la notte (w&d antonioni, w. ennio flaiano, tonino guerra)

La Notte takes L’Avventura’s elaboration of mood (what they call clima over here) and welds it to a disciplined twenty four hour structure. Moreau and Mastroianni make for an impeccably charismatic troubled couple, as the film documents their marriage on the verge of collapse. Cinema in mid-century Italy embraced existential angst with a vigour that even the French can’t claim to match. The French fascination with the rules of form meant they were always more playful than their Italian neighbours, who seem to be perpetually chewing on the hollow bones of affluence. (Perhaps it is more than coincidence that the Godard film which feels closest in tone to the likes of Antonioni, Fellini et al was shot in Italy.) In La Notte, Antonioni pushes the ennui and angst towards a kind of perfection, a perfection which is conveyed through the cinematography and lighting, where every shot is another element in the couple’s exquisite decadence. It is at once claustrophobic, deadening and brilliant, as is the case of their marriage.

Unfortunately I was teaching on the night of the screening of LÉclisse, the third in this kind-of trilogy. But seeing the first two on consecutive days, you can see how the director had no choice but to gravitate towards colour and the fractal explosion at the end of Zabriskie Point. La Notte would appear to be pushing an aesthetic as far as it can go. Even if there was one more step, the end of this journey, the one he and his characters is on, is clearly nigh. The constrained concerns of the mid twentieth century cannot be masticated for much longer, no matter how beautiful they (and their avatars, Antonioni’s perfect actors) may be. People will soon stop wearing perfect suits, their hair will be a mess, the codes of civilisation will be challenged and overthrown, to an extent. The whole of late twentieth century thought is encapsulated in the films of Antonioni, leading to Jack Nicholson going awol on the edge of the world’s great desert. 

nights of cabiria (w&d. fellini, w. ennio flaiano, tullio pinelli, pier paolo pasolini)

There’s a beautiful quote in the helpful back page of the BFI (NFT) notes from Fellini: “The film doesn’t have a resolution in the sense that there is a final scene where the story reaches a conclusion so definitive  that you no longer have to worry about Cabiria. I myself have worried about her fate ever since.” This quote strikes such a chord because it talks both about the film and about the act of creation. The filmmaker has constructed a character (played by his wife) with whom he has, you could say, fallen in love. At the end  of the film he has to leave her. Had he left her in a resolved ‘happy ending’ scenario, it would have been easier for Fellini to let her drift away, just another of his many characters. As it is, he leaves her deliberately in a state of uncertainty, and so he is compelled, as the quote says, to return to her fretfully, an uneasy god. 

The quote also feels relevant in so far as the happy ending the film almost postulates for Cabiria doesn’t seem faithful to her story. Cabiria is from the margins. This is by and large a cheerful film, one which celebrates its lead character and her world, in spite of its harshness. Cabiria is a survivor, a fantasist whose feet are nevertheless on the ground. Nevertheless, how many poor prostitutes struggling to get by in post-war Italy were granted a happy ending? Had Fellini given her this kind of resolution, it wouldn’t have felt truthful to the world he depicts. It would have been closer to Pretty Woman than Rome Open City. As it is Nights of Cabiria treads a fine line between social realism and something approaching disfunctional romcom. Cabiria is the sort of gutsy character producers dream of because they know an audience will fall in love with them. Giulietta Masina plays her with an irreverent delight. Even the breeze block shack she has created seems adorable on the inside. (A shack so reminiscent of the buildings in slums all over the world.) But, as much as the film delights in Cabiria’s joie-de-vivre (Chaplineque), the realities of her existence are discernible at the edges. A pitiable fate, living in a hole in the ground, lurks. We’ll never know whether Cabiria succumbed to this fate or escaped it. Fellini opted out of a definitive resolution, but in so doing he found a way of being truthful both to the spirit of his times and the spirit of his character. 

la dolce vita (w&d federico fellini; w. ennio flaiano, tullio pinelli, brunello rondi, pier paolo pasolini)

The fascinating thing about watching unarguable classics comes in part from observing the way in which the director frequently approaches his or her film with no regard for the conventions of storytelling. Dolce Vita is a collection of bravura sequences rather than any kind of coherent, identifiable narrative. There’s the helicopter sequence, the miracles sequence, the Ekberg sequence, the aristocrats sequence etcetera. Each sequence could act as an extended short on its own. Fellini isn’t interested in telling a story in the conventional understanding of that term, he’s interested in creating a world. The brilliant world he creates, that of a paparazzi journalist in good-time Rome, is evident enough, but the ‘why’ and the ‘what’ are more complex. The movie is in effect a kind of prose poem focussed on the dissolute life of the charming Mastroianni. No-one quite exudes sophisticated hedonism like Mastroianni and he’s so charismatic that you can buy the idea that this is actually the perfect way to live. Yet as the film unfolds, the cracks begin to appear. His night with Ekberg is charming but converts him into a dogsbody, fetching milk for a stray cat. His relationship with his father is distant and less fulfilling than it should be. The one time he comes clean and declares an emotional attachment, the object of that declaration mocks him. He becomes increasingly misogynistic. The final scene is protracted, gratuitous, the tedious fag-end of a party which has gone on for far too long. Mastroianni is dressed like a roué. He has become abusive. No woman in the audience is going to like him anymore. His is the rake’s progress. Clearly there’s something in Fellini’s own psychodrama playing out here, which would require a more extensive knowledge of the context of the film within the director’s oeuvre. It feels as though it’s on the border of what is called in Montevideo ‘auto-ficcion’ which might just be the film’s skill. What is perhaps more curious is the way in which the film seems to wilfully seek to tire the viewer out. Yet another character says: ‘This is the first time I’ve ever seen the dawn”, something which we have witnessed several times in the course of three hours, something which is an elemental part of Marcello’s disrupted rhythms. It’s as though the filmmaker wants us to realise not just the beauty and bright lights of the world that Marcello inhabits, but also the erosive, draining impact of this lifestyle. He wants you to stumble out of the cinema, stunned, ready for your bed, never wanting to go out on the town again.