#0000C/#848: FELLINI, Federico: Roma (1972)

FELLINI, Federico (Italy)
Roma [1972]

Spine #0000C/Spine #848
Blu-ray

Travelogue, memoir, and outrageous cinematic spectacle converge in this kaleidoscopic valentine to the Eternal City, composed by one of its most iconic inhabitants. Leisurely one moment and breathless the next, this urban fantasia by Federico Fellini interweaves recollections of the director's young adulthood in the era of Mussolini with an impressionistic portrait of contemporary Rome, where he and his film crew are shooting footage of the bustling cityscape. The material delights of sex, food, nightlife, and one hallucinatory ecclesiastical fashion show are shot through with glimmers of a monumental past: the Colosseum encircled by traffic, ancient frescoes unearthed in a subway tunnel, a pigeon-befouled statue of Julius Caesar. With a head-spinning mix of documentary immediacy and extravagant artifice, Roma penetrates the myth and mystique of Italy's storied capital, a city Fellini called "the most wonderful movie set in the world."

120 minutes

Color
Monaural
in Italian
1:85:1 aspect ratio
Criterion Release 2016/2020

Not to be confused with another film with the same title: #1014

Director/Writers

Story and screenplay by Federico Fellini and Bernardino Zapponi.

Fellini was 52 when he directed Roma.

Other Fellini films in the Collection:

#0000C/#189: The White Sheik (1952)
#0000C/#246: I Viteloni (1953)
#0000C/#219: La Strada (1954)
#0000C: Il Bidone (1955)
#0000C/#49: Nights Of Cabiria (1957)
#0000C/#733: La Dolce Vita (1960)
#0000C/#140: 8½ (1963)
#0000C/#149: Juliet Of The Spirits (1965)
#0000C/#747: Fellini Satyricon (1969)
#0000C/#4: Amarcord (1973)
#0000C/#50: And The Ship Sails On (1983)
#0000C: Intervista (1987)

The Film

This is a film that demands multiple viewings — Fellini has purposely made a non-narrative film with one outlandish image after another, that resists comprehension on first look. And look carefully:

If the dead cows don’t get you, the bishop in the blinking neon suit will!

Peter Gonzales is brilliant as the 18-year-old horny Fellini (even though he hardly speaks a word of dialogue). Same with Dolores (Fiona Florence), the come-hither prostitute who Fellini wants to date (she nods her head in agreement, but we never learn the outcome!) …

Gore Vidal — an ex-pat living in Rome — makes a cameo, and seems completely self-deprecating, in keeping with all the surrounding satire …

Perhaps the most touching, truly honest moment comes when Fellini follows the great Anna Magnani to her doorway. “Go to bed, Fredri!” she says, seeming truly annoyed. She looks fantastic, but passed away a year later …

A long section at a variety show (Fellini cleverly slips in the detail of the exact date: July 19, 1943) recalls Variety Lights, but is infused with pathos and a hard look at the Roman attitude!

One of the best in the canon.

Film Rating (0-60):

56

The Extras

The Booklets

#0000C only:

Eighty-two page booklet featuring an essay by David Forgacs.

“The film has three time levels. The first, contained within the opening fourteen minutes, is from Fellini’s boyhood, around 1930. Rome seen from Rimini is a distant world refracted through school lessons, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a silent epic movie, a Fascist newsreel, the pope on the radio. As the boys watch a train leaving for Rome, there is a fade to black and a jump forward to the second time level, starting around 1940. One of the boys, now a young man in a white suit, gets off a train in Rome and moves into shared lodgings, then joins a noisy restaurant meal in the street. Hardly uttering a word, he functions in the film less as a character than as a pair of eyes with which the audience discovers the city. The third level starts thirty-four minutes in, after another fade to black, with a shot from a camera car arriving on Rome’s outer ring road, the Grande Raccordo Anulare. We are now contemporaneous with the film’s making, 1971. In pseudodocumentary style, a voice-over narrator asks, ‘What about the Rome of today? What impression does it make on a first-time visitor?’ And Fellini steps out of the car to direct the sequence.”

154-page booklet featuring an introduction by Bilge Ebiri and essays by Michael Almereyda (Primary Sources); Colm Tóibin (Imagined Homes); Carol Morley (Life on Earth); Stephanie Zacharek (Tough Love); and Kogonada (There is No End).

Almereyda:

“In a jaw-dropping sequence on the superhighway that ‘circles the city like one of Saturn’s rings,’ we’re shown the camera mounted on a crane, sheathed in wind-flapping protective plastic under a darkening sky, while the actual Fellini — fifty-one years old, prim and calm in a suit, vest, and tie — follows in a crew-driven car. We’ve seen plenty of big-budget movies commandeering freeways, and they routinely involve paralyzing traffic jams [Fellini has one here, as well — a similar scene lifted from 8½, where the camera peers into the car windows …] or high-speed chases in service of familiar plots, but Fellini’s freeway is a feral spectacle unto itself, an overview of civilization, an outlandish unfolding event.”

#848 only:

Eight-panel foldout poster with an essay by Forgacs.

[this is a different essay than Forgacs’s from #0000C]

The subway sequence is fascinating:

“The subway tunnels and the drilling equipment were built and shot on Stage 5. Fellini had initially thought of filming on location, and DP Giuseppe Rotunno remembered doing some shots there, but during the reconnaissance led by the chief engineer, Fellini said, ‘we need to redo everything at Cincecittà. We can’t set up the lights here.’ Light, Zapponi said, was essential to Fellini’s style; it was his syntax. As reconstructed in the studio, this sequence is one of the most haunting in all Fellini’s work. After the drill pierces a wall with a hollow space behind it, the engineer and camera crew enter a buried Roman villa. As they look at the frescoes painted on rectangular columns, with the sound of howling wind coming from the tunnel, the colors fade before their eyes and ours. The effect was obtained by applying a transparent varnish over the paintings that turned white when high-power resisters inside the columns were switched on and emitted heat. The scene is a condensed encounter between two Romes: ancient civilization and modern technology. Those freshly painted faces remained sealed from time, but on contact with modernity they are immediately destroyed. There is an echo here of the final shot of Satyricon, where the characters we have been watching appear as painted images on the ruined walls of a building on a cliff top buffeted by the wind. Both sequences poignantly evoke the death of ancient Rome, and also the evanescence of cinema itself,”

From Discover Magazine:

“While Fellini’s scene is metaphorical, as relics don’t actually dematerialize in a matter of minutes, they are certainly at risk from construction.”

To this day, construction of the Rome metro is constantly uncovering treasures from the past.

#0000C/#848:

Commentary

From 2016 featuring scholar Frank Burke.

An important commentary by a self-professed huge Roma fan.

Deleted scenes

Mostly snips (as usual, Fellini had to satisfy the distributors and cut the film to 120 minutes) — but worth seeing the missing scenes of the third and fourth cameos — Marcello Mastroianni and Alberto Sordi.

Interview 1

From 2016 with filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino.

The most deserving heir to Fellini.

Interview 2

From 2016 with poet and Fellini friend Valerio Magrelli.

On the meeting the man … he couldn’t believe he had read his poetry! Fellini discarded him just as easily.

Presentation

Of Roma ephemera from the “Felliniana” archive of collector Don Young.

The best stuff are the production stills .

Trailer

An excellent trailer with only images, no dialogue. Not there’s much in the film, in any case.

Extras Rating (0-40):

36

56 + 36 =

92

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