Now, Nonsense Isn't New To Me
I finished the 2005 Tape yesterday, causing some alterations to the January 5th 2006 entry which purported to show the tracklist. Check it out. I'm still wondering who the five artists Jim had heard of were...
After reacquainting myself with Fellini's La Dolce Vita last week at the Tyneside's Italian cinema festival, I was looking forward to loving 8½ this week, but it didn't happen. I was bothered as to why this would be, why perhaps the most highly-regarded Fellini film was also the one which left me the coldest. After some thought, I think I've nailed it; it's because film-making is a silly thing to do.
Let me explain. An intelligent and aware artist will know that, despite its strains and stresses, making a movie or writing a book is not actually on a par with curing cancer or eliminating Third World poverty, and this is why most of the great films about film-making, from Sullivan's Travels through Day For Night to Ed Wood present the process of movie-making as being a fundamentally surreal, silly thing for a grown man or woman to do. Charlie Kaufman may display himself sweating and complaining about his artistic integrity in Adaptation, but that's part of why he's a funny character. Even Mario Van Peebles' Badassss! or E Elias Merhinge's Shadow Of The Vampire, both of which deal with visionary directors creating important films, salt their dishes with liberal doses of silliness and satire.
By contrast, most of the bad films about film-making present the film-maker as being fundamentally saintly, involved in an endeavour of such dramatic importance that to crack a smile would be to betray thousands of years of human achievement. This is why Jean-Luc Godard has been so insufferable for the last three or four decades - you watch something like King Lear or In Praise Of Love and think "This actually is how Godard sees himself. He is insane." Bad films about film-making make you think less of the people who made the film.
I don't think any less of Fellini, and 8½ is very far from a bad film, but it lacks the daring and cohesion of La Dolce Vita. It contains a welterweight of great scenes (think traffic jams, or harems, or press conferences), but it's too closely aligned with the artist - Marcello Mastrionani's Fellini substitute - to deliver any revelatory insight. La Dolce Vita starts off from the assumption that its audience views its tabloid journo 'heroes' with contempt and then upsets that idea by affording them sympathy, even occasionally being seduced by the tacky glamour of the world it depicts. The structure of La Dolce Vita is actually a fairly straightforward morality play, but Fellini is so good at seducing the audience that it comes as a surprise when the international jet-set trash world turns ugly. That's quite an achievement. 8½ is made for people who love movies, love directors most of all, and it goes on to portray directors as being highly-strung but essentially righteous people of great artistic vision. The revelation of La Dolce Vita simply isn't there.
Admittedly, I find Fellini's films a bit like comedies - there's nothing as good as a great comedy (or a great Fellini), but a bad one can make you feel like the only sober person in a room full of drunks. When Fellini's good, I can get past my own lack of knowledge about Italian society, circuses or Catholicism - his three most frequent topics - by the cumulative force of what's on screen. 8½, despite its manifold pleasures, isn't one of those films. It's not as transcendent. You scratch through a layer of symbolism, only to discover another layer of symbolism beneath it.
The film I wanted 8½ to be, surprisingly, is Michael Winterbottom's A Cock And Bull Story. Considering that I am a fan of Winterbottom, his stars Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Dylan Moran, Kelly McDonald, Naomie Harris, Jeremy Northam, Stephen Fry and Gillian Anderson, not least his source text The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, you may be surprised that I'm surprised at how much I loved this film. I think that's why I'm surprised too. I wouldn't have been surprised if it was good, but the fact that it's surprisingly good is one hell of a surprise.
That sentence makes about as much sense as the film, which overcomes the problems inherent in filming a novel about a man trying to write an autobiography and failing by making a film about making a film based on a novel about a man trying to write his own autobiography and failing and failing. Really, the less you know (or understand) about this film before going in, the better - only note that it is one of the cleverest and funniest films I have ever seen in my life, and that oddly it proves to be an almost precisely faithful adaptation of its source novel. And that I have no problems with my libido.
After reacquainting myself with Fellini's La Dolce Vita last week at the Tyneside's Italian cinema festival, I was looking forward to loving 8½ this week, but it didn't happen. I was bothered as to why this would be, why perhaps the most highly-regarded Fellini film was also the one which left me the coldest. After some thought, I think I've nailed it; it's because film-making is a silly thing to do.
Let me explain. An intelligent and aware artist will know that, despite its strains and stresses, making a movie or writing a book is not actually on a par with curing cancer or eliminating Third World poverty, and this is why most of the great films about film-making, from Sullivan's Travels through Day For Night to Ed Wood present the process of movie-making as being a fundamentally surreal, silly thing for a grown man or woman to do. Charlie Kaufman may display himself sweating and complaining about his artistic integrity in Adaptation, but that's part of why he's a funny character. Even Mario Van Peebles' Badassss! or E Elias Merhinge's Shadow Of The Vampire, both of which deal with visionary directors creating important films, salt their dishes with liberal doses of silliness and satire.
By contrast, most of the bad films about film-making present the film-maker as being fundamentally saintly, involved in an endeavour of such dramatic importance that to crack a smile would be to betray thousands of years of human achievement. This is why Jean-Luc Godard has been so insufferable for the last three or four decades - you watch something like King Lear or In Praise Of Love and think "This actually is how Godard sees himself. He is insane." Bad films about film-making make you think less of the people who made the film.
I don't think any less of Fellini, and 8½ is very far from a bad film, but it lacks the daring and cohesion of La Dolce Vita. It contains a welterweight of great scenes (think traffic jams, or harems, or press conferences), but it's too closely aligned with the artist - Marcello Mastrionani's Fellini substitute - to deliver any revelatory insight. La Dolce Vita starts off from the assumption that its audience views its tabloid journo 'heroes' with contempt and then upsets that idea by affording them sympathy, even occasionally being seduced by the tacky glamour of the world it depicts. The structure of La Dolce Vita is actually a fairly straightforward morality play, but Fellini is so good at seducing the audience that it comes as a surprise when the international jet-set trash world turns ugly. That's quite an achievement. 8½ is made for people who love movies, love directors most of all, and it goes on to portray directors as being highly-strung but essentially righteous people of great artistic vision. The revelation of La Dolce Vita simply isn't there.
Admittedly, I find Fellini's films a bit like comedies - there's nothing as good as a great comedy (or a great Fellini), but a bad one can make you feel like the only sober person in a room full of drunks. When Fellini's good, I can get past my own lack of knowledge about Italian society, circuses or Catholicism - his three most frequent topics - by the cumulative force of what's on screen. 8½, despite its manifold pleasures, isn't one of those films. It's not as transcendent. You scratch through a layer of symbolism, only to discover another layer of symbolism beneath it.
The film I wanted 8½ to be, surprisingly, is Michael Winterbottom's A Cock And Bull Story. Considering that I am a fan of Winterbottom, his stars Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Dylan Moran, Kelly McDonald, Naomie Harris, Jeremy Northam, Stephen Fry and Gillian Anderson, not least his source text The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, you may be surprised that I'm surprised at how much I loved this film. I think that's why I'm surprised too. I wouldn't have been surprised if it was good, but the fact that it's surprisingly good is one hell of a surprise.
That sentence makes about as much sense as the film, which overcomes the problems inherent in filming a novel about a man trying to write an autobiography and failing by making a film about making a film based on a novel about a man trying to write his own autobiography and failing and failing. Really, the less you know (or understand) about this film before going in, the better - only note that it is one of the cleverest and funniest films I have ever seen in my life, and that oddly it proves to be an almost precisely faithful adaptation of its source novel. And that I have no problems with my libido.