Fellini’s Obituary for Cinema
(Fellini said this in the 80s, wonder what he would have thought about today’s TV with all its ‘reality’!!! I agree with his ‘death of cinema’ thesis as well)
“I too think that the cinema has lost authority, prestige, mystery, magic. The giant screen that dominates an audience devotedly gathered in front of it no longer fascinates us. Once it dominated tiny little men staring enchanted at immense faces, lips, eyes, living and breathing in another unreachable dimension, fantastic and at the same time real, like a dream. Now we have learned to dominate it. We are bigger than it. See how we have reduced it: here it is the size of a cushion between the library and the flower pot. Sometimes it’s even in the kitchen, near the refrigerator. It has become an electronic domestic servant and we, seated in armchairs, armed with remote control, exercise a total power over those little images, rejecting whatever is unfamiliar or boring to us… We wipe out the images that don’t interest us. We are the masters. What a bore that Bergman! Who said Bunuel was a great director? Out of the house with them. I want to see a ball game or a variety show. Thus a tyrant spectator is born, an absolute despot who does what he wants and more convinced that he is the director or at least the producer of the images he sees. How could the cinema possibly try to attract that kind of audience?”
(Comments on Film)
and later on…
“The abnormal, the monstrous, the delirious, the alienated, the exceptional reproposed by TV as (it it were) the most obvious, normal, familiar, and customary aspect of daily life; and on the other hand, the banality, the insignificant, the informal, the collective, the undifferentiated, presented with solemnity, trumpet flourishes, reflectors, choreography, and the rhythms of a sacred ceremony.”
(Notes on Ginger and Fred)
March 30, 2009 at 11:07 AM
I have great sympathy for Fellini mourning the “death” of cinema, but I must also confess to some discomfort with these lines :
“I too think that the cinema has lost authority, prestige, mystery, magic. The giant screen that dominates an audience devotedly gathered in front of it no longer fascinates us. Once it dominated tiny little men staring enchanted at immense faces, lips, eyes, living and breathing in another unreachable dimension, fantastic and at the same time real, like a dream.”
To state it differently, the image of Mussolini chosen for this piece seems to be appropriate, and these lines seem to betray some nostalgia for an idealized authoritarianism…
March 30, 2009 at 11:41 AM
That’s exactly why I chose that picture from Amarcord! I think that inasmuch as cinema has always had a certain ‘fascistic’ potential the Mussolini image is appropriate. and let us not forget how heavily involved the Mussolini regime was with the Italian movie industry. I think that Fellini in many ways (and especially in Amarcord) often reveals this contradiction in his cinema. On the one hand the ‘larger than life’ imagery repels him when it’s put to the service of ideologies like that of Mussolini, on the other he is also clearly fascinated by the idea of the spectacle. One must also incidentally connect all of this with the idea of Rome or the ‘imagining’ of Rome as spectacle in Hollywood of course but even moreso in Italy where every other film was once an ‘epic entertainment’ set in ancient Rome. Again, this loop can very much be seen in Fellini (and not only in the rather obviously titled Roma!).
March 30, 2009 at 11:51 AM
I think the representations of Rome in Fellini’s films like “Roma” and “Satyricon” offer a useful corrective of sorts to the problem I pointed out in my initial comment. For in these films, Fellini subverts the spectacle by presenting it as a permanently decadent one (“Satyricon”) or as a non-linear dreamscape that cannot really be impressed into the service of a political “project” because the dream doesn’t really “point” anywhere, it is unstable and in perpetual danger of unraveling. Stated differently, Fellini is perhaps wise to the fascistic potential of the “muscular”, authoritarian spectacle — hence his grand Roman spectacles stage decadence, decay, perversity (“Satyricon”) or apolitical/autobiographical memory, art, and the strangeness of the familiar (“Roma”). Whereas an imagined and idealized history serves as the bedrock of the fascist project, in Roma we have the wonderfully strange sequence of the archaeological dig revealing fresco treasures — all of which turn to dust the moment they are exposed to daylight…
March 30, 2009 at 12:12 PM
Wonderful comment on Roma Qalandar. Probably the best I’ve seen on the film. I think Fellini probably continues this project in his later work where the ‘artifice’ behind the spectacle is brought much more to the fore. This has been accurately read as ‘deconstructive’ of the cinematic enterprise in some ways but perhaps the ‘political underpinnings’ of such a gesture are not as often remarked upon. A logic end to this entire late Fellini span is then his Intervista where we are almost literally at an ‘end’.
March 30, 2009 at 12:15 PM
Re: “Probably the best I’ve seen on the film.”
Given the volumes written on Fellini, I quite doubt this, but I will accept the compliment as a token of your affection for me…
March 30, 2009 at 12:41 PM
Not at all Qalandar.. the volumes are indispensable.. but they’re also very detailed readings of the relevant films.. a comment such as yours summarizes a film from a certain (for my purposes ‘interesting’) angle without compromising ‘lucidity’. There is not enough of the ‘essayistic’ in cinema. Which is why I like Rangan so much in India. Again Lane’s piece on Monsters is an example of the same. A concise ‘impressionistic’ piece or comment that informs but also gives one a window onto the world of the film.
March 31, 2009 at 12:29 PM
An older comment on Roma, from 2005:
http://qalandari.blogspot.com/2009/03/roma-redux.html
November 11, 2011 at 6:19 PM
“Ever more petit bourgeois, consumerist and fascistic, the tele-stupefied country has lost all awareness of culture and language. It has lost all memory of itself, its history, its identity. [.....] has become a horrendous language, a babble invaded by media languages which expresses nothing but merchandise and consumption.”
I have blotted out a crucial reference from this fiercely blunt quote because it seems to me that many ‘names’ could be substituted here. And this could also be about a country called India.