THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
LATINN ARE LOESY ! ~ 8 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 SCREEN Consider how unlike Bergman and FeHini are--so much so that one is almost tempted to think of them as types of the Northern and...
...I t would enter them the way the camera always did in those Hollywood spectaculars, as if participating in a triumphal march...
...Their emotions are either transparent or non-existent...
...The only caveat we might keep in mind while listening to Fellini denounce Casanova is that this is a little like hearing Dr...
...Where Bergman's is austere, Fellini's is extravagant...
...The first two parts) AN APPEAL --Efforts to escape from Vietnam are continuing, reports the current issue of Worldview...
...Headquarters for this international mercy program is in Singapore but cheeks should be sent to its American office: Boat People's Project, World Conference on Religion and Peace, 777 UN Plaza, New York, N.Y...
...Overcrowded Vietnamese escape boats drift about without any sure haven of refuge, and they are said to be ignored by passing merchant ships...
...and in one scene he brings in that bawd as a visual aid to help him perform with an aging Marquise...
...He is a stereotype--'the I t a l i a n ' . . . . It is understandable that he became a myth, because he is a meaningless universality...
...The United Nations High Commission on Refugees estimates that more than 8,000 of these fleeing refugees, "many of them children, have already perished in the stormy seas...
...On the set Fellini's best takes are generally the ones preceded by a tirade against the cast and crew, and it isn't out of character to talk himself into an idea in the same disparaging, despairing tones...
...Before the scene is out, the mistress has given Casanova a meaningful wink as a high sign indicating her lover's presence at the peephole, and has gone cross-eyed when she reaches an orgasm...
...For the effect of both fish eyes and cross eyes is to eliminate the center of the field of vision...
...Women and Seton Hall Portrait of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton by artist Joseph Dawlej: of Cranlord...
...The point is that Fellini works best when he works by a kind of aversion, and this is very much the way he has worked with Casanova...
...There is never any wasted motion in a Bergman film, whereas Fellini's seem to be all wasted motion...
...In that first love scene there is a painting of two fish swimming in opposite directions, and it is through the eye of one of them that the man watches his mistress with Casanova...
...I read Casanova's Memoirs afterwards and was smitten by a feeling of OizTiness and the mortifying impression that I had made the wrong move...
...Elizabeth Ann Seton, whose name we bear and whose spirit we have followed since 1856...
...It takes an evasive action like a plane trying to avoid a heatseeking missile...
...If he were the weaker director he is sometimes ac15 April 1977:240 cused of being, Fellini's camera would hover over those sets in long establishing shots, unable to bring itself to let them go...
...9 The W. Paul Stillman School of Business Administration _9 The College of Arts and Sciences _9 The School of Education _9 The College of Nursing _9 School of l.aw Co-educational and PROUD of it...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...9 There is nothing in the Memoirs . . . . He roamed the world, and it .is as if he never moved from his bed...
...shows her as a young mother...
...THE OTHERS are the many thousands who have brought intellect and verve to our campus...
...Indeed, Fellini has admitted as much: "I made the film because I signed the contract...
...Then the mismatch that this produces between the two eyes in the painting becomes a common occurrence in the rest of the film...
...WOMEN have done much for Seton Hall University...
...He won't let himself be taken in by himself, which is most certainly an act of _9 self-criticism, not self-indulgence...
...His consciousness refuses to be impressed with his fantasies the way his camera refuses to be impressed with his sets...
...A man with no inner being at all, Casanova would then seem a natural hero for Fellini...
...He has, for that matter, .created the room itself...
...and then to move in close on the figures in that scene, lingering over them and probing their expressions with his camera until he has exhausted all emotion...
...lini's point of view, however, more important than the comment the fish eyes and cross eyes make on Casanova's way of looking at the world is the guidance they give to our way of looking at Casanova...
...The complaint most often heard leaving the theater after a Fellini movie is that he is self-indulgent and ill-disciplined as a director...
...Since Fellini loves grotesques anyway, he seems to have chosen about half his cast because their eyes were in some way misaligned...
...Certainly the comparison I posed above with Bergman, whatever light it might throw on Fellini's work, would seem to go against him in this regard...
...Awake, he reacts against his dreams, against himself...
...Their lives are too fleeting for that...
...But in truth, the wasted motion in Fellini's films /s his discipline...
...In several scenes, having spent his seductions on an aristocrat, he then switches to some common wench for the love-making itself...
...Because of that austerity I was speaking of, Bergman always strikes us as the very soul of discipline and tight control...
...The first was St...
...What are those sets, after all, but Fellini's dreams, his fantasies7 Were he really the egomaniac he has been reputed to be since 8ý89 he would revel in them...
...In every possible respect, in fact, Fellini's Casanova tries to make us sense this emptiness...
...All of Bergman's etiorts, in other words, are bent on getting at some hidden psychological truth, some ugly feeling concealed behind a neat and severely beautiful facade...
...Where Bergman's filmmaking is claustrophobic, Fellini's is openair...
...But it is from this very antagonism that the real spirit of Fellini's Casanova comes...
...The most characteristic Fellini shot is one in which a subjective camera enters a room and is approached by assorted freaks and sycophants...
...His art is that he does not do this...
...To construct fabulous sets complete in every detail, light them with such care, people them with such an eye for composition, and then snake the camera through them or fan it past so casually, almost indifferently--this seems to me to he perfect self-restraint...
...Such warped perception is appropriately emblematic of the way Casanova himself sees women, often having his own wandering eye on more than one at a time...
...But raised as an issue from the first love scene, in which a man peeps at his mistress in bed with Casanova, voyeurism itself ultimately comes to imply the void, the hole at the center of our pereeptions, where Casanova ought to stand...
...After all, Fellini has always created the room full of people he is trying to avoid...
...The fish eye recurs when Casanova later stands beside a leering papier-mach6 whale at a carnival, the wink when he picks up a bawd with one eye blackened from a fight, and the crossed eyes as a joke between two sisters tending Casanova in an illness...
...Funds are needed to charter the rescue ships that have begun to ply the refugees' escape routes from Vietnam...
...It may sound as if Fellini loathes Casanova, but that is just Fellini's way too...
...WE'VE NOTICED...
...In FeUiui's world, on the other hand, the characters have no psychology, no hidden feeling...
...FeUim's way is to set a scene that is all props, costumes, staging, effects--an intricate and voluptuous tableaunand then to whisk the camera by it so quickly we scarcely get a glimpse...
...F'ounOeO 1856 = SETON qtALL UNIVERSITY South Orange, New Jersey 07079 Commonweal: 241...
...Bergman's way is to set his scene with no props, no posing, no symbols, a scene whose naturalism is absolute...
...The emptiness of Casanova which Fellini here denounces is the very thing that makes Casanova inspiring to him...
...Frankenstein complain because he is forever being pestered and buttonholed by some monster...
...Because Casanova's life is, as Fellini's description of the Memoirs suggests, an endless round of copulation, the movie is inevitably voyeuristic...
...Crossed eyes move the center out to the edges, like the fish swimming in opposite directions in that painting, and leave the center of the field vacant and indistinct_9 And the fish themselves, having their eyes on the sides of their heads, also have the greatest trouble seeing what is right in front of them...
...From Fel...
...It's no wonder that, looked at in these ways, Casanova appears such a blank to us...
...The way Fellini talks, one would conclude that Casanova approached him in the same, obsequious waymindeed, Casanova approaches many of the men in Fellini's film this waymand Fellini has reacted just as his camera reacts under such circumstances, with aversion...
...LATINN ARE LOESY ! ~ 8 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 SCREEN Consider how unlike Bergman and FeHini are--so much so that one is almost tempted to think of them as types of the Northern and Southern regions, the Scandinavian and Mediterranean temperaments...
...10017...
...some 1,600 people are believed to 'be "currently in peril...
...Really Fellini loves him...
...They are inside exactly what they appear to be outside: grotesques...
...As soon as these figures loom into sight, the camera always veers off in some new direction...
Vol. 104 • April 1977 • No. 8
