with one another.  In the lowest part of the Meier building, there's a huge and excellent work by Anselm Kiefer:  the painting shows a tangle of converging railroad tracks aimed at a sinister collection of buildings in the midst of a seared and slashed landscape, everything burnt and half-melted with another tangle of metal ladder affording escape, or possibly the mere hope of the escape, from the fatal rails and the death-factory on the horizon.  The vertical ladder mimics the horizontal railroad tracks and ties and two charred ballet slippers dangle from one of its rungs.  

Eddington

 What was that all about?  This morning, as I walked my dog through the sullen, grey humidity, I passed a church, more or less killed by COVID.  In the darkened window, on the sill, I saw the pale apparition of a bottle of hand sanitizer.  Do you recall the pandemic?  The poorest people were deemed "essential workers" so they could be sacrificed to the endangered economy.  Trump wanted people to inject Clorox bleach into their bodies.  Mobs beat up Chinese people in retaliation for the "China flu."  Fights occurred in grocery checkout lines over masks.  Bar-owners defied the quarantine and went to jail.  And, in the midst, of the panic and fear, the police murdered George Floyd and there were super-spreader mass demonstrations, police precincts on fire, hails of rubber bullets. In hospitals, nurses and staff in hazmat suits stood bedside as people died without any of their loved ones allowed in the room. Corpses were stored in coolers in the parking lots of hospitals. Ventilators hissed and empty streets led to empty shopping malls and deserted skyscrapers.  Every kind of febrile fantasy imaginable spread with the speed of the Internet.  When an effective vaccine was offered, about 30% of the public inexplicably refused to get the shot.

I don't know exactly what happens in Ari Aster's Eddington (2025).  The film is about how tensions over COVID stretched communities and the country at large to the breaking point.  The film is a paranoid muddle, but its very incoherence is true to the historical moment that it depicts:  it's not clear what's going on, but, whatever it is, things are bad.  Aster, of course, became famous for making horror movies -- in that genre, allusion and suggestion are as important (or more so) that representation.  The really bad stuff that occurs in Eddington is off-screen, merely implied as opposed to stated.  The film doesn't make sense -- it's about two hours and fifteen minutes long, but you have the feeling that another hour of the picture ended up on the cutting room floor. (Aster is nothing if not ambitious; his previous film Beaux is Afraid is an enormous psychodrama that climaxes with the protagonist sailing into his mother's colossal womb, a watery chamber that doubles as an amphitheater stocked with thousands of CGI extras.)  Although the narrative in Eddington is impossible to recount, what lingers in the imagination is the film's weird ambience -- it's like a modern Western on the order of No Country for Old Men that has dissolved into frenzied delirium.  

Joaquin Phoenix plays Sheriff Joe Cross, a beleaguered lawman in a desert county somewhere in New Mexico.  The film's hallucinated topography is essential to its effect:  the town of Eddington, seemingly the county seat, looks like any number of desolate western villages -- to my mind, the town seems like Gillette, Wyoming in the Big Horn Basin or Winslow, Arizona (I think the picture's locations were largely shot in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico).  The town is sunbaked, treeless so that its naked ugliness is fully exposed, an array of nondescript commercial buildings in a downtown grid with barren gravel-covered hilltops rising over the empty wide streets and vacant lots -- there's a water tower on one of the piles of gravel adorned with a painting of cowboys and Indians. (In a zinc-roofed shed, there's a museum of pioneer artifacts and Indian relics.)  The wasteland is spacious -- pueblo-style houses of adobe are scattered across the pebbly, grim arroyos around the village.  In the opening sequence, a local drunk and mad man, muttering frantically to himself, stumbles over one of the piles of rock pimpling the desert and we see the town spread out below.  The drunk goes to a bar where he enters without a mask.  The COVID pandemic is in full spate but hasn't yet reached this rural county -- so far, there seem to be no verified cases.  Sheriff Cross thinks the town will be immune and refuses to wear a mask.  Everyone is tense, bickering with everyone else about what measures are necessary to combat the virus.  In the wake of the George Floyd murder, all the townsfolk have their cameras at ready, in holsters like revolvers and ready for a quick draw.  When Cross takes down the malevolent, insane drunk, of course, the altercation is filmed and leads to police brutality protests.  Pedro Pascal plays Mayor Garcia,, Cross' liberal antagonist -- he's a wine and cheese progressive who is courting a company that plans to build a huge data center on the outskirts of town.  After some confrontations with the Mayor, Sheriff Cross decides to run for mayor himself -- he enlists his deputies at the sheriff's office (which seems to be a violation of law) and tricks up his pickup with red, white, and blue bunting and inflammatory popularist slogans.  Sometimes, he drives through town denouncing Garcia using a loudspeaker mounted on the truck.  For the film's first ninety minutes, nothing much happens -- people get more and more paranoid about the virus; there are more squabbles about preventative measures and local kids (with some outside agitators) stage protests on the town's forlorn main street.  Things come to a head when Cross gets a noise complaint about music coming from Garcia's house where he is hosting a campaign party.  Driving his ridiculous gaudy truck, Cross comes to the party, confronts the mayor, and orders him to turn off the music.  Garcia's well-heeled supporters are openly contemptuous of the sheriff and disobey his commands.  There's a confrontation and Garcia slaps the Sheriff across the face -- it's a strangely shocking scene, similar to the moment in The Long Goodbye in which Henry Gibson slaps the enormous and menacing Sterling Hayden.  Cross is humiliated and doesn't respond, retreating from the party.  By this time, it's apparent that the sheriff is sick with COVID, feverish and on the edge of delirium.  Cross arms himself and returns after dark to a sniper's vantage near the Mayor's house.  He guns down the mayor and his teenage son for a good measure.  Then, Cross kills the crazy vagrant in the local bar where the man has broken in.  From this point on, all hell breaks loose and the film ends with an exuberant over-the-top rampage involving machine guns, drones dropping bombs, and all sorts of spectacular mayhem.

Complicating the situation are strange sexual subtexts.  Cross' wife (played by Emma Stone in an eerie, if underwritten part) steadfastly rebuffs his sexual advances.  Cross accuses the Mayor of having raped his wife when she was sixteen -- whether this claim is true is a matter of conjecture; this is the subtext of rivalry between the two men. Cross' mother-in-law is a Q-anon addict and conspiracy monger -- she seems completely crazy.  Midway through the movie, an enigmatic figure named Vernon Peak appears; he's a handsome young man who claims to have been sexually trafficked by his father to "ten older men" and, now, is some kind of politically opportunistic victim's rights advocate.  Cross' wife seems to be attracted to Peak who is accompanied by several young people who are political activists.  As the protests over police violence and the Floyd killing ramp up in Eddington, Peak and his followers also participate in sowing discord in the town.  Meanwhile some other sort of dark force is afoot, manipulating events.  An additional layer of complexity involves the reservation adjacent to town; the sniper's roost from which Cross fired at Garcia is on Indian land and the tribe claims jurisdiction over part of the investigation into the shooting.    

After the climactic shoot-out, an extremely gory and graphic affair, Cross is horribly injured.  We think that he's been killed but, in fact, he's suffered a brain injury that has paralyzed him.  In the film's epilogue, Cross has somehow been re-elected mayor (possibly due to his perceived heroism in the fire fight) but he's mostly mute and disabled, a stunted figure in a wheelchair.  Cross' wife, frigid with him, has run off with Vernon Peak and, in fact, is pregnant by the sex abuse crusader.  Cross' crazy mother-in-law now runs Eddington.  (There's a quietly devastated scene in which a male nurse hired to attend to Cross plops him naked on a toilet, casually cuffing the paralyzed man upside the head before apologizing:  "Sorry about that.")   Cross now shares a bed with his lunatic mother-in-law and the handsome health aide.  A concluding overhead shot shows the vast data center spraying a million volts across the naked desert with the smaller, dimmer lights of Eddington in the background.  

One of the most devastating aspects of the film is that one of Cross' deputies is a Black officer.  This man is loyal to Cross and supports his political ambitions. He is continuously assailed as a traitor to his people in the demonstrations arising from the death of George Floyd.  When the cops come to investigate the multiple murders of Mayor Garcia, his son, and the drunk desert rat, Cross pins the killings on the Black man, claiming he acted with the connivance of "Antifa."  The officer is thrown in jail.  Later, in a mysterious drone attack, he's badly injured.  In the film's penultimate sequence, the Black cop, badly scarred from the bomb dropped by the drone, lies prone on the desert floor, engaged in target practice with his rifle -- he's survived, if just barely, and there is a sense of palpable menace in the image of the figure lying in the dust, after dark, blasting away at the silhouette of a man on the target.  It's the fire of revenge, the fire next time.  

The movie is exquisitely made, but baffling.  The acting is all ferocious, pitch-perfect.  Some parts of the movie are darkly humorous.  After the Sheriff has slaughtered Garcia and his teenage son, Cross' own adolescent son gives an eulogy for the slain boy.  He says that as an exemplar of "White privilege", he's not qualified to talk about the death of the young man "of color".  After these self-righteous comments about not having the right to speak, however, he goes on and speaks, at length, anyway.  

This is an excellent movie, but I have no idea what it is supposed mean , nor do I know who was killing whom in the big battle at the end.   The picture has the expressive fury that I associate with Scorsese's early movies like Mean Streets and Taxi Driver.  It's very good but, in many ways, also indefensible. You should see this picture for yourself.    

The Flying Dutchman (Des Moines Opera)

 Bow ties are de riguer among the spiffy elders at Indianola's Blank Performing Arts Center where the Des Moines opera presented The Flying Dutchman on July 20, 2025 -- the last performance of the summer festival.  Angelica and I arrived an hour early and, so, heard a french horn player practicing scales behind a staff-only door in the corner of the upper lobby.  Apparently, the door opened into not only rehearsal spaces but some sort of green room -- we saw singers coming and going including the burly, bearded gent who plays the Norwegian sea-captain Daland in the show; he was concerned about seating for a friend of his who had come from South Carolina to see the sold-out show.  (The bass singer wore a white tunic and heavy black boots polished to a mirror-like sheen.) Efficient-looking young women in black blouse and dress, headphones tucked over their ears, carrying black I-pads scurried around on enigmatic errands.  

The Flying Dutchman (1843) is the first opera written by Richard Wagner that bears all of the composer's signature devices:  the music is continuous, performed notionally without interruptions with breaks only begrudgingly granted out of hygienic considerations; characters are identified with leit motifs, the Byronic hero is redeemed by love, and. after the fat lady sings, she hurls herself off a cliff into the torch of the raging sea.  The opera's effect is single-minded, and, even, a bit monotonous.  Wagner here is tinkering with his invention of the leit motif and, if truth be told, he uses the technique ad nauseam.  It seems that there are only three musical themes in the opera:  a surging fanfare that leaps up an octave in the horns signifying the Dutchman and his sinister ship with its blood-red sails, a jaunty sailor's jig ("Steuermann, lass die Wacht!), and Senta's motif, some ambiguous chords that melt into supernatural radiance as the music climaxes with the redemption theme.  There's far more melodic stuff in an opera by Mozart or Rossini; Wagner rather mechanically screws his themes into your brain, deploying the same material over and over again.  It's redundant, but, of course, given the kinetic dynamism of the melodies and their lush orchestration, ultimately, thrilling.  

It's customary to present a pantomime during Wagner's brilliant and oceanic overture -- in this case, we see the death of Senta's mother in childbirth: she lies under a blood-stained blanket while Daland, her father, cradles the infant among mourning women; Senta grows up, essentially an orphan to the sea, since her mariner father is absent most of the time; she seems to displace her emotion for her father onto a picture of the Flying Dutchman that she tears out of a book and carries everywhere; then, the Dutchman's vessel surges into view, a projection of blood-red boat on a wild blood-red sea.  In a tempest, Daland's own ship is in peril itself -- the sailor's wrestle with long snake-like rigging ropes that hang from the ceiling.  Then, the storm ends and the Steuermann (ruddersman) falls asleep.  The Dutchman, who looks like a pirate, comes ashore -- he has a bare chest, tattoos, and wears a black BDSM vest.  The Dutchman, condemned to wander the sea unless redeemed by a woman's selfless and faithful love, is granted a couple days every seven years to search for this redemptive love.  He seems to know that Daland has a marriageable daughter and, with trunks of gold and gems (when opened they give off a golden glow after the manner of the "great whatsit" in Kiss me Deadly), essentially purchases Senta from her father -- he's a willing seller.  In the second act, the chorus of women (about 20) are spinning and sewing -- the music in this opera is very heavily and obviously gendered.  Senta is prating about her boyfriend, the Dutchman whom she knows only from a picture she carries around with her.  The Dutchman appears and Senta sings with him -- this is an archetypal Wagnerian love duet:  it's less like lovers yearning together and more like some kind of cataclysmic celestial event, an alignment in the heavens or an eclipse, a vast, momentous cosmic occurrence.  There's only one problem:  Senta has a boyfriend, the feckless Erik the Jaeger (hunter).  Senta is confronted by Erik about her obsession with the Dutchman and, after the two exit into a snowy forest, he warns her about the supernatural demon-lover; he has had a portentous dream.  The sailors come ashore and party with the local girls in a massive choral scene (40 chorus members at least).  The party turns into a battle of the bands when the undead sailors on the Dutchman's ship sing their rampant theme as a countermelody to the more banal, and cheerful, jig sung by the women in the town and their seamen sweethearts..  The townsfolk are affrighted and, with the girls, they flee.  Erik confronts Senta about her love for the Dutchman.  It seems that Senta has allowed Erik to court her and he has risked his life picking "special flowers for her on the high cliffs."  But, as Senta observes, she never gave him her vow -- it was, so to speak, an informal and ephemeral relationship.  Unfortunately, the Dutchman who is lurking around (and highly ambivalent about being saved by Senta) hears the huntsman's confession of love, accuses Senta of being unfaithful, and leaves in a huff.  (The Dutchman justifies his pique by saying that, if Senta turns out to be faithless, she'll be condemned to hell himself and so he's breaking up with her "for her own good.")   The Dutchman sets sail in the tempest.  Senta proclaims:  Hier steh ich, treue dir bis zum Tod! ("Here I stand -- faithful to you to the death!").  She hurls herself off a cliff -- although this bit of stage business is obscure in this production.  The redemption through love music swells through the orchestra as a trap door opens and an elevator lifts Senta and the Dutchman, a hunky fellow now shirtless with elaborate nautical tattoos on his shoulders, up into what is supposed to be the heavens but is, in fact, to floor level on the stage.  The ending is rushed and its accelerated concatenation of calamities comes as a surprise -- you can't really digest what is going on until you're on the way to the exit.  The hasty conclusion to the opera also comes as a surprise in light of the rather leisurely and verbose development of the libretto (written by Wagner himself) during the preceding two hours -- it has lots of hefty people belting out high decibel notes at one another while the orchestra repetitively churns through the opera's three basic leit motifs.  

There's a lot of overreaction to various things in the opera -- it has a hysterical, frantic edge.  The Dutchman is condemned to his endless sailing over the stormy seas because, once while attempting to round the Cape of Good Hope, he said that he would keep trying to make this passage "even if it took (him) an eternity."  Someone heard this oath and, accordingly, condemned him for it -- a punishment that seems grossly disproportionate to the crime.  Similarly, the Dutchman flees Senta's embrace on the basis of a half-heard fragment of her conversation with the Huntsman -- this also seems an absurd overreaction.  On the other hand, the demeanor of Senta and the Dutchman suggests that they have some serious reservations about one another.  In this staging, the two principals circle one another warily on the stage, rounding the open orchestra pit between them like caged tigers pacing back and forth.  The Dutchman says he has had many women turn out to be disloyal to him -- probably, due, I suppose, to his propensity of buying his girlfriends from their fathers with chests of treasure.  There's an unsavory, mercantile aspect to the Dutchman's courtship of Senta, at least, initially, and, perhaps, I am hallucinating, but I had the distinct sense that the Dutchman most likely preferred his free life of damnation among the raging sea and stars to the rather cozy Biedermeier domesticity offered by Senta -- it's more fun being damned than stuck at home in a cold, grey Norwegian harbor-town.  

The production is handsome with towering flats on which raging blood-red seas are projected, lighting causing waves to seem to surge and topple onto the stage itself.  Most of the effects are accomplished by projection on the flats.  In the final scene, Senta stands against a blaze of brilliant lights that seems to represent the very opera stage on which this action climaxes.  The chorus performs fortissimo and the large forces fill the relatively small theater with deafening sound.  The orchestra was brilliant and the singing by all of the performers was suitably Wagnerian, a mighty din resounding through the room.  

In several productions of this opera that I have seen the pantomime during the famous overture is lackluster -- that was the case in this production as well.  I would suggest that the pantomime show the idyll between the huntsman and Senta -- it's soundless after all which foregrounds Senta's argument:  she may have acted as if she loved the huntsman, but, in truth, she never gave him her vow; she didn't announce her love for him in a high decibel aria and, hence, the lovemaking with the climbs up the cliffs didn't really account for anything.  

  

La Dolce Vita (Part II)

 La Dolce Vita – Part Two

1.

Very early in La Dolce Vita, Marcello communicates with girls bathing on a rooftop by wordless pantomime.  Distance and the whirr of the helicopter rotors make his words inaudible to the women with whom he is flirting.  The sequence is mirrored by the encounter with the angelic Paola in the film’s last scene.  A monster has washed up on the beach and Marcello with the people from the orgy have come to see the spectacle.  A creek runs as a rivulet across the beach and into the sea.  Marcello turns away from the monster and sees the girl standing on the other side of the stream.  The sound of waves and wind make it impossible for him to speak with her.  They communicate briefly by gesture and pantomime.  (Marcello makes a clownish gesture signifying helplessness.) One of the women from the orgy beckons to Marcello and, reluctantly, it seems, he follows her along the beach, moving in the direction of the flaccid, goggle-eyed monster.  

In the middle of the movie, Marcello goes to the Cha Cha club with his father.  They see a sad clown who mournfully plays on his trumpet.  Again, the clown doesn’t speak but communicates by gesture.  

La Dolce Vita is about spectacle.  Spectacle is word-less, it’s about what can be seen.  Celebrities and movie stars exist to be seen.  The hordes of paparazzi that besiege them are capturing their image.  In effect, spectacle dematerializes the world into image.  The pop stars and glamor girls and the whole specious world of film are spectacular images.  But, where everything is image, where everything is appearance, nothing is substance.  

Where everything is spectacle and image, the world presents as “shallow”.  Critics, often, describe La Dolce Vita as “depthless”.  This description is certainly a misnomer with respect the Fellini’s camerawork and pictorial composition.  In fact, many shots in the movie employ extremely deep focus; often we can see tiny figures in the far distance, standing like sentinels against Fellini’s bleak Roman horizons.  (Fellini films suburban Rome the way John Ford shoots Monument Valley – it’s like a Western, with acres of desert between huge mesas and buttes of apartment flats.)  Certainly, there is nothing “depthless” about the way the film depicts Rome and its denizens.  Yet the appellation “depthless” may be accurate in several respects.  First, critics often liken the vast canvas of La Dolce Vita to an church fresco.  This means that the scope of the film is lateral or horizontal and not vertical or, for that matter, exposing depths behind the surface of the image.  Frescos relevant to the mise-en scene-of La Dolce Vita are works by Giotto at the Arena Chapel in Padua and the Basilica of San Francisco at Assisi (the attribution of the Basilica frescos to Giotto is disputed) – these works show episodes in the life of St. Francis, in separate panels sprawling across the wall.  Similarly, Fellini depicts separate episodes in the life of Marcello deployed in a structure that is essentially non-recursive and non-narrative.  (Only the three scenes with Steiner, each isolated by other episodes in the film, form a narrative – and one that is highly disquieting). Modern life is characterized by anomie, detachment, alienation, and fragmentation – the “fresco” structure of the movie, deploying individual episodes that all have the same structure but that don’t cumulate into a narrative embodies this cubist fracturing of reality into individual discrete fragments, anecdotes that don’t cohere into a story.  “Depthless” accordingly means the film’s horizontal structure, box-cars of narration on a single track running from nowhere to nowhere.  

But “depthless” also means shallow.  A world that is comprised of spectacle, of naked images bereft of any meaning except as spectacle, is necessarily shallow.  Fellini’s La Dolce Vita is a shallow film about how modern urban life, in a society of spectacle, is shallow itself.  There are no hidden depths in the movie.  What you see is what you get.  It’s pointless to excavate the imagery in the film for profundity.  What Fellini presents is a modernist spectacle of startling images not invested with any literary significance.  They don’t “mean” anything except, perhaps, as symbols.  And symbolic imagery is essentially wordless in that it can’t be reduced to anything but its appearance.  

2.

In voice-over commentary on the La Dolce Vita DVD, the once-famous movie reviewer Richard Schickel struggles with the film’s opening sequence.  As everyone knows, Fellini shows a helicopter transporting a rather garish statue of Jesus over Rome’s urban wasteland.  Schickel correctly describes the imagery as complex in its meanings, but, then, asserts that the sequence is, more or less, blasphemous.  (Schickel was once the reviewer of the weekly magazine Life and was one of the few critics who had the ability to “make or break” a newly released motion picture with American audiences.)  So far as I can see, Schickel generally interprets everything in La Dolce Vita in a way that is exactly opposite to what I think the movie intends.  But the difficulties Schickel has with the film’s opening sequence, one of approximately 12 episodes that comprise the movie, is indicative of the way that Fellini constructs meaning in the picture.  Fellini works symbolically – Schickel apparently doesn’t want to discomfit his middle-brow listeners by reminding them of High School literature classes and, so, he doesn’t invoke the concept.  But this yields an interpretative crisis in his commentary after about only 60 seconds into the work.

A symbol is an image or figure of speech that can’t be reduced to any single meaning or set of meanings.  Symbols evoke a constellation of meanings that exceed the literal significance of the image or text.  If you can replace an image or trope with a single meaning, it is probably not symbolic, but, perhaps, metaphorical (a likeness) or allegorical (an emblem that typically has a one-to-one correspondence to some other concept.)  By their nature, symbols are suggestive, allusive, and evasive.  Hence, Schickel’s attempt to put into words the meaning of the helicopter conveying Christ, with arms outspread, over the city of Rome – the image can’t be reduced to any single response; rather, it conveys a set of responses.  Decoding a symbol in literal terms defeats its purpose.

Christ borne over the city of Rome by helicopter evinces the clash between ancient and modern, both literally materialized as the shadow of the helicopter on Roman ruins, but, also, demonstrated in the conflict between Christian morality and the pagan hedonism the reigns on the Via Veneto.  Christianity hasn’t gone away; rather, it hangs suspended, like the sword of Damocles over our heads – Christ both blesses His imperial city and condemns it.  His outstretched arms will embrace the entire spectacle presented by the film, suggesting theological dimensions to Marcello’s pilgrimage through night-time Rome.  In another sense, Christ is instrumental – he is brought here and there, trotted out when needed, but otherwise ignored.  (This notion of the instrumental peripatetic Christ is shown explicitly in the scenes involving the apparition of the Virgin – the children dart here and there, following an invisible presence that only they can see.)  The supernatural is omni-present.  The decadent aristocrats in their ruinous villa hunt for ghosts and one of the women has an uncanny seizure that resembles some sort of sinister orgasm.  Fellini is ultimately a moralist and the imagery of Christ held high over His city suggests that the self-indulgent hedonism that motivates the film’s characters is set against a Christian frame of reference.  The symbol shows Christ triumphant, Christ debased, Christ as judge, Christ as an irrelevant and kitschy figure moved from place to place like a piece of advertising – no single interpretation of the opening sequence is correct or, even, available and, in fact, it is difficult to put into words what this symbol means.  

La Dolce Vita is replete with complex and enigmatic symbols.  Consider the sea-monster on the beach juxtaposed against the angelic Paola, the teenage waitress at the seaside resort, the Madonna’s apparition in the blighted rural landscape, the prostitute’s flooded basement apartment, the grotesque aristocrats’ ghost-hunting in the abandoned villa, Marcello astride the woman at the orgy, riding her like a donkey, the lonely wastelands surrounding Rome, the sad clown at the Cha Cha cabaret, the searchlights probing the darkness as visible from the balcony at Steiner’s apartment, and innumerable other images and sequences.  At the threshold of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, we must be conscious that the director works poetically by deploying symbols with complicated emotional and intellectual correlatives.  The overture to the film, Christ carried over the city, establishes Fellini’s modus operandi – the sequence is mysterious (why is Christ being transported? And where?), non-narrative, and never explicated within the movie.  Fellini’s prelude establishes that meaning in La Dolce Vita will never be reducible to any single formulation and, further, that there will be no consolation afforded by a single, consistently developed story-line or narrative.  The plight of urban elites is to live in an absurd flux of sensations in which all meaning is necessarily fragmentary – La Dolce Vita doesn’t hold together or cohere; it consists of a series of disconnected, highly affective, fragments, a mosaic with the pieces scattered in all directions.  

Furthermore, we must accept that episodes in the film are non-narrative, posited as random events, and that each new episode will likely involve characters that we haven’t met before and that will probably drop out of the movie after the episode has screened.  (It’s instructive to watch the movie with someone who isn’t familiar with it – naive viewers tend to be very confused by the lack of overlap between the episodes.)  Anita Ekberg’s character, Sylvia Rank, has come to epitomize the film in the popular imagination – her scenes cavorting with Marcello in the Trevi Fountain are emblematic for the movie.  But she appears only for a fifteen minutes or so in a picture with a running time of almost three-hours.  Descending into Rome like Christ, dropped from above in an airplane, she adorns the movie for a little while, “a poor player who struts and frets (her) hour on the stage” and, then, exits never to be seen again – indeed, never even to be mentioned again.  Fellini seems to suggest that narrative continuity is a pre-modern luxury upon which we can no longer rely.

In the place of a continuous narrative, Fellini creates alarming juxtapositions, sudden transitions that are completely disorienting and, even, shocking.  There are two examples of these disconcerting jump-cuts in the first few minutes of the film.  The camera tracks the two helicopters in the Roman sky, following the statue of Christ, or its shadow cast upon the ground.  But, suddenly, we encounter several women in bikinis sunbathing on a terrace atop a tower.  One of the women gets up and the camera-angle emphasizes her derriere – the lady’s ass is thrust at us as the statue of Christ swoops by overhead.  When the sequence ends, Fellini cuts to an uncanny Asian figure, some sort of animated idol from Thailand or Angkor Wat – the figure seems to be metallic, gilded like the Christ dangling from the helicopter.  The Asian god quivers and utters a ullulating cry.  Two masked body builders with scimitars flank the idol-like figure.  The jump-cut establishes a violent clash between the figure of Christ and the specter of this weird, shrieking Asian god, the latter a spectacle presented on the floor of a palatial night club.  The juxtaposition signifies, it seems, the remote, dangling Christ in contrast with the eerie, pagan energies of the night-club.  Fellini devises a series of oppositions to energize his film and propel it forward on the basis of a strident dialectic – this against that.

3.

Consider one of the most celebrated sequences in La Dolce Vita – the media hysteria surrounding an alleged apparition of the Virgin occurring in a singularly desolate landscape somewhere near Rome.  Even people who dislike La Dolce Vita (and there are many) must concede that this episode is a tour de force, a bravura display of what camera movement, chiaroscuro lighting, and image composition can achieve on the sheer level of astonishing “sight and sound.”  Of course, simply construed, the sequence is one of the “stations of the cross” as it were in Marcello’s pilgrimage.  The film systematically, even, encyclopedically exhausts the possibilities for meaning in the modern, urban world of celebrity-mad Rome.  The life of the mind and its fatal debility is demonstrated in the episodes involving the civilized, but doomed, Steiner.  Celebrity is shown to be empty, particularly in the episode involving Anita Ekberg and her sybaritic companions.  Love as an escape from the world of trivial glamor is shown to be futile.  Naked desire and lust aren’t the answer to anything.  And, Fellini is at pains to demonstrate that religious faith and piety are largely fraudulent; the miracle sequence involving the apparition, on its simplest level, signifies the “disenchantment” of religion.  (Fellini, although a “cradle Catholic,” is weirdly Protestant; Max Weber said that the Protestants “disenchanted” the world.  This project of “disenchanting” the spectacle of modern life is central to the meaning of the film.)   

Thus, the wild madness shown in the miracle scene is a critique of religion and religious faith.  But the sequence has other overtones.  Fellini emphasizes that the miraculous apparition of the Virgin in this industrialized wasteland is primarily a cinematic spectacle.  The movie emphasizes that the miracle is being filmed by camera crews on scaffolds, cranes arched over the mob, and huge Klieg lights in batteries spraying their beams across a scene thronged with a literal army of extras.  In fact, the scene of the miracle (like the glamor of the celebrities) exists for the ubiquitous spectators of the paparazzi – the miracle is a movie staged for the camera. (In this sequence, the Madonna is a kind of celebrity.)  Accordingly, we can say that the miracle scene is about not only religious faith but, also, movie-making.  The sequence shows us an attempt to make a movie.  We are watching a film, very much like La Dolce Vita being produced right before our eyes.  So, with this episode, Fellini reaches the ne plus ultra of his endeavor to “disenchant” the world – he shows us that the very apparatus of film-making is also futile.  The children dart back and forth pointing to places where the Virgin has appeared to them – but they are gesturing to emptiness, trampled mud, a mangled tree.  In short, the children direct the eye to the very feature of the world that most characterizes La Dolce Vita – that is, sheer nothingness.  In the end, the camera can’t show what is truly real or significant.  It aims to produce the image of an apparition but nothing can be seen.  The entire vast spectacle of the miracle scene – and it is as huge and elaborate as a battle in a big-budget war movie – exists as a frame around what can not be seen; all the cameras in the world can’t film what isn’t there – and what isn’t there is any sense of meaning in the huge and empty spectacle.  So, finally, Fellini disenchants even his own endeavor in making the film.  

There’s a famous novel, and less well-known film adapting the book, by Nathaniel West called Day of the Locust.  The novel and film are about the hollowness and false values that animate Hollywood.  In the miracle scene, Emma prays that the little tree which has sprouted foliage where the Virgin appeared will embody for her another miracle – the resurrection of Marcello’s love for her.  But, in the rainstorm, the mob descends upon the tree like a horde of locusts.  They shred the tree, tearing it apart.  The lure of celebrity makes the populace of modern cities into locusts who destroy the very environment upon which they are dependent for life.  

4.

It’s interesting to note that Fellini stages the spectacle of his parties, orgies, and crowd scenes as if these images were history paintings made in the academic style of the 19th century. He composes the his parties like battle scenes that you might see in the Louvre or any number of other art museums.  In these scenes, we see crowds of people in motion, throngs that spill out to the edge of the pictorial canvas.  Some of the combatants have fallen; others are detached from the violent spectacle contemplating it with bemused horror, some seem to gaze out at the spectator.  Look at the dance scenes in the Caracalla bar with Sylvia, the drunken Lex Barker as Sylvia’s lover – he seems to be doing a crossword puzzle – and the wildly Dionysian Freddie who walks upside-down on his hands and seems to be some kind of leering satyr.  Group shots look like Gericault, Delacroix or Gros: in the center of tapestry, figures move in concentrated choreographed masses (like soldiers advancing into heavy fire), people are fallen, wounded, hors de combat, and, at the edges of the spectacle, there are witnesses who stand-in for the audience in the cinema and people who have, quite simply, gone mad.    

5.

Rome always falls.  It’s decline and fall are always imminent. 

6.

The paradox of “la dolce vita” is that everyone is trying to escape from it.  “The sweet life” is a kind of prison.  The film’s rhythm of nocturnal revelry and disillusion at dawn demonstrates the dimensions of the cell in which the characters are locked.  Since escape is impossible, La Dolce Vita presents the impression of ennui, interminable running in place – progress toward some sort of authentic existence is impossible.  The film systematically forecloses all avenues of escape.

Romantic love is a fiction: the encounter with Maddalena and Marcello ends in the flooded basement of a prostitute’s apartment; at dawn, Marcello’s long-suffering girlfriend, Emma, attempts suicide (not for the first time).  Glamor is a dead-end – Marcello’s pursuit of the fabulous Sylvia ends unconsummated in the Trevi Fountain at dawn, floods of desire reduced to a faint trickle.  (Back at the hotel, Sylvia’s husband punches Marcello in the gut.)  Religious ecstasy turns out to be fraudulent.  When Marcello’s father visits the Via Veneto, family ties and nostalgia about the past turn out to illusory – ill, the old man abruptly leaves rebuffing Marcello’s pleas that he remain for a few more hours in Rome and the good old days aren’t all they were cracked up to be.  The occult and aristocratic past are ghostly apparitions, grotesque remnants of something long rotten.  The paparazzi that are instrumental to the “sweet life” are shown at the end stalking and ambushing a woman whose husband and two children have just been killed – the stars of publicity are not only the rich and beautiful but, also, those who have suffered unimaginable tragedy.  Horror and mourning are grist for the mill.  Desire peters out, ending with a whimper and not a bang, at an orgy in which there is no sex, only violent humiliation.  The two most promising avenues for escape, represented by Steiner’s seemingly serene domesticity and the life of the mind and Paola, the angel at the seaside resort, are inaccessible to Marcello.  The rot is too deep; it has claimed Steiner as its victim and the angelic child, presented as a symbol of innocence, is physically inaccessible, beyond the stream that bisects the grim, grey beach.  

La Dolce Vita, accordingly, is a spectacle characterized by the continuous repetition of the same, a pattern that, by necessity, must be revealed by the film’s length.  Fellini’s subject matter is tedium, the dull boredom that arises when the same thing occurs over and over again.  To keep this boredom from enervating the film, Fellini and his co-writers design episodes that can be broadly interpreted in accord with the film’s systole/diastole of inebriated rapture giving way to dawn’s disillusion but which are complicated with themes that run in counterpoint to the picture’s fundamental structure.  The individual episodes are never baldly schematic, but, rather, complex with ambiguities and complications.  

As an example, the placid domesticity of Steiner’s family is undercut by the detail of searchlights sweeping the sky as if in search for the bombers that will carry the nuclear weapons at the end of the world.  The gathering is polyglot, cosmopolitan; people speak in allusions, citing Shakespeare and other writers.  The natural world is kept at a distance, confined within Steiner’s tape-recordings; the culture of the peasants and dispossessed is appropriated – a woman sings a Negro spiritual.  The serenity of Steiner’s world is undercut by the very intellectual qualities of skepticism and angst that it values.  His existence rests on knife-edge – the leisure and intellect that allow Steiner to critique his world also induce despair.  

When Marcello’s father appears on the Via Venuto, the script posits a warm reunion between father and son in the Cha-Cha Club that will later turn to ash at dawn. But this diagram of the episode’s meaning is complicated by complex imagery that mourns for a romanticized past that never really existed – nostalgia is just as much a trap as eros.  Rome has changed; the old traveling salesman can scarcely recognize his old haunts.  There is something specious about father and son pretending to an intimacy that they never had when Marcello was a boy.  Ultimately, people who are nostalgic for a fondly imagined past are revealed to be clowns and sad clowns at that.

The scene in the suburbs with aristocrats listlessly partying in their haunted castle is played for comedy.  The rather inconsequential sequence begins with an oddly protracted procession of cars departing from the Via Veneto for the decaying villa, filmed like Dracula’s castle atop an improbable prominence of cliff.  At the party, superannuated aristocrats are half asleep, mechanically going through the motions of revelry.  A strangely skinny youth, like an elongated figure from an El Greco painting, hauls a wagon behind him stocked with bottles and glasses – he trudges through the party like a mule.  The corridors of the villa are adorned with huge enigmatic and rather cartoonish frescos; battered Roman emperors in bust guard the entrance to the haunted house and line the walls of its rooms.  In one gallery, there are pictures of eminent women from the past, a gynaeceum someone says.  The aristocrats are spectral, ghosts themselves, and, so, it is ironic when they storm out of the new villa (probably built in about 1700) to visit the ruinous, dilapidated old palace said to date from 1500 – the father berates his son: “Why did you let the villa go to pieces?”  Why not?  The aristocrats hunting ghosts are ghosts themselves, and, in the final shot of the sequence, the English painter, Jane, who apparently seduces Marcello is shot in enormous close-up, a dark ravenous face with open mouth and eerie glittering sparks in her eyes.  Love, in this sequence, is opportunistic and assumes the fraudulent glamor of vampirism – these are the Undead.  All of this is demystified in the dawn when the partygoers, staggering out of a dark forest, encounter the princess grandmother on her way to church with her pet priest.  Three or four of the revelers obediently follow the old woman into the chapel – so much for their nocturnal corruption.

La Dolce Vita isn’t a tragedy.  The film presents a world in which tragedy is corroded by publicity.  The paparazzi stalking Steiner’s widow encircle the woman.  She remarks that they must have mistaken her for a movie star.  Indeed, the cameras and gossip columnists are about to turn her into a celebrity.  But the film doesn’t show the woman’s sorrow or, even, her reaction to the horrific news that she receives.  Everything is image.  Where image prevails, nothing is tragic.  Tragedy requires depths that the movie can’t access and that may not even exist in the modern world.  (The scene with Steiner’s widow ends with an emblematic image of a paparazzi approaching the camera; the picture centers on the man’s elaborate camera and flash bulbs – and, with that shot, the theme of glamor and the paparazzi comes to an end.)

The orgy celebrating the annulment of Nadia’s marriage (divorce being illegal in Italy in 1960) is asexual, without consequence.  It’s as light as the feathers that Marcello scatters in the final sequences in that episode.  Here, everything is weightless and ephemeral; the feathers signify what Milan Kundera called “the unbearable lightness of being” – repetition, in this case, renders individual moments meaningless; everything just repeats itself.

The monstrous fish hauled out of the sea in the film’s final scenes is another symbol replete with conflicting meanings.  In Koine Greek, the Hellenic language spoken at the time of Christ, the formula “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior” can be abbreviated by an acroynm ICHTHYS; the letters “ichthys” spell the Koine Greek word “fish”.  During the persecution of the Christians in Rome, church members used the symbol of the fish (“the Jesus fish”) to identify themselves to one another.  Some critics believe the huge fish in the last scene, dead for more than a day (it is said), symbolizes Jesus; the “Jesus Fish” accordingly brackets the movie at its end, an image that resonates with the scenes showing the statue of Jesus the Worker carried aloft over Rome tethered to a helicopter at the film’s inception.  Christ, who is the alpha and omega, is also arguable the beginning and end of La Dolce Vita.  The hideous fish may be apocalyptic, a leviathan tugged from the waters and, by its monstrosity, declaring judgement on the depravity of the characters in the film.  In that interpretation, the monster materializes as a physical emblem for the moral degeneracy of the people in the film.  Fellini’s camera focuses on the creature’s slimy eye.  Someone says: “it insists on looking.”  Thus, the fish also seems to be connected to the ubiquitous cameras carried by the paparazzi and, so, suggests the idea of voyeurism, the impulse that animates gossip columnists and their minions.  The fish’s eye may also stand in for the camera recording events to be shown to the public as La Dolce Vita.

In this connection, it is worth recalling various wonders and enigmas to which the film makes reference.  The Virgin appears to children in a rainstorm; depraved aristocrats consult a Ouija board and a woman seems orgasmically possessed by some demonic presence; the ruinous villa is haunted by Sister Edvige who appears as a ghost carrying her severed head; in the new villa, a whispering gallery allows Maddalena to communicate with Marcello who is located in another room – this is a strange acoustic anomaly; the sad clown beckons to a herd of balloons that obediently follow him off-stage at the Cha-Cha Club.  The beach monster is only one of a number of wonders depicted in La Dolce Vita.  These strange apparitions are signs and wonders presaging the apocalypse.   

7.

As he made plans to film the orgy, Fellini asked around.  He wanted to know if anyone in his professional circle had attended an orgy.  Fellini confessed that he hadn’t ever been involved in such a thing and didn’t know how to stage the scene.  He consulted with Pier Paolo Pasolini, a homosexual poet and filmmaker with a somewhat sordid reputation.  (Pasolini was later to stage spectacular orgies in his film Salo.)  Pasolini admitted he had no idea what an orgy was actually like.  Fellini said: “I’ll have to make it up.  We’ll improvise.”  A Danish woman on the set for the orgy scene remarked about Fellini: “He just doesn’t know how to do the dirty.”

8.

How do you read the expression on Paola’s face in the final scene?  She beckons to Marcello but he is unable to cross the little stream to her.  She is an angel and beyond the constraints of human emotion.  She views Marcello with only the slightest tinge of regret.  Angels come from the shores of light at the other side of existence.  Her bright face is radiant with joy.  

People will Talk

 People will Talk is an unclassifiable picture released in 1951 starring Cary Grant and Jeanne Crain.  Directed by Joseph Mankiewicz after his great success with All About Eve, Twentieth Cent\ury Fox apparently granted the director carte blanche to make any picture that he wanted.  The result is an eccentric movie, much more interesting in its parts than in sum.  The film is beautifully made and splendidly performed, but is akin to Shakespeare's "problem plays" -- a knotty, gnarled sort of movie that becomes easily distracted by its own philosophical premises.  It's fascinating to see a big budget Hollywood vehicle of this sort, obviously pitched as a romantic comedy, stretching and straining at the limits of its genre.  Mankiewicz intends something important and intensely significant with this movie, but it has too many ideas and, more than a few of them are hare-brained.  

People will Talk bears many traces of its rather bizarre German origin.  The movie adapts for the screen a German play produced in 1934, Der Frauenartzt dr. med. Hiob Praetorius (The Gynecologist Dr. Hiob Praetorius).  In the movie, students show their admiration for an instructor by stomping on the floor of the lecture hall; everyone eats sauerkraut and bratwurst; and the hero, played by Cary Grant, is also (improbably enough) a conductor of classical music who is shown leading an orchestra that looks as if it were assembled in Munich to play Brahm's Academic Overture and Wagner's "Prize Song" from Der Meistersinger.  The situations portrayed in the film have a vaguely Teutonic aspect.  (The original play was written by a German comedian, famous in the slapstick era, named Curt Goetz.)  Although the movie is ostensibly set in the Midwest, this is a puzzling place that seems more like some version of rural Germany than America.  

Jeanne Crain plays a woman who is auditing one of Dr. Noah Praetorius' anatomy classes.  As Praetorius provides a philosophical disquisition on death, spoken over the very attractive and plump corpse of a young woman, Crain's character, Deborah Higgins faints.  Praetorius runs some tests on the young woman at this clinic.  (Praetorius is some kind of guest lecturer at the medical school, runs his own very successful and elite clinic located in what seems a kind of Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie House, and moonlights as the sardonic demanding director of the college's symphony orchestra.)  Praetorius discovers that Deborah is pregnant, the result of a one-night stand or possibly a very brief relationship with a soldier or sailor who has been killed.  Praetorius is a mysterious figure -- he is claimed to be a miracle worker and his patients often demonstrate amazing recoveries from the various ailments that afflict them.  Furthering the sense of enigma surrounding Praetorius is his close relationship with an older man, the rather stolid, husky Mr. Shunderson.  No one knows why Mr. Shunderson, a drab nondescript nonentity, and Dr. Praetorius are inseparable but there are apparently sinister rumors circulating about the bond between the two.  A rival doctor played by Hume Cronyn is investigating Praetorius' background, hoping to establish that the miracle-worker is some kind of quack or charlatan.  (The paranoid scenes involving the investigation are thought to relate to the McCarthy senate inquiries then current).  After Deborah attempts suicide, she is confined to Praetorius' tony clinic, where, of course, the good doctor falls in love with her.  After she is released, he travels to the farm where she lives with her father and his brother and proposes.  Shunderson comes with him and, indeed, he goes everywhere with the physician, hovering nearby, doing his bidding as a man-servant and almost never speaking.  Deborah's family is a bit gothic -- her uncle is a patriotic, right wing moron and her father is a self-avowed failure; he says that everything he has touched he has ruined.  The family has a vicious dog named Beelzebub, a snarling collie who is tamed by the kindly, mysterious Mr. Shunderson.  Deborah accepts Praetorius offer of marriage -- he proposes to her in a sterile-looking milking parlor on the farm.  They are married but their lives are complicated by Deborah's pregnancy (Praetorius has told her that the test was wrong and she is not pregnant but this is a lie) and the investigation of the doctor's background.  On the evening that the symphony concert directed by Praetorius is scheduled, the doctor is hauled into an adversarial meeting and cross-examined by his bitter rival.  All secrets are revealed and the hero is vindicated. Praetorius rushes to the concert hall where he vivaciously directs Brahm's Academic Overture and everyone sings the Gaudeamus igitur.  The baby leaps in Deborah's womb.  Mr. Shunderson, who it turns out has been resurrected from the grave, sits peacefully in the corner with Beelzebub now tamely reposing at his side.

This is very strange stuff.  Praetorius isn't idealized; he's snarky, arrogant, and demanding.  (He even bullies the poor members of his orchestra; Grant isn't afraid to play against type and he is often unsympathetic and nasty).  Furthermore, Praetorius lies to Deborah about her pregnancy -- when she figures out she is pregnant after being married, she assumes its Praetorius' child (but it's not).  It' not clear why Praetorius tells this whopper and one would think that a marriage founded upon this sort of deception might be headed for trouble.  The movie implies that the investigation focusing on Praetorius is based upon his providing gynecological services as an abortionist -- this is hinted but never explicitly developed.  The film also suggests that Shunderson may be Praetorius' homosexual consort or, possibly, even some kind devil with whom the doctor has made a sinister deal -- he can work miracles in exchange for his soul.  (The actual explanation as to Shunderson's relationship with Praetorius is ridiculous, disturbing, and so implausible as to wreck the movie.)  By far, the best part of the movie is its opening half-hour.  There are some truly alarming sequences in that part of the film -- Praetorius' lecture over the corpse of the young woman, his conversation about death and whether dying is painful with a woman who is on her deathbed, the suicide scene with Deborah and the images of Hume Cronyn, a wizened little homunculus, conspiring against Praetorius on the basis of what seems to be naked jealousy -- Cronyn is little and ugly compared to the tall, avuncular and gorgeous Praetorius.  The latter two-thirds of the movie set about solving the Shunderson mystery (people call him "the bat") and much of that part of the film seems to be intended as light comedy -- there are amusing scenes with Walter Slezak who plays, in the orchestra with difficulty, a bass fiddle; Slezak is an European atomic physicist and there's lots of banter with him about music and his huge instrument.  Scenes with Deborah's father, who concedes his fecklessness, are also disturbingly masochistic.  

The opening episode demonstrates the potential power that the film that the picture can't sustain.  Hume Cronyn has called a middle-aged woman, a battle-ax, into his office to interrogate her about Praetorius.  She demands that the door be kept open, implicitly accusing Cronyn of sexual designs on her.  (This seems improbable and an instance of unreasonable vanity in that the part is played by Margaret Hamilton who acted the role of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz.)  The woman talks about how Dr. Praetorius miraculously cured his patients by "talking to them" -- it seems that Praetorius is a giant walking-talking placebo of some sort, a notion that is plausible since the part is played Cary Grant.  But, then, when it comes time to talk about "the Bat", Mr. Shunderson, the woman demands that the door be shut -- some things are too awful to be discussed in public.  This is an exceptionally evocative and well-made scene that traces its own dramatic arc (door open to door shut) and it starts the movie with a bang -- I suspect the scene is very closely adapted from the source play by Herr Goetz.  Unfortunately, the movie, although always compelling, ultimately ruptures under the weight of its own ambitions -- it's about too many things at once:  feminism and women's health, medicine, McCarthyist persecution, friendship, love, romance, death, and music.  But People will Talk does have a fine and satisfying happy ending.  (The name Dr. Noah Praetorius is a little risible -- did no one remember that Dr. Praetorius played by a very gay Ernest Thesiger acted as the mad doctor in The Bride of Frankenstein?)

La Dolce Vita (part I)

 

1.

See it if you can: Federico Fellini’s 1953 film Il Vitelloni.  This picture was Fellini’s first international hit and a box-office success.  Il Vitelloni is about five young men living in a provincial city on the Adriatic sea coast.  The young men, who are friends, are not yet grown-up, mostly unemployed, and they hang around town chasing the local girls and mooching off their parents.  (The film’s title Il Vitteloni is an untranslatable word that means something like “veal-calves” signifying “mama’s boys” – it’s a term of derogation for twenty-somethings not yet settled into adult life.)  In the movie, the lads get drunk, fight with their parents, and dream about escaping town for the big city, Rome.  At the end of the movie only one of the boys has the gumption to actually leave town – this is a young man called Moraldo Rubini.  In the final scene, we see him on a train departing for Rome; like Federico Fellini, Moraldo dreams of becoming a cartoonist and illustrator in the metropolis.  (Il Vitelloni is a reminder as to Fellini’s innovative brilliance: the narrative template devised in this 1953 movie underlies Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) as well as George Lucas’ American Graffiti (also 1973) as well as many other “coming of age” movies.)

Fellini wrote the script for Il Vitelloni with his associates Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli.  After the film’s success, Fellini with Flaiano and Pinelli wrote a sequel called Moraldo in the City.  This picture picked-up the story where Il Vitelloni ended, chronicling the adventures of Moraldo Rubini in Rome.  The story is about Moraldo’s love affairs and professional entanglements playing out against the urban landscape of post-war Rome.  

At this time in his life, Fellini was very busy.  Immediately after directing, Il Vitelloni, Fellini parleyed his success with that film into an opportunity to make a bigger budget and more elaborate picture, La Strada (1954).  La Strada features Fellini’s wife, Giuletta Masina playing a waif abused by a circus strong man.  Italian films had cachet with American actors in the fifties and sixties – of course, Clint Eastwood profited from the impulse to hire Americans to star in Italian movies designed for international consumption.  La Strada, also an internationally acclaimed film, starred Anthony Quinn and Richard Basehart. (It won the American Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Picture). In 1955, Fellini made Il Bidone, a crime picture in which he wished to cast Humphrey Bogart as a small-time crook.  Bogart was dying at that time and, so, Fellini hired Broderich Crawford for the role.  The picture was a failure and largely regarded as a misstep for Fellini – it wasn’t released in the US until after the success of La Dolce Vita made Fellini a household name in Europe and America.  Giuletta Masina starred in Il Bidone and was also the leading lady in Nights of Cabiria (1957).  Nights of Cabiria, a neo-realist film about prostitution, was well-received and Masina’s performance highly praised.  (The movie also won Fellini a second Oscar for Best Foreign Language Picture.)

After the success of Nights of Cabiria, the Italian producer Dino de Laurentiis (who had underwritten La Strada and Nights of Cabiria) expressed interest in financing Moraldo in the City.  Fellini and his co-writers Flaiano and Pinelli dusted off the script and began revising it.  Beginning in 1958, Cinecitta Studios near Rome was acclaimed as “Hollywood on the Tiber”; Italian movie crews were highly efficient, professional, and much cheaper than similar personnel in Hollywood.  As a result many movies were shot at Cinecitta, particularly “sword and sandal” picture involving Greek and Roman mythology and gladiators. Film stars from all around Europe and the United States began congregating in Rome, energizing the night life in that city, particularly in the entertainment district called the Via Veneto.  (This is the neighborhood where the American embassy is located close to the famous Trevi Fountain.)  People like Kirk Douglas, Orson Welles, Audrey Hepburn, Tennessee Williams, Anita Ekberg, and stars (and celebrities) of similar magnitude could be glimpsed in the bars, restaurants, and gaudy night clubs on the Veneto.  The presence of many Hollywood stars in the district created a proto-Warhol culture of fame and celebrity.  (One of Warhol’s “stars” appears in the movie, the German singer Nico.)  This culture, in turn, attracted hordes of gossip columnists and cameramen, who specialized in stalking stars, taking their pictures, and spreading scandal about their love affairs, drunken brawls, and indiscretions.  It is the “Hollywood on the Tiber” aspect of high society along the Via Veneto that Fellini and his scriptwriters inserted into the Bildungsroman scenario for Moraldo in the City – the screenplay was updated to make Moraldo into a gossip columnist haunting the Veneto for material that he could sell to the popular weekly scandal sheets.  

Dino de Laurentiis wanted to capitalize on the enormous success of an earlier “Hollywood on the Tiber” romantic comedy, Roman Holiday (1953), starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck.  Roman Holiday was the second biggest box office hit in the United States in 1953 and was successful internationally – as late as 1990, Japanese moviegoers voted Roman Holiday their “favorite foreign film.”  Laurentiis told Fellini that he wanted several big American stars in the picture, now dubbed La Dolce Vita.  Specifically, Laurentiis wanted to cast Paul Newman in the role of Moraldo Rubini.  Fellini opposed this decision and told Laurentiis that he wanted the principal part played by Marcello Mastrioanni, a relatively unknown actor at that time.  Laurentiis and Fellini quickly reached an impasse with the producer refusing to finance the picture unless Paul Newman starred in it.  (Fellini thought that Newman was “too pretty” for the part and wanted Mastrioanni, a man who had a “normal face,” for the hero; Fellini was not against casting international stars – he wanted Maurice Chevalier to play the part of Marcello’s father in the film; he also tried to cast Greer Gardner, Peter Ustinov, and Barbara Stanwyck in supporting roles.)  One night at a hotel on the Via Veneto, Fellini ran into another producer who was willing to finance the movie without interfering with casting.  Laurentiis sold his rights in the script Moraldo in the City to new producer and the film was shot beginning in January 1959, mostly on the sets constructed at Cinecitta Studios.  Mastroianni was cast as the lead, now named Marcello Rubini. Fellini wanted Henry Fonda to play the part of Steiner in the picture but was unable to hire the actor.  Fellini also attempted to film the exterior sequences on the Via Veneto on-location.  This proved to be impossible – the street was too busy and couldn’t be closed for filming.  The plan was to scrap the street scenes but Fellini argued that this would compromise his vision, which, of course, revolved around scandalous events on Via Veneto.  There was a dispute and Fellini ultimately agreed to surrender his percentage of the gross in the film in exchange for the studio constructing a massive, several block set simulating the Veneto.  The set was, in fact, built and is featured in several scenes in the movie.  Of course, La Dolce Vita turned out to be the most profitable Italian film ever made and Fellini bitterly regretted relinquishing his share of the gross, a revenue source that would have made him fantastically wealthy.     

2.

La Dolce Vita was famous even before it was released to general audiences on April 5, 1960 (the premiere in Rome had been on February 2, 1960).  Tabloids covered a controversy involving the Austrian movie star Luise Rainer, a two-time Oscar winner for The Great Ziegfeld and The Good Earth in 1935 and 1936 respectively.  Fellini cast Rainer in the role of Dolores, an elderly “nymphomaniac” who has sex with Marcello.  Rainer came to Rome but clashed with Fellini, demanding that her scenes be re-written to make her “Marcello’s muse” directing him to finally write his book.  Fellini wouldn’t accede to her demands, widely reported in the press, and wrote Dolores out of the script.

La Dolce Vita was shot, almost entirely at Cinecitta Studios near Rome between March 16, 1959 and August 27 1959.  The first scene filmed was the ascent to the viewpoint over the St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican – the episode was shot on a set built at Cinecitta imitating the spiral stair that climbs between the inner and outer shell of the dome at St. Peter’s.  The vantage from the height shown in the movie is constructed with stock footage and not accurate to the perspective from the top of the stair.  (In this scene, Anita Ekberg as Sylvia is indefatigable – she charges up the stairs leaving everyone behind her, including Marcello who has to scramble to catch up.)  As she climbs the stairs, Sylvia says that she “must tell Marilyn” (Marilyn Monroe) about running up the stairs as an exercise for weight loss.  (In the interview scene, Sylvia alludes to a famous statement by Marilyn Monroe when she was questioned whether she slept in lingerie or pajamas – Monroe said “I sleep only in two drops of Chanel No. 5" which Sylvia paraphrases as “I sleep only in two drops of French perfume”.)  The final sequence shot was the beach scene with the sea monster filmed at Passoscuro near Rome.

While the movie was in production, Italian gossip magazines and fashion periodicals covered the movie stars involved in making the picture with almost daily features.  Paparazzi (the word originates in La Dolce Vita) haunted the movie stars involved in the picture and photographed them whenever possible.  One day before the first day of shooting, an Italian tabloid, Lo Specchio, referred to the film that didn’t yet exist as “almost legendary.”  Popular periodicals covered Fellini’s efforts to secure a producer for the film – there were lavish accounts of Dino de Laurentiis storming out of a meeting with the director.  Everything Anita Ekberg did in Rome was covered with the sort of savage persistence shown by the paparazzi in the film.  Mobs of journalists and photographers swarmed around the Trevi Fountain during Ekberg’s scene at that location.  Hundreds of pictures of Ekberg cavorting in the fountain, some of them altered to make her look “more nude”, were published in magazines all around the world.  

Fellini changed the script on a daily basis, often re-writing scenes for the afternoon before lunch.  (Because the argot of Roman pimps and prostitutes is specialized, Fellini hired Pier Paolo Pasolini to advise as to authentic slang – Pasolini’s contribution is audible in the scene early in the movie in which Marcello and his upper-crust girlfriend Maddalena (played by Anouk Aimee) pick up a middle-aged whore who lives in a flooded basement.)  Fellini allowed actors to improvise in many scenes.  Lex Barker who plays Sylvia’s boyfriend (and who gets to beat up Marcello) was cast because the actor had appeared in Tarzan movies in the early fifties.  But Barker turned out to be well-educated and sophisticated; he was much more than a piece of beef-cake and so Fellini expanded his role and made him more sympathetic and philosophical, altering the script for that purpose.  Fellini cast on the basis of appearance; he looked for faces to enliven his movie.  When he found someone who appealed to him, he would often re-write parts of the script to accommodate that actor – this was what he did in the scene with the aristocrats at the haunted palace in Fregene.  One of the actors named Ferdinando “Wa-Wa” Brofferio impressed Fellini to the extent that has the man make love to Maddalena while she professes her fidelity to Marcello.  Fellini changed the end of the movie, making it more bleak than it was in the script: in the script, Marcello sees beautiful young girls cavorting in the sea and his face is illumined with joy at the sight.  Much of the orgy scene at Fregene near the end of the movie was improvised. Sequences featuring musical performers were developed on the basis of artists available at the time of the filming.

Fellini wanted to use Kurt Weill’s tune with the Brecht words Mackie Messer (Mack the Knife) for the movie but couldn’t secure the rights.  So he instructed Nino Rota, the great movie composer, to write a theme as close as possible to the famous music by Weill.  Rota always orchestrated some scenes to themes from Ottorino Respighi’s The Pines of Room, particularly a sepulchral piece of music depicting figure emerging from underground burial places (“Pines near a Catacomb”).  Fellini clashed on-set with his cameraman, Martelli.  Fellini wanted to use very long focal length lenses (75 mm, 100 mm and 150 mm) for the photography.  (“Scope” format normally uses 50 mm lenses; the film is shot in Totalscope, the European equivalent to Cinemascope.)  Martelli objected that these long lenses would flatten out the image and make it flutter when the camera was moved.  Notwithstanding this objection, Fellini prevailed.  The use of these long lenses gives the film a quality of “depthlessness” that some critics have commented on.  Fellini worked very efficiently.  He shot 260 to 280 minutes of film that he edited to about 180 minutes, a very high ratio of on-screen film to film not used and discarded in editing.  Fellini continued to tinker with the movie even as it was being dubbed.  (Italian and most other European movies were not shot with live sound in the fifties; rather, voices were dubbed in post-production).  Fellini changed a number of lines from what he had filmed (with actors speaking their lines on-location but not being recorded) is the dubbing process, substituting new dialogue for what he had shot.    

The film refers to a number of events covered by tabloids during the several years and months before the movie was shot.  Between 1956 and 1959, Anita Ekberg was married to Anthony Steel, a British actor.  In August 1958, the tabloids published pictures of Steel slapping Ekberg in a nightclub, ostensibly because she was drunk.  Later, Steel got into a brawl with the paparazzi who had snapped the shot.   This scandal rhymes with the scenes with Ekberg and Les Barker in the picture.  One of the big celebrities in Italy in 1959 was Andriano Celentano, nicknamed “Italy’s Elvis Presley”.  Celentano performs Little Richard’s “Ready, Teddy” at Caracalla’s.  (Elvis Presley had also covered that tune.)  Celentano plays himself at Caracalla’s.  (Incidentally, there was no nightclub called “Caracalla’s”; Fellini invented the venue, shooting the sequence in the enormous grotto-like ruins of the Baths of Caracalla.  It was at these ruins that Edward Gibbon conceived the idea for his book The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  Fellini installs various huge fragments of classical statuary in the archaeological site and uses blazing bonfires to create a bizarre ambience for this scene - the sequence looks very much like some of the remarkable sets designed a decade later when Fellini made his version of the Satyricon.)  The figure of Steiner is based on Cesare Pavese, an Italian writer and intellectual who committed suicide in 1950.   (Fellini had also seen a French newspaper account of a successful young man who inexplicably killed his three children before taking his own life.)  The literati who appear in the scene at Steiner’s flat were all actual figures in the Roman literary and intellectual salon scene.  On July 3, 1958, the Virgin Mary appeared to encephalitic child about 100 km from Rome and allegedly cured her.  After this event was reported in the news, hundreds of people flocked to the village where the child lived hoping to glimpse the holy apparition.  (It was later reported that the children in the village had been manipulated and posed for photographs suggesting that a miracle had occurred.)  Roman audiences would have recognized the silent movie star Polidor in the Cha Cha club were Marcello goes with his father, the old wine salesman.  Polidor appears as the sad clown with the trumpet.  In the scene at the haunted villa, the decadent aristocrats are played by real scions of Italian royal families – these were also figures familiar to Roman audiences from their periodic appearances in tabloid scandal-sheets.  One of the women, Princess Doris Pignatelli di Monteroduni was featured on the cover of Life magazine as “one of the best dressed women in Europe.”  (The German actress who claims to speak “Eskimo” in this scene is Nico Paeffgen, later one of Warhol’s Chelsea Girls who sang with “The Velvet Underground.”) In the final orgy scene, Fellini refers to a famous incident at private party on November 16, 1958 in the Rugatino restaurant in Rome.  In the company of many of the rich and famous (including Anita Ekberg), an Egyptian bellydancer named Aiche Nana did an impromptu striptease – this was filmed by a number of paparazzi and widely reported, to the moral disapprobation of the public, as evidence of the decadence prevailing on the Via Veneto.  (A woman named Nadia, in fact, Nadia Grey, an actress well-known for her films from the thirties and forties, performs a striptease for the guests at the film producer’s house at Fregene.)  Finally, in 1953, there was a much-reported incident of a dead body washing up on a beach near Rome – the mafia, politicians, and sex parties were said to be implicated in the murder of the young woman whose corpse was fished out of the sea.  The public’s interest in the case was revived in 1957 when a lengthy trial ended in an acquittal, providing ample fodder for Italian conspiracy theorists.  Photographs showing the woman’s body washed-up on the shore show a location very similar to the beach scene with the monster at the end of the film.  

3.

La Dolce Vita’s premiere in Rome was uneventful.  Critics generally disliked the picture and, of course, the Catholic Church was appalled.  The Church with some Fascist groups orchestrated a more vehement reaction to the movie at the Milan showing on February 5, 1960.  People in the audience booed the movie and there were choruses of men shouting “Basta!  Basta!” – the expression means “Enough!” and “Get the fuck out!” Someone spit on Fellini and he was called “the Antichrist”, with a few thugs taking punches at him on the street.  Of course, this kind of reaction is box-office gold and Fellini was laughing all the way to the bank.  The Pope considered ex-communicating Fellini after a private showing at the Vatican – also PR of inestimable value enhanced when there were calls for the Italian parliament to ban showing of the movie.  The paper of record, L’ Osservatore Romano, renamed the picture “La schifosa vita”(“the wretched life”) or La sconsia vita (“the mucky life”) – it seems pretty evident that these writers didn’t exactly grasp the heavy irony in Fellini’s title.  As everyone with any sense has observed, Fellini is a rather puritanical moralist and the film is obviously intended as a scathing critique of decadence in film and celebrity culture.  Some of the more sophisticated Catholic commentators claimed that the movie was based on Dante’s Inferno and that it was an attack on a world that had become a “moral quagmire.”  One leading Catholic weekly in Brescia praised the movie for its courage, calling it a heroic “condemnation of the unchallenged state of privilege, or parasitism, the cult of stars, moral decadence, and the economic satiation of some social groups whose immorality is an outrage to the Italian working class.”

From the outset, critics pointed out the film’s essential hypocrisy.  Fellini said that La Dolce Vita “was a thermometer to take the temperature of a sick world.”  This objective, however, is coupled with a depiction of beautiful people engaged in highly photogenic debauchery.  The film’s focus on glamor and style inevitably dilutes its moral effect.  The problem is familiar to us from war films – most so-called anti-war pictures end up celebrating the very thing that they intend to denounce.  The problem is that, at least, on film, war is a spectacle of mass movement, color, and peril – on screen, war is so pictorially impressive that the anti-war message gets lots in the spectacle.  This fundamental contradiction arises in film’s dramatizing scandal and depravity: Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments at least in its silent version deplores sin disobedient to the Biblical law – but this sin, usually primarily having to do with lust and adultery, arouses prurient interest; the more lurid the sin, the more attractive it will seem on screen.  This is the trap that La Dolce Vita embodies.  

Pauline Kael wrote a famous essay on La Dolce Vita pointing out that Fellini’s logic was specious.  If the modern world is corrupt, as Fellini argues, then, why (Kael asks) does he employ as his exemplars for depravity the most attractive and, seemingly, enviable people possible?  The “apathy and malaise” that Fellini portrays doesn’t affect common people, Kael argued.  (It should be noted that she didn’t believe that “modern man” was somehow uniquely alienated and despairing – European films articulating this proposition were relying on a “myth and fad”, she said. In fact, one of her famous essays on Antonioni, a director whose films run parallel to Fellini’s themes, was called “The come-as-the-sick-soul-Europe-Parties (considering La Notte, Last year at Marienbad, and La Dolce Vita).  This essay can be read on the internet and I recommend it highly – it was originally published in the Massachusetts Review in 1963.  You should read this text on your own, but I will presume to summarize some of Kael’s points in that writing about La Dolce Vita.  

Kael was a connoisseur of acting. She decried the misuse of Mastroianni as “a handsome, mindless mask, that actor as a mature juvenile, the experienced, tired, fortyish man of (La Dolce Vita and its progeny).”  She goes on to pragmatically ask: “isn’t it rather adolescent to treat the failure of love with such solemnity?  For whom does love last?” La Dolce Vita treats the end of the world as “a big dull party... but whose experiences are they (films like La Dolce Vita) expressing...the party (is) just a photogenic symbol of modern life...loaded with meanings it can’t carry?”

“Many Americans,” Kael says are likely “attracted by (Fellini’s view of fabulous parties, jaded people, baroque palaces; to any American who works damned hard, old-world decadence doesn’t look so bad...Forgive me if I sound plaintive: I’ve never been to one of those dreadfully decadent big parties (the people I know are more likely to give bring-your-own bottle parties.)”   Secretly, Fellini loves the “the spectacle of wealth and idleness,” Kael argues.  But “if the malaise is general, why single out the rich for condemnation?  If the malaise affects only the rich , is it so very important?  As usual, there is a false note in the moralist’s voice.”  “La Dolce Vita is like poking your head into a sack of fertilizer and, then, becoming indignant because you’re covered with excrement.”  Kael accuses Fellini of “exploiting the incidents and crimes and orgies of modern Rome in the manner of a Hollywood biblical spectacle but La Dolce Vita is a sort of Ben Hur for the more, but not very more, sophisticated... he’s very close to the preachers who describe the orgies of high-life and the punishments of eternal hell fire.”  Kael says Fellini is a “country boy who can never take for granted the customs and follies of the big city...but...perhaps, also a showman who knows that these episodes will be juicy fodder for the mass audience...”  La Dolce Vita is “an incoherent, message movie.”  Kael thinks its ironic that audiences attend a three-hour Marxist-inflected film only to come away with the proposition that “fornication is bad.”  

Kael’s essay isn’t completely coherent itself and it violates a cardinal rule of criticism – the critic must concede the artist’s theme or donnee (that is, basic assumptions) and ask whether the film is well-executed given its fundamental premises.  (You can’t denounce a Western because it’s not a musical or romantic comedy, that is, the critic should, I think, accept the film for what it wants to be.)  Kael’s essay is an apology in part for encouraging people to see Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, a picture that she describes as a masterpiece but, which, it seems spawned a number of other films with broadly similar existentialist themes that she dislikes as pretentious.  Further, in the essay, she abuses La Dolce Vita for not being Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, a film that she thinks develops parallel themes.  Kael notes that college girls in America may fantasize about “changing places with a whore”; there are drug addicts on Wall Street, she says, and “Communist and working class girls” likely fantasize about taking their clothes off in public.  So why aren’t there any drug-addicted businessmen, sturdy college girls, or hard-working Communist women in La Dolce Vita?  Kael’s objection seems to be that she thinks the film’s range is too narrow: “we need to see some intelligent, hardworking, or creative people who nevertheless have the same outlets – or vices, if you will – as these shallow people (on screen).”  Fellini “allows the middle-class to cluck with glee and horror at seeing the rich do just what the middle-class secretly wants to do.”  This seems wrong-headed to me: Kael regards the cinema as a “trash art”, as a spectacle that is best when trashiest, most exploitative, and raw.  Movies are founded on voyeurism.  So what’s wrong with Fellini casting his audience as voyeurs  to the lives of “the rich and famous?”  Ultimately, Kael shows that there is something fundamentally dishonest about La Dolce Vita – but if we are to reject with dismay every work of art that has something of the dishonest about it, what would survive our disapprobation?

After a few years, La Dolce Vita became vaguely disreputable.  Critics greatly preferred Fellini’s next film 8 ½, a picture about the plight of a director who can’t get his film made, a surrealist spectacle involving Mastroianni as a surrogate for the filmmaker (he uses a whip to tame a cage full of ravenous women) and an immensely ambitious movie that was pretty much universally acclaimed.  La Dolce Vita wasn’t exactly denounced (critics are generally loath to admit making mistakes) but the celebrity associated with it and the film’s fame was thought to be rather embarrassing.  For a couple of decades, Pauline Kael’s criticism had traction and people saw the film through the lens that she provided.  However, in the last thirty years, filmmakers have re-evaluated the movie and people like Alexander Payne and Martin Scorsese (as well as Roger Ebert who proclaimed the movie his favorite) have restored some of the patina that the film lost when savaged by Pauline Kael.  

4.

La Dolce Vita was once the most famous and celebrated movie in the world.  So, of course, it has a cast a long shadow influencing later films.  The picture is cited in Pietro Germi’s 1964 Divorce Italian Style and, also, alluded to in Cinema Paradiso (1988).  Sofia Coppola shows Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson watching the movie on TV in Lost in Translation (2018).  The couture depicted in La Dolce Vita spawned dresses and hats inspired by the film by Versace, Valentino, Prada, and accessorized by Gucci. There have ben a number of museum shows documenting the world-wide influence of the clothing shown in the movie, mostly designed by Brioni.  Dylan mentions the movie in his 1964 “Motorpsycho Nitemare”.  The famous opening sequence is mimicked in Cinemo Paradiso’s Director’s Cut, Steve Martin’s L. A. Story (1991), and the German comedy Goodbye, Lenin in which a statue of the Communist leader stands in for “Christ the Worker”, the figure hauled over Rome in La Dolce Vita.  Most notably, Paolo Sorrentino, in effect, remade the movie in The Great Beauty (2013), a film in which a 65-year old intellectual wanders around Rome, distracted from writing his long-promised book by the baroque splendor of the Eternal City.  (Sorrentino acknowledges that La Dolce Vita is the model for this picture.)

When Marcello Mastrioanni died in 1996, the City of Rome silenced the Trevi Fountain and draped it in black.