• Sub-Plots: Police investigation showcases stories of five witnesses that depict how their day started and what they saw when it finishes in Paolino park

• Themed Character: Roman rain that drives characters to seek shelter, triggering transitions to portrayal of the prostitute at different stages of her day before meeting her nocturnal fate.

Paolino Park where all witnesses congregate
and the victim – prostitute in the far left

The above are the building blocks of an Italian cinema masterpiece, written and directed by Bernardo Bertolucci based on a story by Pier Paolo Pasolini. The backdrop story is that Bertolucci has started his career assisting Pasolini in his first feature film Accatone a year earlier. He describes this experience as “witnessing the birth of cinema” as neither Pasolini nor him had any experience making films. All Pasolini wanted was close up angles of the protagonists that should resemble tormented faces of religious saints, sacrificed on the altar as depicted in timeless Tuscan paintings.

In this film you will find the typical Pasolinian themes of the rough life of poor boys on the fringe of society and their struggles to find meaning in a chaotic environment. Pasolini convinced Cinecitta’ executives to allow Betrolucci and Franco Citti to turn his story into screenplay. However by the time the script was ready, Pasolini was completely busy tending to his film Mamma Roma (1962), so luck and ample talent crossed path and the assignment of directing the film was given to 21 year old Bertolucci who had never before directed a full feature film.

In the Criterion’s interview of this disc, Bertolucci confesses to the initial disbelief sentiment the entire set had towards taking orders from a young unknown 21-year old. What I found interesting is that although Bertolucci tried to personalize the film with his signature poetic style of keeping the camera always in movement as it followed the characters’ individual trajectories towards the park crime scene, emphasizing the element of the passing hours as a prosaic manifestation of the ordinary and life-like realism – critics only saw the Pasolinian influence dominating. It tells you a lot about the delicate balance between screenplay and directing style, especially when the story comes from such a powerful source as Pasolini.

The film brings another fine auditory gem; a brooding suspense of the park scenes countered with a jovial jazzy street life – a genuine score
by classic composer Piero Piccioni. With that, the film opens up a window to a Pasolinian Rome coined in his signature novel “Ragazzi di vita” of the early 60’s, depicting rough urban realities of adolescents at the lowest social rung: the faces, the fashion, the accents, the architecture, the cars, and yes the music that paints it all with a rich depth.

You will find the story structure following Akira Kurosawa’s Rashômon (1950), where a master scene is being reflected by myriad of point views, in this case of the five eye witnesses, each revealing another layer that was not visible through the others.

Think about the next time you read the paper about the latest crime scoop, which serves as the only valid conclusion but what caused it often carries multiple conflicting agendas, which validates once again that the truth is indeed in the eye of the beholder.

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I came early to get a close seat in the first rows. I am surrounded with young film students in their early twenties that are busy texting and convivially chatting away. In the back are sitting some older folks with serious expressions. Photographers are everywhere with their cameras at the ready, which builds up a tension as if a spaceship from Mars is about to land any second.

With the customary 15 minutes delay, Debora Young, the Festival director opens up with a few words of introduction after which Maestro Bellocchio is ushered onto the stage that in instant becomes a focal point of million camera flashes.

Master class with Marco Bellocchio

Interviewing Bellocchio is Dan Fainaru (Internal Communications) that poses wide range of questions about various milestones in his rich career. No English translation is provided, so I am glad all these years of Saturday Italian classes are effectively kicking in. Here are some insights I found the most interesting:

• Cinematic approach taken by young students: Bellocchio sees today’s young film students as very proficient in mastering the technical aspects of producing an effective soundtrack or solid camera angles, giving an example of the other day’s Short films shown or a typical reality TV shows that generated an audience-wide jeer. What they most lack of is a good script and a credible recital. He points out that in the Neorealism period, non-professional actors although used banal dialogs, they were extremely genuine as they reflected real people telling their own stories in their natural habitat.
• Dubbing: Bellocchio outlines two stages in the evolution of dubbing (i.e., use of professional voiceover artists instead of the actors’ own voice): 1) when he started out back in 1965 it was a common practice. In the case of I pugni in tasca (Fists in the Pocket), it was rather a necessity as Lou Castel, the lead actor did not speak Italian fluently. He also gave an example of many directors including Fellini that shot scenes with complete dialogs only to change them entirely at the dubbing stage. 2) Around the 80’s he ditched dubbing, as it has become outdated practice no one considered valid anymore.
• Italian Cinema today: Bellocchio teaches classes in directorship and screenplay writing. Regarding global cinema, he points out that even back in the 50’s 3D movies were popular, they disappeared and now are back in vogue, referring to the other day’s opening of Toy Story 3 in the Teatro Greco (Greek Theater). He didn’t say it explicitly but I found it as an acknowledgment that these are all technology muscles, but with no soul. As for Italian cinema, he confessed that classic Italian cinema, namely Neorrealism, had to its advantage extremely tough economic post-war conditions as backdrop, which enabled to tell much more believable stories about human poverty, loss of job and other survival challenges. With the help of an audience member sitting at the front row he summed up a common quote that aptly summed up the current thinking:

“Italian cinema today is inferior to the sum of its parts”

I do hope we won’t need another war to improve quality, as I believe there are great contemporary gems from Tornatore, Ozpetek, Salvatores, Sorrentino, Solidini and many others that brought forward new directions and perspectives in tune with the times. That said, it was a bit unsettling when I stopped at a local DVD store and the only titles for sale were American blockbusters. It could be a coincidence or cold business sense but still telling.

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Luisa Anselmi played by Anouk Aimée

Some interpretations for the title 81/2 includes the number of episodes of the film or number of films Fellini did until that point, with the “1/2″ representing his co-direction with Alberto Lattuada of Luci del Varietà – Variety Lights (1950).

Counter to the Neorealism genre that focused on external themes in a documentary fashion using real locations, non-professional actors and post-war social issues of poverty and survival, Fellini transformed this view from the objective to the subjective. This film attempts to uncover the internal and subjective workings of an individual mind. In this case, Guido Anselmi’s, interpreted beautifully by Marcello Mastroianni, a famous film director experiencing creative block. A lot has been written about Mastroianni, in essence, playing Fellini’s alter ego, which in that sense lends the film to be an autobiographical representation of Fellini’s personal world as a director.

Such world also known as “Fellinian” is characterized with a surreal almost fantastic ambiance of a circus, with multiple exaggerated characters operating in grand spectacles contexts. The film brings together scenes coming out from Guido’s mind showcasing people he knew in an effort to capture that big idea for the film. But then cutting to scenes taking place in the present that add reality-pressure in the form of anxious producer, wife, lover, actors – who are all trying to negotiate their wants from the struggling director.

You can easily see how this work influenced many filmmakers; some of Woody Allen’s films that mix fantasy and reality as the director brings actual dialogs taken from his life as part of making a movie. The result is a personal movie within a movie or as Seinfeld TV series aptly coined “show about nothing.” But as we all know that “nothing” is in fact “rich something” – a realistic representation of life itself where things never work as we want them to or seem as they are. From this respect, we see that Fellini was directly influenced by ideas from 1934 Italian Literature Nobel laureat, Luigi Pirandello, also discussed in a recent review of Kaos (Paolo and Vittorio Taviani -1984).

Other worth noting elements includes the recurring implicit shtick Guido employs throughout the film, touching his nose, which in Italian signifies “The big Liar” motif. True, a film is in fact a made up story and in the case of Fellini serves as a signature style effectively captured in a 2002 documentary about Fellini’s work: “Federico Fellini: I’m a Big Liar” by Damian Pettigrew. A similar shtick we also see in Mastroianni’s recurring tick sound in Pietro Germi’s classic Divorzio all’italiana – Divorce Italian Style (1961).

I especially liked the interpretation of Luisa, Guido’ wife played by French actress, Anouk Aimée, which Fellini already included in La Dolce Vita. Her bookish style with black-framed spectacles and the eternal in-mouth cigarette signifying her disturbed alertness to the shenanigans Guido cooks up. Such turbulence rocks their relationship with a parade of on-set lovers and borrowing some of their real-life intense arguments into dialogs for his movie.

And I cannot ignore another signature soundtrack by all-time Fellini’s collaborator, Nino Rota that completes this work with a musical gem to support the carnival atmosphere where fantasy and reality blend into a colorful parade of characters and meanings, even though the film is in black and white…

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