A very drunk peasant was walking along Leninskaya Street of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky and clearly cursing: "Fellini, b *** b ... Antonioni, b *** b ... How much we can on our heads!"
The city premiered "Orchestra Rehearsals".
The penetration of the work of Fellini and other Italian directors into the life of an ordinary Soviet citizen was incredibly deep.
Starting with the fact that the so-called sixties - they drew all their ideas about European civilization from the films of the Italian neorealists, because they were rather gray people.
All "thaw" cinematography - literally all - has been crushed by the Italian neorealists.
Among Soviet critics is the Fellini cult.
At the 1963 Moscow Film Festival, 8½ won the Grand Prize.
The early Nino Rota stuck in the ears of both writing and listening.
The director's scream performed by Mastroianni ("Now let's join hands!") From "8½" was reflected in the unbearable bardic whining "... so as not to disappear one by one."
To me, a young employee of the Dom Kino newspaper, status Soviet film critics shouted in my face: “There is no such director Lynch!
And Carpenter too!
The director is Fellini! "
It was 1990.
That's how powerful the director Fellini is.
It is surprising, of course, that just 18 years after the war, the Italians found themselves with the Soviets in acceptable Western cultural landmarks and friends, and the Americans in the enemy.
As if there was no Stalingrad and the Corpo di Spedizione Italiano in Russia.
As if the meeting on the Elbe did not take place.
Of course, there is one clue - right after the war, the left and the Reds, socially close to the Soviet, broke out to power in Italy.
And the simultaneous breakthrough in the cinema of Italian neorealism was considered a breakthrough of socially close art.
In fact, Fellini is not the author of neorealism, and with the "socially close" it did not work out well either.
All this time - right up to the 80s - we simply marveled at the intellectual, creative and staging power of Italian cinema, which calmly carried Hollywood-shmollywood into one gate on the world market.
And only then the Americans didn’t wash, so they destroyed Italian cinema by rolling.
But it’s not that simple.
When we look at the scenery incredible in scale (say, Fellini's Satyricon, a film that could not be shown in the USSR, since Fellini here reveals his bisexual essence, they will not show him on TV even now), we must understand where they grow from feet of all this luxury.
The studio "Cinecitta" ("Cinema City"), which occupied wild hectares of squares and was equipped according to the latest technical fashion - the favorite creation of the fascist dictator Mussolini - was a powerful production (Hollywood Jews were just nervously smoking nearby with money from Las Vegas gangsters) ...
This power went entirely to new progressive authors, among whom was Fellini too.
And also - Antonioni, Visconti, de Sica, de Santis, Roberto Rossellini.
It was Rossellini (whose daughter would later become the common-law wife of Lynch) who is considered to be the first author of neorealism with the film Rome - Open City (1945).
And Fellini was noted only at the beginning of his career.
But if they are still trying to politely link Fellini's work with the post-war period, then the truth is that all the "socially close" neorealists not only began their careers with money and under the tutelage of the "bloody tyrant Duce", but also felt great with him ...
And his son Vittorio Mussolini was involved in all the cinema of the terrible fascist dictator Duce - from production to ideology.
And, in fact, Fellini and Vittorio, for example, wrote a general script, not to mention Rossellini, which blossomed under Mussolini and with his money.
Although, as it should be for every intellectual of the capital, he later said that on the sly, with the other hand, he also filmed anti-fascist videos.
(For buzzers, note: there was no internet and video back then.)
But the most beautiful thing is that neorealism itself, which, as we remember, served as the basis not only for the Soviet cinema "thaw", but also for the new wave of French cinema, is the fruit of the works of a circle of directors and theorists who rallied around the magazine Cinema, the editor-in-chief which was ... well, of course, Vittorio Mussolini.
Who, after the war, left for Argentina until the dust settled, and then again took up Italian cinema.
The novel of our hero - Federico Fellini - was short with neo-realism.
Let's start with the fact that he failed his first film "Variety Show Lights", but played back on "Mama's Sons" and "Love in the City" (both - 1953).
Sons is a really good movie.
And it also postulated a new state of Italian society: let's forget about the war, fascism - accursed Hitler beguiled, and we are good people, let's have fun!
Under the march of Lev Chernetsky's Sumy Hussar Regiment ("A big crocodile walked along the street ..."), which Nino Rota unpretentiously inserts into her score.
It is no coincidence that Alberto Sordi plays here.
That's when the comedy wave started and Sordi was their face: let's have fun!
And this wave swept away all neorealism.
It was just the right time for Fellini, who was a merry fellow only in public, and at work - a gloomy tyrant.
Moreover, he writes to himself that he has always been a liar and all his stories from his own life are invented.
Here we are faced with a paradox: if a liar says that he is a liar, then at least somewhere he is telling the truth.
So the entire subsequent career of Fellini is the paradox of a liar.
Which brings him to symbolism.
The seemingly banal life story of a pair of circus performers "The Road" (1954) suddenly takes on symbolic colors.
The luxurious brutal American Anthony Quinn is a really toxic macho (so that even young readers and readers could understand this text).
And Juliet Mazina, in which everything that Fellini could bear in a woman without disgust is embodied - the complete absence of female sexuality.
And even secondary sexual characteristics.
And the less space it takes, the better - along all three coordinate axes.
Actually, "The Road" opened the way for him to symbolism, and then it was just the trick for the director, who broke into telling a full-scale story.
Instead, there is an endless set of quasi-noovels of various qualities.
He knew everything about himself, so in “8½” he speaks through the lips of the character: “The absence of a problematic idea or philosophical premise turns the picture into a series of completely unfounded, albeit funny, episodes to the extent of their dubious realism.
Scarcity of Poetic Inspiration ”.
But Fellini can be considered the grandfather of the music video genre.
Because these pieces of symbolic reality that he offers in his films, you will somehow find in all rock authors.
From REM (Everybody Hurts - "cork" from "8½"), Marilyn Manson to My Chemical Romance, etc. (a lot of things, starting with circus musicians from the same "8½").
And you can't get away from Fellini.
And then there is the unbearable addiction of music editors to poke La passerella d'addio by Nino Rota into all the cracks - a clinical picture of vulgar thinking.
His creative method of flickering narration, of course, most of all coincided with the ancient literary basis of "Satyricon" - a document from which only horns and legs remain to our days.
These are pieces of an adventurous story, where the main intrigue is who will sleep with a handsome boy today.
This is, without any foolishness, a great film with an excellent artist, with an avant-garde design (well, who knew then that Fellini's Roman ships were cut like the yacht of a Russian oligarch).
And yes, buggers are the only people in Fellini's cinema whom he really loves and regrets.
And, most likely, he knows a lot about it.
Indeed - Fellini gathered in his paintings the leading group of world beauties-actresses - from Anita Ekberg to Anna Magnani with Claudia Cardinale and Anouk Eme.
And the viewer looked at them with his mouth open.
But it is in the "Satyricon" that all women have only one function - to silently lie on their backs and spread their legs in front of the first comer.
In other films, all these endless beauties are either greedy women, or victims of humiliation and violence.
Or just idiots.
To the gallery page
It is unlikely that anyone who admired Anita Ekberg in “La Dolce Vita” as “the embodiment of total female beauty and sexuality” remembers how the quasinovella ends - this beauty is publicly hit in the face by her American friend in front of journalists.
Everyone usually remembers only the Roman Trevi fountain and the wet dress.
In "8½" the main character's dream is a harem and so that these girls can be whipped with a whip.
Only in one film does Fellini's subconscious hatred of beautiful, sexy women have a deep constructiveness.
“City of Women” in 1980 - there is nothing more relevant to describe the current “Radfem”, which has actually been milking the same cow for 40 years: “The cabinets are stupid - they are masculine.
Listen to male sounds - harsh, aggressive, and expressing self-doubt.
For men, our vagina is a disgusting hole.
Let's come up with a beautiful name for it - "moon violet".
The civilization that gave birth to democracy also gave birth to phallocracy. "
And so on - ridiculous and homerically derogatory.
“Ladies, kill the wall,” the Oscar-winning author seems to be telling us.
If you ask me what my personal favorite Fellini film is (actually, you don’t need to ask anyone, I’ll tell you anyway), it’s "Orchestra Rehearsal".
Filmed in 16 days.
In one location.
Wildly funny.
Rather, even so: no joke funny.
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.