The Screen

...In the last 18 months I have seen his name two or three times, buried deep in news stories--once after he'd been wounded in fighting with Syrian soldiers during the Lebanese civil war, later when he replaced Ahmed Jibreel as leader of the PFLP General Command, most recently after he escaped to Baghdad...

...Like the protagonists in every Fellini film, they find themselves surrounded by grotesques...

...and our interest in Fellini comes from the wonderment we feel at a man who would go to such trouble to construct a world he hates...

...In Cairo shortly before the meeting of the Palestinian National Council in March, George Habash, leader of the Popular Front of the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), said he would never accept a West Bank state as final, or give up the struggle against Israel...

...I want to bring myself into focus, to stop this smooth dissolving into the rest of the world...

...There a great carved head was supposed to be pulled up by ropes from the Grand Canal in Venice as part of a pageant Casanova attends...

...This is an aspect of the Middle East conflict which has not achieved the attention it deserves, although there is plenty of evidence of it on Pages 2 through 90...

...He is only pathetic...

...In between, this sunken sculpture goes through a variety of metamorphoses...

...The chaos is all moving in a concerted direction, downward, like a whirlpool...

...They are, in order of appearance: the nun who offers herself to Casanova in the opening love scene, a woman named Henriette who is the only one he ever truly loves, a giantess from a circus, his mother, and a mechanical woman with a clockworks he finds in a German castle...

...he said...

...If such a West Bank Palestinian state were to be somehow tinkered or hammered into existence, for how long could it keep the peace with Israel...

...But I watched the sweat from his body in the hot theater slowly soak the armpits of his light blue shirt, turning it dark...

...Here as elsewhere symbolism circulates through Fellini's film the way Casanova's hat floats down the Thames, on a series of swirls and eddies...

...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 PHILIP K. JASON DEFINITION As the thumbed mint leaf snaps back its fresh tang, I want to snap back, carom, recoil harder than the felt pressures...

...For the moment the rejection front is largely confined to Iraq, but it represents a powerful undercurrent of feeling in the Palestinian community, it is singleminded and well-organized, and it has proved its ability to carry out highly visible acts of terror of a sort which can poison relations between states...

...He is as transparent as the ice on which he stands, as frozen in time as the giant head in the canal beneath him...

...From his manner on the set, which is bluff and exasperated, to his movement of the camera, which is scurrying and evasive, he always gives the impression that he wishes he were somewhere else--that he finds wherever he is aggravating and distasteful...

...Sandwiched between a promiscuous nun, a giantess and a mechanical woman, the only two women who ever mattered to Casanova, Henriette and his mother, are cut off from the rest of his life...

...At the end, then, Casanova remains completely unredeemed...

...He has only one note: passionate harangue...

...He was in favor of surrendering the West Bank, with suitable safeguards...

...It requires death...

...Images bump into us like flotsam carded along on the force, and then sooner or later they all bump into us again as we and they are swept around endlessly together...

...But there's also another strain of lovers in the film, lone women who are more important to him...

...She is the ideal woman to whom Casanova's whole life has brought him and whose emptiness of all thought or feeling matches his own...

...Ask yourself: what would be the prospects for peace then...

...The likely result, after a few years of bitter conflict, would be a new war ending in a new occupation of the West Bank b y Israel...

...Thus, where he whips the derriere of one mistress and makes love to another who has fainting spells in an early scene, later he himself falls into a faint and is revived by a woman who uses a similar little whip on him to do so...

...We should give them one more chance," he said...

...It's a dizzying experience, yet at times we realize dimly that there is also a progression of some sort to it...

...These women are the stations of Casanova's cross...

...His failings, his pretenses and his limitations are now s o obvious that he isn't even repulsive anymore...

...Where the pair of women are the high notes and flourishes, these women singly met are the low, sustaining notes in the organ fugue...

...His .own creations are what the grotesque characters and fabulous sets in his films are, after all...

...The last of these grotesques, the mechanical woman, is also Casanova's last love affair...

...He is, we must always remember, a great admirer of downs...

...As I mentioned in my last column, many of the women Casanova makes love to come in pairs of highand low-born...

...29 April 1977:278...

...Another example this film provides of Fellini's ability to be inspired by his own displeasure is found right in the opening scene...

...It's a glimpse of his mother's head encased in the windows of her carriage in winter just as the sculpture will be encased in ice a few scenes later on...

...But if they cause trouble again we should chase every last one of them across the Jordan River and right out into the desert...

...In that concluding fantasy scene where Casanova is on the ice of the Grand Canal in winter, all the other women from his own past approach him...

...The truth is that Fellini is drawn to these empty heroes precisely because the pathos in them is so much more accessible...

...They readily illustrate the foolishness of the whole human race, and thus they renew once again FeUini's ability to feel compassion for his fellow man...

...We learn about freedom through a long history of blood and sacrifice...

...But on the day the scene was shot, the head had only emerged by half when the actuating mechanism failed and it settled back into the water again...

...but they all fade from view before they have even come near...

...The only one who remains, the one he dances with on the ice as the film closes, is the mechanical woman...

...I could not understand more than a few words...

...I think of an Israeli military strategist who worked for a think tank in Jerusalem, a hard, intelligent man...

...The fact that he works this way suggests he always counts on making new material out of unforeseeable and untoward Commonweal: 277 accidents he expects to befall him as he goes along...

...What Fellini originally planned to do with this scene is impossible to say since he works with no shooting script...

...But the interesting thing about the movie he ended up with is how integral---indeed, one might even say seminal-- that sunken head in the opening scene is...

...A West Bank Palestinian state would not find it easy to control the irredentists within its overcrowded population, no matter how efficient and ruthless its political police, and the Israelis for obvious domestic reasons would find it equally difficult to tolerate bloody border incidents...

...A West Bank state would be an Israeli puppet, the "rejection front" of which the PFLP is a leading member would never surrender its right to all of Palestine, and the war would continue...

...His new film, Fellini's Casanova, is a case in point, for Fellini claims he made the film only because he had signed the contract and in spite of finding Casanova himself "a stereotype . . . a meaningless universality...

...Habash talked for two hours without interruption, at the sustained pitch of a man under a spell...

...That is what Fellini always sees in such inane characters...

...THOMAS POWERS 'CASANOVA' CONCLUDED 0000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN In the last issue I was explaining why I feel Fellini works best when he works by a kind of aversion...

...And we are not death amateurs...

...Why not go on fighting Israel from the new boundaries...

...When I think of the Palestinians confined in such a state, curled into the body of Israel, I think of three things: I think of George Habash giving a speech in Beirut, surrounded by teenagers with machine guns, on the anniversary of Ma'alot, where Palestinian terrorists killed 20 Israeli school children...

...Freedom is not poetry," he said when I met him...

...The stain spread to the center of his shirt, then to the sleeves and down the sleeves to the rolled-up cuffs...

...Habash was asked how this would be possible...

...I think of Abu A1 Abbas, then a young officer of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, General Command, and now its leader...

...But as the film goes on, Casanova himself begins moving in and out of equally severe shadows foreshadows, in effect--which life is casting on him...

...Having closed the scene with an underwater shot of the head resting on the bottom of the canal, Fellini returns to this image at the film's end when Casanova looks through ice that covers the canal in winter and sees the head frozen in the water below him...

...In Casanova's case this is a progression from screwing to getting screwed...

...The statesmen might get their settlement, and the PLO might get its West Bank state, but I'm not sure how long it would last...

...And yet in this final scene, with all Casanova's illusions gone and all his defenses down, Fellini grants him perhaps a certain surprising dignity, a certain nobility even...

...They mark the episodes along the route he takes to damnation...

...I do not know Arabic...

...It's Casanova himself nearly drowning in a suicide attempt in the Thames River...

...He ceases to be the subject of the sentences with which his life is written and begins being the object of them instead...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...Like his vision of the Thames, Fellini's movies are in effect giant whirlpools in which his heroes and his audience are trapped...

...I want to be like new-cut wood turned sleek under the oiled rag...

...It's a masthead raised from a wreck which Casanova finds in a lover's garden...

...In fact, he is a more vacuous figure than ever...

...This is the charm of his movies, in fact, this revulsion he has for his own creations...

...In the early scenes, for instance, when Casanova mounts a woman, she is alternately eclipsed and revealed by an incredibly dark shadow Fellini has contrived to have him cast...

...The sweat soaked his waist, and his leather belt, turning it dark too, and then the sweat stain traveled down his trousers to his knees...

...I want to throw a sharp shadow back against its blankness, step out of the frame of the liquid mirrors and dry myself quickly...