1st Jan 2010; The Song of Sparrows

KONANGAL OUTREACH SCREENING


The Song of Sparrows
A film by Majid Majidi
Year : 2008
Country : Iran
Runtime: 96 min
Persian with English subtitles
1st Jan 2010 6 pm
Aruna Thirumana Mandapam
(Next to P&T Quarters bus stop)
N S R Road, Saibaba Colony, Coimbatore.

This screening is supported by
Hollywood DVD Shoppee
N S R Road Saibaba Colony Coimbatore

"The Song of Sparrows" is a fitting name for the new film from Iranian writer-director Majid Majidi. Sparrows are, after all, the most ordinary of birds: small, brown, common. The overlooked and the ordinary is exactly the terrain Majidi loves to walk, and we see again in this film his deep affection for his country's common folk -- with their meager resources, menial jobs and yet surprisingly fulfilled lives.

That is not to say he is content to merely let the camera linger too long or too lovingly, though the cinematography by Tooraj Mansouri is beautiful, from sweeping rural vistas to the choking streets of Tehran and always the faces, etched with grime and life, eyes that pool with hurt, frustration, acceptance..

In "The Song of Sparrows," which he co-wrote with Mehran Kashani, Majidi goes down that road again. Here we have Karim (Reza Naji), who works long days on an ostrich farm, caring for the birds and collecting the huge, delicate eggs. But things, which are never easy for this impoverished family man, are about to get more difficult.

Karim’s leathery face makes it difficult to determine his exact age. He could be anywhere from 35 to 55. And it’s highly likely that he’s barely educated, since he’s not so good at making change. Majidi definitely hasn’t created a saint. With bloated pride, Karim doesn’t always do right by his family, violently lashing out when his children infringe on his role as bread winner.

Majidi also enjoys toying with his characters, forever putting them in situations that send their internal moral compasses spinning, letting good and bad choices alike play out long enough for us to see the consequences.
The film abounds in metaphors. Even the son dreams of striking it rich through selling gold—gold fish, that is, and not coincidentally a symbol for prosperity in Iran and elsewhere. But the story is so well told that the symbolism supports rather than sustains the plot. What better metaphor for tenacity than an ornery, ungainly but oddly beautiful ostrich.

Majid Majidi

Majid Majidi was born in Teheran in 1959 from an Iranian middle class family. He grew up in Teheran and at the age of 14 he started acting in amateur theater groups. He then studied at the Institute of Dramatic Art in Teheran.

After the Islamic revolution in 1978, his interest in cinema brought him to act in various films, notably "Boycott" (1985) from Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

His debut as a director and screenwriter is marked by "Baduk" (1992), his first feature film that was presented at the Quinzaine of Cannes and won several awards nationwide. Since then, he has written and directed several films that won worldwide recognitions, notably "Children of Heaven" (1997) that won the "Best Picture" at Montreal International Film Festival and nominated for best foreign film at the Oscar Academy Awards.

His film "The Color of Paradise" (1999) has also won the "Best Picture" award at Montreal International Film Festival. In the USA, it has been selected as one of the best 10 films of year 2000 by Time Magazine and selected by the Critics Picks of the New York Times among the 10 best films of 2000. This film has set a box office record for an Iranian film in the U.S.A. His last film "Baran" has won seven major awards at the Teheran International film Festival in February 2001 and the "Best Picture" award at the 25th Montreal International Film Festival in 2001. After "Baran" he has made five more films till date.
(Source: Internet)

திரைப்படத்தின் உன்னதக் கலைஞன்: மசாகி கோபயாஷி -2

எமது தமிழ் வலைப்பக்கத்தில்
திரை மேதைகள் அறிமுகம்

திரைப்படத்தின் உன்னதக் கலைஞன்
மசாகி கோபயாஷி – 2

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25th Oct 2009; Ramin Bahrani's CHOP SHOP

CHOP SHOP
A film by Ramin Bahrani
Year: 2007
Country: USA
English with English subtitles
Runtime: 84 min
25th Oct 2009 ; 5.45pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium
Call : 94430 39630
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com

If you own a car and you live in or around New York City, you've at least heard about the Iron Triangle of Willets Point. Not because it's a zone of spectacular urban blight right in the middle of the continent's richest and most expensive city -- although it certainly is -- but because it's where you can get your dents banged out, your windshield replaced and your muffler repaired at rock-bottom prices, at least if you're paying in cash and you're not too concerned about things like receipts and warranties.

This dilapidated and disreputable 20-block stretch of junkyards and body shops, some of it actually unpaved streets, sits in the shadow of Shea Stadium (home of the New York Mets) and the National Tennis Center (home of the U.S. Open); except for those points of reference, it's barely plausible as the United States.

It's oversimplifying Ramin Bahrani's extraordinary film "Chop Shop," which was showered with love at Cannes, Berlin and Toronto . Bahrani sees the Iron Triangle as the place where the American dream goes to die. He never judges the place or its people, who are neither heroes nor villains. You could just as easily say that "Chop Shop" is a classic American fable of immigrant pluck and zeal, of an innocent swept away in the undertow of capitalism, fighting like hell to keep his head above water.

Ale is enterprising and optimistic. In exchange for his work, he lives in a knocked-together plywood room under the roof of a shop owned by a man named Rob. He gets $5 for every passing car he flags onto the premises. This income he supplements by selling candy on the subway, peddling bootlegged DVDs, stealing hubcaps and snatching purses. He is not a criminal. He is a survivor. He goes at things as he has taught himself, and will make the record in his own way: first to knock, first admitted, sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes not so innocent.

But if the story of Ale's life in a plywood-paneled room atop a Queens body shop, a room he shares with his gorgeous 16-year-old sister (Isamar Gonzales), who makes her own way in the world just as gorgeous older sisters have been doing since forever, is an American parable, Bahrani's movie is something else again. It's a near-masterwork of low-budget precision and improvisation, constructed and rehearsed over many months in collaboration with the actors and the entire Willets Point community.

Bahrani never forces the "Chop Shop" metaphor. He doesn't have to. In places like the Iron Triangle, Alejandro is just another of society's interchangeable spare parts.

Click here for Bahrani’s Top 10 movies

Ramin Bahrani

Ramin Bahrani (born March 20, 1975 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, U.S.) is an American director and screenwriter. Film critic Roger Ebert called Bahrani "the new great American director" in his review of Goodbye Solo.

Bahrani received his BA from Columbia University in New York City. His first feature film, Man Push Cart (2005), premiered at the Venice Film Festival (2005) and screened at the Sundance Film Festival (2006). The film won over 10 international prizes, was released theatrically around the world, and was nominated for three Independent Spirit Awards.

Bahrani's second film Chop Shop (2007) premiered at the 2007 Director's Fortnight of the Cannes International Film Festival, and then screened at the Toronto International Film Festival (2007) and the Berlin International Film Festival (2008) before being released theatrically to wide and universal critical acclaim. Bahrani was awarded the prestigious 2007 Someone to Watch Independent Spirit Award. In 2008, he was nominated for Best Director Independent Spirit Award.

With Bahrani’s third release, “Goodbye Solo” (2008), the filmmaker earned the prestigious critic’s prize at the Venice Film Festival and was now widely regarded as a key figure in a new wave of international filmmaking. Again he offered a story where class, nationality and worldview try to coexist with the tale of a Senegalese taxi driver in North Carolina hired to ferry an old white Southerner to the site of his promised suicide. Bahrani earned an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Director for his third success, prompting film critic Roger Ebert to comment “After only three films, Bahrani has established himself as a major director."

11th Oct 2009; Ermanno Olmi's Il Posto

Il Posto
A film by Ermanno Olmi
Country :Italy
Year: 1961
Italian with English subtitles
Runtime:93 min
11th Oct 2009
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium
Call : 94430 39630
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com

Olmi’s Il Posto is much more than just a Neorealist film. Like de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), Olmi’s Il Posto transcends the dimensions of Neorealism and stands as one of the great and universal films of any era.. There are several factors that contribute to the virtues of Il Posto – the cinematic craftsmanship, the affecting and natural acting, and the compelling narrative, itself, which is not just about a particular people at a particular time, but about the very nature of modern life.

Il Posto depicts the hopes and uncertainties of Domenico, a 19-year-old boy from a working-class family who has left “middle school” and is looking for his first job. He takes the train to the big city, Milan, hoping to get an office job at a large company.

The character of Domenico is of course the central force in the film, and it is partly his own diffident nature that defines the questionable value of the job-for-life goal. His slowness to react, whether it's to answer questions or to take action, make us wonder if he is capable of ever moving beyond a job with the company once he has it. His actions in respect to the young woman Antonietta, in whom he becomes interested, lack the resolve and fervour needed to get what he really wants. Something will have to change in him to make him ever move beyond the job-for-life once he has it. The role is nicely played by a somewhat sad-faced Sandro Panseri.

Plot is deceptively simple, but every frame of pic is rich with shadings and nuances. Olmi's keenly observant camera is of major assistance, as are his actors. Olmi's genius in Il Posto is in his beautifully composed, lingering shots. Whether in a medium, hand-held, or close-up, Olmi studies a face or a scene long enough for us to see its platitudes with subtle power. Domenico's face is a landscape of emotion, though heavily suppressed — in small smiles, dejected eyes, and embarrassed blushes, we virtually watch him grow before our eyes. Some critics couldn't stomach Olmi's passive Domenico, but there's nothing pathetic about him, he's just a shy, confused person right at the start of life.

Martin Scorsese borrowed shots from Il Posto for Raging Bull, and there are similar echoes in Clockwatchers (director Jill Sprecher credits Olmi as an influence on that film), Office Space, and Time Out. It's startling to notice that, before computer cubicles, desk jobs were just as dismal 40 years ago as they are today

(Source:Internet)

Ermanno Olmi

“...our wars of machines and technology make 'progress' ever more impersonal and deadly - a 'progress' that has not guaranteed man's human, moral, and civil growth.”


Ermanno Olmi ranks as one Italy’s finest film makers. He is known for making realistic films about the lives of average people that are infused with an almost austere subtlety and rare ambiguity that is sympathetic yet not overly sentimental. A native of Bergamo, Italy, he was the son of peasant factory workers.

Following his father’s death during WWII, Olmi and his mother supported the family working in the Edison-Volta electric plant where Olmi worked as a clerk. While there, he became involved in company-sponsored filmmaking and theatrical projects. Most of the films he made for the company had industrial themes. Eventually, he came to head the company film department and over the next seven years made many documentaries, notably his last Edison-Volta film, Il Tempo Si E Fermato (Time Stood Still), in 1959. It was with this film, a chronicle of the relationship that gradually developed between an elderly nightwatchman and his assistant while stationed at the construction site of an Alpine dam, that evidenced the sensitivity that would characterize Olmi’s later works.

The success of the film led Olmi to become a feature filmmaker. To that end, he traveled to Milan and co-founded the Twenty-Four Horses, an independent film co-op where he made his semi-autobiographical feature-film debut with Il Posto in 1961. Both this and his subsequent effort, I Fidanzati (The Fiancés) (1963), quickly earned him a good reputation and led him to make his one mainstream film, And There Came a Man (1965), an epic biography of Pope John XXIII. Unfortunately, this film, the only one in which he did not use nonprofessional actors, was a box-office flop and after making one more feature, Olmi became a television director. He did not make another feature until 1978. The film was The Tree of Wooden Clogs, a complex interweaving of the lives of five peasant families struggling to survive, and is considered Olmi’s finest work.

4th Oct 2009; Shyam Benegal's ANKUR

ANKUR
A film by Shyam Benegal
Country:India
Year:1974
Hindi with English subtitles
Runtime: 131 min
4th Oct 2009; 5.45 pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium
Call : 94430 39630
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com

Ankur opens to a surreal shot of a modern day feudal village in rural India, as an attractive young peasant woman named Lakshmi (Shabana Azmi) participates in a ritual pilgrimage to the shrine of the mother goddess bearing offerings for the tribal ceremony in the hopes that the goddess will answer her prayers to have a child. The scene then cuts to a group of university students comparing the results of their final exams - among them, a zamindari (feudal landowner) heir named Surya (Anant Nag) who barely makes the grade with a "pass class".

Returning home to announce his successful completion, he is angered by the brazen appearance of his father's longtime mistress Kaushalya, and their grown son Pratap in the house, and retreats to the kitchen in order to enlist his mother into cajoling his father to allow him to continue with his studies despite his mediocre grades. His father remains unmoved by his selfish request, and compels him to go through with a pre-arranged marriage to an underaged young woman from a privileged family named Saroj (Priya Tendulkar) and assume responsibility for managing the family's neglected feudal estate. Unable to bring his new wife to the zamindari until she comes of age, the lone Surya arrives unexpectedly at the gates of the farmhouse and is greeted by the housekeeper Lakshmi, and her unemployed, deaf-mute husband Kishtaya (Sadhu Meher) who live in a nearby hut.

Surya soon disrupts the dynamics of everyday life in the village by flouting tradition and local custom: asking the lower caste Lakshmi to brew his tea and cook his meals (a task customarily reserved for a Brahmin priest); denying access to the reservoir used by villagers to fill their water vessels; redirecting the water supply to Pratap's adjacent farm; ordering the overseer to actively pursue thieves and exact severe punishment in order to dissuade others from a similar act. However, despite Surya's seemingly progressive ideas on the irrelevance of the caste system, his moral integrity proves suspect when he develops an irrepressible attraction towards his enigmatic and beautiful servant.

Shyam Benegal creates a sublime and provocative examination of hypocrisy, economic disparity, and the social status of women in Ankur. Capturing narrative realism and understated, naturalistic imagery and sounds, Benegal underscores the dichotomy of rural life in contemporary India, as the inequitable and exploitative legacy of outmoded, but deeply ingrained repressive traditions continue to pervade daily life, despite encroaching urbanization, enactment of laws, and assimilation of Western education: the father's socially tolerated mistress that is contrasted against the public spectacle of a tribal court judgment against a woman who deserted her husband; the inconstancy of punishment for pilfering by the overseer, Lakshmi, and Kishtaya; the class stratification that bounds Lakshmi and Kishtaya to a life of poverty and subservience under an omnipotent zamindar.

Through compassionate, yet objective observations of the country's inertial progress towards modernization, Benegal chronicles the subtle, ideological shift of the villagers under an unfair and opportunistic hierarchical society. Inevitably, it is through Lakshmi's exposure and condemnation of the culturally tolerated hypocrisy that the proverbial catalytic seedling of social revolution is germinated.
(Source: http://www.filmref.com)

Shyam Benegal

Contemporary Indian filmmaker Shyam Benegal has been an important figure in the new wave of Indian directors. Benegal originated what has come to be called "middle cinema". He was initially involved in the advertising industry and produced over 900 advertisements before his interest turned to films.

Shyam Benegal was born on 14 December 1934 at Aliwal, Hyderabad, British India (now Andhra Pradesh, India). The son of a still photographer and one of 10 children, Benegal's love affair with motion pictures began when he made his first home-movie using a hand-cranked camera at age 12. He is nephew of the famous Indian Actor Director Guru Dutt.

As a young man, he went on to found a film society and get involved in acting while studying at Osmania University where he earned an MA in economics. After graduating, Benegal found a job as a copywriter at a large ad agency in Bombay. Soon he was promoted to writing scripts and directing advertising shorts and commercials. He remained there for over a decade.

His film directorial debut was Gher Betha Ganga in 1962. Benegal shot to fame with Ankur 1973, which introduced Shabana Azmi, who also starred in Nishant 1975. The success that New India Cinema enjoyed in the 1970s and early 1980s could largely be attributed to Shyam Benegal's quartet Ankur (1973), Nishant (1975), Manthan (1976) and Bhumika (1977), which were artistically superior yet commercially viable films. Tapping fresh talent mainly from the FTII and NSD, Benegal has made several sensitive and stimulating films.

He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1976 and the Padma Bhushan in 1991. On 8th August 2007, he was awarded the highest award in Indian cinema for lifetime achievement, the Dadasaheb Phalke Award for the year 2005. He is only director to have won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Hindi five times.

27th Sept 2009; Documentaries on Art - 8

Documentaries on Art - 8
27th Sept 2009; 5.45 pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium
Call : 97904 57568
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com

IMPRESSIONISM

The impressionist style of painting is characterized chiefly by concentration on the general impression produced by a scene or object and the use of unmixed primary colors and small strokes to simulate actual reflected light.

Impressionism, French Impressionnisme, a major movement, first in painting and later in music, that developed chiefly in France during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Impressionist painting comprises the work produced between about 1867 and 1886 by a group of artists who shared a set of related approaches and techniques. The most conspicuous characteristic of Impressionism was an attempt to accurately and objectively record visual reality in terms of transient effects of light and colour. The principal Impressionist painters were Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Armand Guillaumin, and Frédéric Bazille, who worked together, influenced each other, and exhibited together independently. Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne also painted in an Impressionist style for a time in the early 1870s. The established painter Édouard Manet, whose work in the 1860s greatly influenced Monet and others of the group, himself adopted the Impressionist approach about 1873.

Edouard Manet
(1832 - 1883)

French painter who broke new ground by defying traditional techniques of representation and by choosing subjects from the events and circumstances of his own time. His Déjeuner sur l'herbe (“Luncheon on the Grass”), exhibited in 1863 at the Salon des Refusés, aroused the hostility of critics and the enthusiasm of the young painters who later formed the nucleus of the Impressionist group. His other notable works include Olympia (1863) and A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882).

In 1850 Manet entered the studio of the classical painter Thomas Couture. Despite fundamental differences between teacher and student, Manet was to owe to Couture a good grasp of drawing and pictorial technique. In 1856, after six years with Couture, Manet set up a studio that he shared with Albert de Balleroy, a painter of military subjects. There he painted The Boy with Cherries (c. 1858) before moving to another studio, where he painted The Absinthe Drinker (1859). In 1856 he made short trips to The Netherlands, Germany, and Italy. Meanwhile, at the Louvre he copied paintings by Titian and Diego Velázquez .

In 1863 Manet participated in the famous Salon des Refuses, an exhibition consisting of works rejected by the official Salon, and he came to be viewed as the hero of the nonconformists. Though Manet regarded himself as working in the tradition of the great masters, his approach was to rethink established themes in modern terms. His early notoriety was based on the subject matter of paintings such as Dejeuner sur l'herb, and Olympia rather than their style.

Manet was highly independent, and extraordinarily original. Throughout his oeuvre Manet painted modern day life, yet many of his paintings are so much more than simple mimetic depictions. If Manet's work seems to be full of contradictions, or to employ a lack of perspective from time to time, then perhaps that was the true reality of Paris in Manet's time. Always controversial, Manet sought to record the days of his life using his own unique vision. From beggars, to prostitutes, to the bourgeoisie he sought to be true to himself and to reproduce "not great art, but sincere art." He died, in Paris, on April 30, 1883.

Claude Monet
(1840 - 1926 )

French painter, initiator, leader, and unswerving advocate of the Impressionist style. He is regarded as the archetypal Impressionist in that his devotion to the ideals of the movement was unwavering throughout his long career, and it is fitting that one of his pictures--Impression: Sunrise (Musée Marmottan, Paris; 1872)--gave the group his name.

His youth was spent in Le Havre, where he first excelled as a caricaturist but was then converted to landscape painting by his early mentor Boudin, from whom he derived his firm predilection for painting out of doors. In 1859 he studied in Paris at the Atelier Suisse and formed a friendship with Pissarro. After two years' military service in Algiers, he returned to Le Havre and met Jongkind, to whom he said he owed `the definitive education of my eye'.

He then, in 1862, entered the studio of Gleyre in Paris and there met Renoir, Sisley, and Bazille, with whom he was to form the nucleus of the Impressionist group. Monet's devotion to painting out of doors is illustrated by the famous story concerning one of his most ambitious early works, Women in the Garden (Musée d'Orsay, Paris; 1866-67). The picture is about 2.5 meters high and to enable him to paint all of it outside he had a trench dug in the garden so that the canvas could be raised or lowered by pulleys to the height he required. Courbet visited him when he was working on it and said Monet would not paint even the leaves in the background unless the lighting conditions were exactly right.

During the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) he took refuge in England with Pissarro: he studied the work of Constable and Turner, painted the Thames and London parks, and met the dealer Durand-Ruel, who was to become one of the great champions of the Impressionists. From 1871 to 1878 Monet lived at Argenteuil, a village on the Seine near Paris, and here were painted some of the most joyous and famous works of the Impressionist movement, not only by Monet, but by his visitors Manet, Renoir and Sisley. In 1878 he moved to Vétheuil and in 1883 he settled at Giverny, also on the Seine, but about 40 miles from Paris.

From 1890 he concentrated on series of pictures in which he painted the same subject at different times of the day in different lights---Haystacks or Grainstacks (1890-91) and Rouen Cathedral (1891-95) are the best known. He continued to travel widely, visiting London and Venice several times (and also Norway as a guest of Queen Christiana), but increasingly his attention was focused on the celebrated water-garden he created at Giverny, which served as the theme for the series of paintings on Water-lilies that began in 1899 and grew to dominate his work completely (in 1914 he had a special studio built in the grounds of his house so he could work on the huge canvases).
In his final years he was troubled by failing eyesight, but he painted until the end. He was enormously prolific and many major galleries have examples of his work.

20th Sept2009; Fellini's 81/2

8 ½

A film by Fderico Fellini
Country : Italy
Year : 1963
Italian with English subtitles
Run time : 138 min
20th Sept 2009; 5.45 pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium
Call:94430 39630
http://konangalfilmsociety.blogspot.com/

Followed by video commentaries on 8 ½
1. Terry Gilliam’s (Brazil) introduction
2. Comments on cinematography of 8 ½
by legendary Vittorio Storaro

Federico Fellini's manic, larger-than-life 8 1/2 rules as the king of all Italian movies. 8 1/2 weaves fluidly through the visually intoxicating landscape of Federico Fellini's subconscious, seemingly to seek inspiration and validation for his life and work. In an opening scene that symbolizes much of Fellini's films, a suffocating man, trapped inside his car, inexplicably begins to float into the skies, only to be abruptly tugged back to the ground. But it is also an indelible image that shatters any preconceived illusion of "typical" elements in a Fellini film.

Fellini made better films earlier in his career, but no other film so perfectly outlines his thought process, and captures his evolution from a realist to a spectacle-maker."8 1/2" is the best film ever made about filmmaking. It is told from the director's point of view, and its hero, Guido (Marcello Mastroianni), is clearly intended to represent Fellini.

It begins with a nightmare of asphyxiation, and a memorable image in which Guido floats off into the sky, only to be yanked back to earth by a rope pulled by his associates, who are hectoring him to organize his plans for his next movie. Much of the film takes place at a spa near Rome, and at the enormous set Guido has constructed nearby for his next film, a science fiction epic he has lost all interest in.

The film weaves in and out of reality and fantasy. Sometimes the alternate worlds are pure invention, as in the famous harem scene where Guido rules a house occupied by all of the women in his life--his wife, his mistresses, and even those he has only wanted to sleep with. In other cases, we see real memories that are skewed by imagination. When little Guido joins his schoolmates at the beach to ogle the prostitute Saraghina, she is seen as the towering, overpowering, carnal figure a young adolescent would remember. When he is punished by his priests of his Catholic school, one entire wall is occupied by a giant portrait of Dominic Savio, a symbol of purity in that time and place; the portrait, too large to be real, reflects Guido's guilt that he lacks the young saint's resolve.

All of the images (real, remembered, invented) come together into one of the most tightly structured films Fellini made. The screenplay is meticulous in its construction--and yet, because the story is about a confused director who has no idea what he wants to do next, "8 1/2" itself is often described as the flailings of a filmmaker without a plan. Fellini's camera is endlessly delighting. His actors often seem to be dancing rather than simply walking. Fellini is a magician who discusses, reveals, explains and deconstructs his tricks, while still fooling us with them. He claims he doesn't know what he wants or how to achieve it, and the film proves he knows exactly, and rejoices in his knowledge.
(Source:Internet)

Federico Fellini

Federico Fellini, a canonical name of personal expression and artistic fantasy in the cinema, had no formal technical training in his profession. Born in the seaside town of Rimini in Italy in 1920, he quit the provinces for Rome at age 18. Enrolled in law school, he abandoned the degree. He never considered attending Rome's Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, whose graduates he would later collaborate with. And unlike his contemporaries, he never frequented the cinema clubs that screened the best Italian directors' films and international titles from France, Germany and Russia. When pressed for his influences, Fellini preferred Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx brothers, Pietro Germi, and Buñuel (with his black humor) to "cine-club" names such as Dreyer, Griffith and Eisenstein. Young Fellini supported himself as a wandering caricaturist until hired by Marc'Aurelio in 1939. The famed humor bi-weekly served as an unofficial training ground for scriptwriters and directors of the postwar period.

Fellini's formative influences can be traced back to the popular Italian culture of the period, and not primarily the cinema. The cartoons, caricature sketches, and radio comedy that were his popular art métier brought him to the cinema as a gagman and scriptwriter. Novelist Italo Calvino diagnosed the influence of mass culture on Fellini's later sophisticated cinematic language as a "forcing of the photographic image in a direction that carries it from an image of caricature toward that of the visionary." Fellini trained for a professional life as a visionary with over ten years of scriptwriting and on-the-set apprenticeship.

For the postwar Left, a film's critical value was based on whether it depicted Italy's social problems and offered a Marxist remedy. Directors who followed their own imperatives were labeled conservative or reactionary. As a veteran of the scripting team responsible for two exemplars of Italian neorealism, Roma città aperta and Paisà (both Roberto Rossellini, 1945 and '46), Fellini was interested in moving toward a "cinema of Reconstruction." After Paisà, he redefined his artistic credo to "looking at reality with an honest eye - but any kind of reality; not just social reality, but also spiritual reality, metaphysical reality, anything man has inside him."

His career compresses the comparable progress in literature from 19th century realism to the reflexive post-modernity of compatriots Italo Calvino and Luigi Pirandello. Exposing the means of fiction, playwrighting, or filmmaking in Fellini's case (in contrast to the neorealist posture of delivering an unmediated story with newsreel aesthetics), all these authors uncover the "ploy" of authorship. It's as if Fellini critiqued realism as an impossible notion by pointing up its fabrication and adding the suppressed element of the fantastic. In his own words, "I make a film in the same manner in which I live a dream..
(Thanks to Senses Of Cinema )