The Talkies
Stein, Benjamin
"The Talkies" the general reader will find neither a readily accessible exposition of their doctrines nor any reason to seek to understand them more fully. According to Mr. McInnes, two developments...
...This philosophic project itself, he implies, reveals a dogmatic or authoritarian cast of mind...
...Therefore Marxism can not be understood or adequately countered without non-Marxist theory...
...He says, "It is not mere values and inventions that provide the variety of ways of living but social movements...
...If Western liberalism is superior to Marxism, then that superiority can and must be explained...
...Marxism understands itself as a theoretical critique of the liberal West...
...Everywhere there are processions of people walking tilted backwards, walking bent forwards, with the camera moving beside them almost, but not quite, at their speed...
...Yes, he said...
...Everyone who believes that the world is a rationally comprehensible whole is denounced by Mr...
...When the ocean liner Rex is scheduled to sail by the town, several miles out, the whole town turns out in small boats to watch it pass by...
...The movie is Fellini's remembrance of one year—around 1935—of his adolescence in the seacoast town of Rimini...
...Gradisca is married to a young officer (who bears an astounding resemblance to John Ehrlichman) and the schoolboys pout at the reception while the blind and cranky accordionist kicks anyone who comes near him...
...Amarcord oiling even Fellini's hest a run for its money...
...Everyone looks up to see the peacock of the local count fluttering down...
...As such, it is not a detailed diary, but a highly subjective recollection of high-points, suitably romanticized and jazzed up to have been worthy of recollection...
...Fellini simply has certain memories of growing up which happen to strike extremely responsive chords in many viewers...
...Once a famous retired film critic was asked whether he went to the movies any more...
...Amarcord is Italian dialect for "I Remember...
...The boys gather secretly in a garage for masturbation while calling out the names of their favorite movie stars...
...People are jumping up and down in a syncopated rhythm as if to a beat known only in Fellini's memory...
...This insight does not come from social movements, however, but from thought, in this case from Mr...
...So many of Fellini's circuslike conventions and trademarks of hurrying formations are present that the movie is like a collection of Fellini's contrivances, all strung together...
...The study of politics, understood as "socialmovements" or anything else, requires a standpoint outside of politics...
...One may take the next step and say that Marx had to be rethought because Marx was an inadequate guide...
...There is melancholy too, as the young Fellini's mother dies and he locks himself in his room with sheer grief and frustration...
...But as spring comes again, the memories are of happiness...
...The movie goes on through the year...
...Gradisca" in Italian means "Please do,"a phrase she used in seducing a local nobleman...
...His vision is so deep, however, that it is difficult to understand just why the chords are struck...
...The schoolboys are shown, with their constant imitations of crepitation in the classroom, and their hilarious fantasies of love and adulation...
...Fellini puts enough of these scenes together so that the experience of watching Amarcord is one long series of "oohs" and "ahhs," as if the audience were being taken on a tour of the Grand Canyon...
...Everywhere there is a lushness about the past which only memory brings...
...The bird sits on the frozen fountain and majestically lifts and spreads its tail feathers...
...Because Fellini's father makes derisive comments about Mussolini, he is made to drink the Duce's health with castor oil...
...It is bigger than a mountain, with more lights than the milky way has stars...
...In Amarcord there is almost no plot...
...The movie not only has no plot, but it has no social or psychological message...
...Except for the irrationalists whom Mr...
...McInnes justly condemns, every student of politics, including Marx, Hegel, and McInnes, describes politics not only by the standard of politics but by the standard of reason...
...the people call him "Ronald Colman.- There is the lunatic, bedraggled town sex bomb, Volpina...
...But that, as brilliant as it was, did not capture like Amarcord the quality of memory as distinct from history, of feeling governed by remembered emotion rather than the precision of that which was faithfully written down or photographed at the time...
...There are the high school students bursting with lust and energy, eyeing the town beauty, Gradisca, who swings her hips in a marvelously provincial imitation of Jean Harlow...
...The young Fellini especially has a mad crush on the beautiful Gradisca ("Compared to her, Garbo is nothing...
...The high school boys are in a state of constant agitation because of lust...
...A lone motorcyclist roars up and down the streets with people leaping out of his way...
...It is important to realize that it is not an account of one year—it is a remembrance of one year...
...No one pays any attention to the driver...
...I go every three months, always to see Fellini's 8 112...
...It is overwhelming and overpowering—not a ship at all but the concentrated essence of a small-town boy's imaginings about the world outside...
...Suddenly there is a strange sound from out of the sky...
...Liberal eclecticism of theory, not to mention rejection of theory, is insufficient...
...It is a small town, and everyone's idirosyncracies are known...
...If there is a "plurality of rational ways of living," then it is possible and necessary to distinguish the rational ways from the irrational ways...
...Even less does he say that Hegel was right...
...He returns throughout the film, al-ways passing in and out of the action without any apparent reason—like the peacock, an evocation of something moving yet not readily explicable...
...McInnes as an adherent of a misguided or dangerous doctrine called Totalism...
...McInnes' own thought...
...The movie begins in the springtime, with the townspeople making a huge bonfire to chase away the winter's chill...
...There is the town rake in camel's hair polo coat and neatly clipped moustache...
...The local young men pour out of the cafe into the town square to watch...
...McInnes, to his credit, makes these distinctions and makes them well...
...that is, Marx was wrong...
...Family life in the Fellini household has a chaotic quality as the father and mother each threaten to kill each other over the other's misdeeds...
...Every such effort resembles, to use his favorite example, the Socratic attempt to distinguish physic (nature) from nomos (convention...
...If he is tempted to deny it, he sells himself short...
...She even has sex for breakfast...
...One was the failure of Marxism in the communist world (to achieve harmony and freedom), the other the failure of Marxism in the noncommunist world (to make a revolution or even to create a revolutionary proletariat...
...Perhaps so, but it does not follow, as he suggests, that there is a plurality of rational ways of understanding...
...and on the incredibly fat and buxom tobacconist's helper...
...But Fellini's inventions are so brilliant, his line to the human consciousness so direct and high-powered that the sum of his many contrivances is a fantastically original and unstereotyped movie of remembrance...
...It does not come until the middle of the night and when it appears it is like a schoolboy's fantasy of a great liner...
...McInnes, two developments contributed decisively to the rethinking of Marx by Western Marxists...
...Amarcord goes straight to the undifferentiated subconscious responses to adolescence, which are apparently the same in New York and Washington as they are in Italy...
...There are just a few episodes with daydreams and fantasies woven in...
...Almost immediately we are introduced to the townspeople and to the usual, repetitive, but always brilliant and evocative Fellini conventions...
...This is especially true of Chairman Mao, whose significance for Western Marxists receives surprisingly little mention from Mr...
...McInnes tells us that "there is a plurality of rational ways of living...
...Also because it is a small town, events of any significance take on a magnificent importance...
...For some reason which I cannot yet understand, that scene, and many others like it in Federico Fellini's latest masterpiece, Amarcord, seem to go straight into the unconscious...
...He frowns on the philosophicattempt to explain the world comprehensively...
...Seemingly just by sime instinctual ability, Fellini has reached our unconscious memories of our own childhoods, even though they may have been factually verydifferent from his...
...As Mr...
...He climbs up a tree and cries out that he wants a woman, and he refuses to come down until a midget nun from the insane asylum climbs up after him...
...McInnes' account of the varieties of bad theory stands as a reminder of the need for good theory...
...McInnes does not quite say that Marx was wrong...
...A ma reord A HEAVY SNOWFALL descends upon an Italian seacoast town...
...McInnes does not like such judgments...
...Fellini made another movie along a similar line—I Vitelloni ("The Calves")—about the life of a group of aimless young men in a small town in postwar Italy...
...There they generate enough excitement that a feeling of undefined admiration and awe emerges through the conscious part of the mind...
...Later they take a mentally ill uncle on a ride into the countryside...
...He condemns Marx and Hegel equally (and, by implication, most philosophers) because they try to distinguish the real from the illusory, the eternal from the ephemeral, the natural from the artificial...
...McInnes points out, the ideologists of communist countries have also had to undertake considerable remystification of Marx...
...It creates a magnificent image of color against a lushly white backdrop...
...It is not a mark of dogmatism but of sanity to attempt to distinguish reason from unreason, truth from error, sense from folly...
Vol. 8 • January 1975 • No. 4
