RUS
NOVANTA / FELLINI. GUERRA. THREE FILMS
:where:
the arched hall, winzavod center for contemporary art, 1 bld. 6, 4th syromyatnichesky pereulok
:when:
april 6 – may 11, 2010
:how:
installation by katya bochavar
video content curator katya telegina
marka:ff’s winter museum, which has dedicated its 2009–10 season to video art, has come to its third and final episode. and that fellini’s films are probably much more deserving of a museum screening than the works of matthew barney or steve mcqueen. and that this episode has been inspired by the fog and assembled to the accompaniment of the not-always-audible music of nino rota – and the poems, mosaics, and drawings of the great tonino guerra, who wrote the screenplays for all three films. tonino, like the smile of the cheshire cat, peers out from various corners of fellini’s cinema, and these three films linger on in the mind precisely in this way, as patches of color – the dwarf nun’s habit, the midget sheik’s fez, the shopkeeper’s breast, the tar of the engine room, smeared over the impossible beauty of the opera. it is all these things that once stopped the artist katya bochavar dead in her tracks. for her (as for all other young soviets who glanced at the world through fellini’s lens – and fell in love with this world for good), amarcord was the beginning of a new life and the beginning of new dreams.
fyodor pavlov-andreevich,
curator, novanta, director, solyanka gallery
amarcord
the entire essence of amarcord is bound up with this expectation of a miracle. returning to recollections of his youth twenty years after the semi-autobiographical i vitelloni, fellini no longer sought after authentic locations, verisimilitude or any other legitimation other than the legitimacy of his own memory. old rimini, the city of his childhood, was bombed during the war and had ceased to exist. when he filmed i vitelloni in the fifties, fellini had tried to find it again in the roman beach district of ostia. in the seventies, however, he almost completely recreated it on the soundstages of cinecitta. the filmmaker’s memories came to life in a setting that he willed into being, rather than in the locations available to him.
in amarcord, the pre-war italian provincial town is presented as an endless carnival of blackshirts, cynical priests, arab concubines, bourgeois wives, village idiots, and adolescents, who are joining this mad procession for the first time in their lives. amidst this chaos, the pre-dawn heat, and the high-sounding slogans, however, everything is suffused by the anticipation of this as yet invisible miracle, which will emerge from the fog any minute now.
and the ship sails on
“i wanted the sea to look absolutely fake but believable,” said fellini after he had dispatched his casanova (a lifeless imitator mistakenly crowned a legendary lover) on a sea voyage across cellophane waves. a location shot would not have been able to solve the artistic task the director had set himself: in his mind, the real sea looked absolutely “wrong” (at least, on the screen). and so on two occasions (in and the ship sails on and fellini’s casanova) he attempted to correct this “error” of nature through purely technical, handmade means – filling a soundstage with plastic, launching a ship on it, and rocking the boat as it sailed the waves – thus appropriating the role of poseidon.
and not only poseidon. fellini said that the profession of filmmaker gave him “almost divine power” – the ability not only to create and thus compete with nature, but also the capacity to resurrect those who had already exited this world. the dead opera diva whose wake, according to the terms of her will, is held by the passengers of the ship, is present among the living as a film image, and a young man thus falls in love with this already-deceased woman. the chronicler’s camera records the voyage, forever preserving its details for a posterity that, perhaps, will have no use for them. and the ship sails on begins as a fast-motion history of cinema (from the silent newsreel to the soundstage musical) and it ends as a panegyric to this art form – the only guaranteed antidote to death.
ginger and fred
ginger and fred are dancers who once performed as a duet but who have lost track of one another. they are two angels sent by their creator into the ninth circle of television hell (where dante’s inferno has been expropriated, tamed, and crammed onto the tv screen as an animated puppet film.) the title characters have been invited to take part in a new year’s tv show. condemned to fifteen minutes of fame, they travel from the provinces to rome, a city where the end of the world has happened long before. the fog in which ginger risks getting lost bears little resemblance to the fog in amarcord: it is a mass of smog and fumes, a source of potential danger or, at least, disenchantment. demons on motorcycles burst forth from it; city dwellers indifferent to everything but football disappear into it.
the nineteen-eighties are suffused with the aesthetic of the apocalypse, a foreboding that the finale is just around the corner. fellini parodies and exaggerates this reality, reducing it to a baroque absurdity. at the gates to this hell ((rome’s termini station) he hangs a gigantic papier-mache ham, and he turns the tv studio into a chamber of curiosities, a bestiary, a gathering of tragicomic freaks. the main characters are vulnerable and old-fashioned; they do not belong to this frightening world. they are visibly at odds with it, and, at the behest of the demiurge-like director, they transform it, making us believe for just a little while that a miracle is still possible.
