#0000C: FELLINI, Federico: Intervista (1987)

FELLINI, Federico (Italy)

Intervista [1987]

Spine #0000C
Blu-ray

Federico Fellini’s penultimate film is a similarly self-reflexive (and self-deprecating) journey through both the director’s dream life and his cinematic world — which are, here as always in Fellini’s work, inextricably entwined. In Rome to make a documentary about the great filmmaker, a Japanese camera crew follows Fellini on a tour through his longtime home studio of Cinecittà as the maestro’s memories and fantasies unfurl in a dizzying, dazzling, time-bending love letter to the art and spectacle of moviemaking. the film’s sprawling vision even makes room for an appearance by Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg who, in an unforgettable bit of movie magic, relive their iconic Trevi Fountain scene from La dolce vita, lent new poignancy by the tacit acknowledgement of time’s passing.

106 minutes
Color

Monaural

In Italian, Japanese and English

1:37:1 aspect ratio

Criterion Release 2020

Director/Writer

Federico Fellini was 67 when he wrote and directed Intervista.

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/#848: Roma (1972)
#0000C/#4: Amarcord (1973)
#0000C/#50: And The Ship Sails On (1983)

The Film

Is it a film within a film within a film? Or perhaps a filmmaker at work, making a film about a film?

Actually it’s four films:

1. A Japanese television crew filming the proceedings;
2. An autobiographical section where the young Fellini (Sergio Rubini) (put a pimple on that nose!) sets out to interview the famous actress Greta Gonda (the gorgeous Antonella Ponziani), and is so nervous he can barely utter a sound;
3. The making of a fictional film, an adaptation of Kafka’s Amerika;
4. Intervista itself.

How ‘bout we just say that Fellini is up to his old tricks, hanging a bunch of interesting (or semi-interesting) episodic spectacles onto the clothesline of cinema …

Maurizio Mein — Fellini’s assistant since Satyricon — plays himself, doing all the grunt work of an AD …

At least Fellini puts himself into the proceedings, tickling our fancy about this 56-year-old genius who has seemingly run out of ideas.

The magic — we’re talking Fellini, after all — is delivered by the appearance of two actors from the old days — Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg.

Marcello appears in an obviously choreographed scene as Mandrake the Magnificent, bursting through the window of the production office (accompanied by balloons and confetti), asking Fellini if he’s in his usual trouble with finances or sexual escapades. His magic wand will cause an erection.

Probably staged — Anita initially refuses Fellini entrance to her gated estate, guarded by snarling dogs, but eventually invites the entourage in to feast on roasted chestnuts, wine and Schnapps.

Mandrake magically produces a sheet which serves as a screen as we watch the scene in La Dolce Vita where they dance, and Ekberg sloshes her way through the Trevi fountain. Ekberg’s tears of remembrance seem real, as the Japanese reporter tries to do yoga magic on Mastroianni to get him to quit smoking.

Film Rating (0-60):

53

The Extras

The Booklets

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

“Intervista is Fellini’s film about Cinecittà, the studio he had used for everything from Nights of Cabiria onward. By the 1970s, indeed, it had become so much ‘his’ that the productions he shot there, on Stage 5 were major events, tying up vast crews for months at a time and attracting visitors eager to see the maestro at work … Intervista is a complex patchwork of films within a film, all of them fictitious, about filmmaking and the state of cinema in the eighties.”

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:

“Cinecittà provides a framing device, the studio as dream factory and as a portal for time travel, allowing Fellini to evoke and mock the overripe plushness of Italian cinema under Fascist control in all its alluring ridiculousness. The setting also gives Fellini the opportunity, in the present tense, to acknowledge his working family, crew members and comrades, and to concoct a diversionary scene featuring the studio’s glamorous ‘archivist,’ a woman with a knowing air who, while picking chicory for tea, wades into tall weeds adjacent to the not-so-enchanting housing projects bordering Cinecittà‘s back lot. ‘Are any of Fellini’s sets still standing?’ the Japanese interviewers ask. ‘No, he takes them home as souvenirs.’”

Fellini’s TV

A 2003 Italian television documentary on Fellini’s work in television advertising during the 1980s.

Fellini racconta: Passeggiate nella memoria

An Italian television documentary produced in 2000 and featuring several interviews with a late-in-life Fellini looking back on his career.

Very nice, but as usual Fellini politely refuses to do any meaningful dissections of his work. Good for him.

At Home with Federico Fellini

A 1987 interview with Fellini on the importance of Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika to Intervista.

Quite interesting to hear Fellini dive into Kafka.

Audio interview

From the early sixties with actor Mastroianni by film critic Gideon Bachmann.

Mastroianni fondly discusses his relationship with Fellini. Some funny anecdotes, a very soul-searching explanation of the type of friend and filmmaker Fellini was, and describing many self-deprecating episodes the two shared …

Extras Rating (0-40):

35

53 + 35 =

88

By Director

By Spine #