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Il Poeta Federico Fellini Film Studies , Week 8 (Spring 2012)

Film Studies. Il Poeta Federico Fellini Film Studies , Week 8 (Spring 2012). Film Studies. Film Studies. Film Studies. Everything and Nothing by Jorge Luis Borges

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Il Poeta Federico Fellini Film Studies , Week 8 (Spring 2012)

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  1. Film Studies Il PoetaFederico FelliniFilm Studies, Week 8(Spring 2012)

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  4. Film Studies Everything and Nothing by Jorge Luis Borges There was no one in him: behind his face (even the poor paintings of the epoch show it to be unlike any other) and behind his words (which were copious, fantastic, and agitated) there was nothing but a bit of cold, a dream not dreamed by anyone. At first he thought that everyone was like himself. But the dismay shown by a comrade to whom he mentioned the vacuity revealed his error to him and made him realize forever that an individual should not differ from the species. At one time it occurred to him that he might find a remedy for his difficulty in books, and so he learned the “small Latin and less Greek,” of which a contemporary spoke.

  5. Film Studies Later, he considered he might find what he sought in carrying out one of the elemental rites of humanity, and so he let himself be initiated by Anne Hathaway in the long siesta hour of an afternoon in June. In his twenties he went to London. Instinctively, he had already trained himself in the habit of pretending he was someone, so it would not be discovered that he was no one. In London, he found the profession to which he had been predestined, that of actor: someone who, on a stage, plays at being someone else, before a concourse of people who pretend to take him for that other one. His histrionic work taught him a singular satisfaction, perhaps the first he had ever known. And yet, once the last line of verse had been acclaimed and the last dead man dragged off stage, he tasted the hateful taste of unreality. He would leave off being Ferrex or Tamburlaine and become no one again.

  6. Film Studies Thus beset, he took to imagining other heroes and other tragic tales. And so, while his body complied with its bodily destiny in London bawdyhouses and taverns, the soul inhabiting that body was Caesar unheeding the augur’s warnings, and Juliet detesting the lark, and Macbeth talking on the heath with the witches who are also the Fates. No one was ever so many men as that man: like the Egyptian Proteus he was able to exhaust all the possibilities of being. From time to time he left, in some obscure corner of his work, a confession he was sure would never be deciphered: Richard states that in his one person he plays many parts, and Iago curiously says “I am not what I am.” The fundamental oneness of existing, dreaming, and acting inspired in him several famous passages.

  7. Film Studies He persisted in this directed hallucination for twenty years. But one morning he was overcome by a surfeit and horror of being all those kings who die by the sword and all those unfortunate lovers who converge, diverge, and melodiously expire. That same day he settled on the sale of his theater. Before a week was out he had gone back to his native village, where he recuperated the trees and the river of his boyhood, without relating them at all to trees and rivers--illustrious with mythological allusion and Latin phrase--which his Muse had celebrated. He had to be someone; he became a retired impresario who has made his fortune and who is interested in making loans, in lawsuits, and in petty usury.

  8. Film Studies It was in character, then, in this character that he dictated the arid last will and testament we know, from which he deliberately excluded any note of pathos or trace of literature. Friends from London used to visit him in his retreat, and for them he would once more play the part of the poet. History adds that before or after his death he found himself facing God and said: I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man, myself alone. From out of a whirlwind the voice of God replied: I dreamed the world the way you dreamed your work my Shakespeare; one of the forms of my dream was you, who, like me, are many and no one.

  9. Film Studies “the suspicion--the extreme test of his topicality, the total congruence of the director and his time--that Fellini, a man who has exhausted himself and his life in images, doesn't exist.” --LilianaBetti on Federico Fellini

  10. Film Studies “When you work with Federico you only learn to discover that there’s nothing to discover.”—Lina Wertmuller, assistant director on 8 ½ and director of Seven Beauties, Swept Away, Which Way is Up?

  11. Film Studies “A flight of fantasy, whether in dreams or daydreams, is no mere sleight of mind. But only children will accept it as being equally as profound as the arbitrary awareness we are taught to regard as reality, and hence, only they are nurtured by it. Later, of course, many of us comprehend our self-imposed poverty and try to double back, but the bread crumbs are always missing and our failures are immense. A true belief in the validity of non-ordinary reality-with all that it can teach us-seems beyond the capabilities of every practicing adult, with the possible exception of Federico Fellini---Garry Trudeau”

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  34. Film Studies Cine-Mendacity Cine-Mendacity

  35. Film Studies Cine-Mendacity

  36. Film Studies Fellini himself once even proclaimed the need for a “cine-mendacity” to replace “cinema-verite” because “a lie is always more interesting than the truth” (Playboy 58). Cine-Mendacity

  37. Film Studies “Federico only blushes when he tells the truth.”—GiulettaMasina Cine-Mendacity

  38. Film Studies David Thomson, to cite an extreme example, has ruthlessly assaulted Fellini (in his Biographical Dictionary of Film) as an "obsessional vacuous poseur . . . a half-baked, play-acting pessimist, with no capacity for tragedy," whose films are a "doodling in chaos." Cine-Mendacity

  39. Film Studies “Fellini is not honest, he is not dishonest, he is just Fellini. . . . he has no limits; he's just like quicksilver--all over the place. I have never seen anybody like that before. . . . He is enormously intuitive; he is creative; he is an enormous force. He is burning inside with such heat. Collapsing . . . . The heat from his creative mind, it melts him. . . . He is rich.”—Ingmar Bergman (Simon 221-22) Cine-Mendacity

  40. Film Studies Fellini the Autobiographer Fellini the Autobiographer

  41. Film Studies “Making a film is something quite other . . . than a simple professional fact. It's a way of realizing myself and giving my life a meaning. That's why, when you ask me which of my films I prefer, I'm stuck. I don't know what to say. I don't consider my films as professional facts; if I did so, I might be able to look at them objectively enough to say this one seems more of a success than that. But as it is, I find getting such a detached position absolutely impossible. The way I want to speak about a film is, not to say what I'm expressing in it, but the stages of my life I pass through making it. I have just the same difficulty as I would if somebody asked me "Which do you prefer, your military career, or your marriage, your first love, or meeting your first friend?" They are all facts of my life. I like it all, it's my life and consequently I can't choose.” (Burgeon 91) Fellini the Autobiographer

  42. Film Studies “My work can't be anything other than a testimony of what I am looking for in life. It is a mirror of my searching . . . for myself freed. In this respect, I think, there is no cleavage or difference of content or style in all my films. From first to last, I have struggled to free myself from the past, from the education laid upon me as a child” ("Interview," Playboy 58). Fellini the Autobiographer

  43. Film Studies "If I set out to make a movie about a fillet of sole, it would turn out to be about me" (Costello 36). Fellini the Autobiographer

  44. Film Studies “The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography” (Walter 36). --Federico Fellini Fellini the Autobiographer

  45. Film Studies “At bottom, I am always making the same film. I am telling the story of characters in search of themselves, in search of a more authentic source of life, of conduct, of behavior, that will more closely relate to the true roots of their individuality” (Kast 182-83). Fellini the Autobiographer

  46. Film Studies Fellini’s Creative-Life Fellini’s Creative Life

  47. Film Studies For the "real," he has explained, is not what we assume it to be; “it is neither an enclosure nor a panorama that has just a single surface. A landscape, for example, has several textures, and the deepest, the one that can be revealed only by poetry, is no less real. It is said that what I wish to show behind the epiderm of things and people is the unreal. It is called my taste for the mysterious. I shall readily accept this description if you will use a capital "M." For me the mysterious is man, the long irrational lines of his spiritual life, love, salvation. . . . For me, the key to the mystery--which is to say, God--is to be found at the center of the successive layers of reality . . .” (Murray 35). Fellini’s Creative Life

  48. Fellini’s Creative Life Film Studies “For me the only real artist is the visionary because he bears witness to his own reality. A visionary--Van Gogh, for instance--is a profound realist. That wheat field with the black sun is his; only he saw it. There can't be greater realism” (Samuels 226).

  49. Fellini’s Creative Life Film Studies

  50. Film Studies “[Fellini] creates the way he sees" (Hughes 157). --Dadaist/Surrealist Hans Richter Fellini’s Creative Life

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