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Yet many of his films were neither critical nor financial successes. And the fact that you were watching a Fellini film was unmistakable. Nothing in a Fellini film was arbitrary every element was meant to dazzle the viewer.
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Such mastery was often discernible in his extensive use of the moving camera, music, color and the precision in his casting. Fellini, who usually collaborated on the writing of his screenplays, was one of the very first filmmakers to completely master his medium. and are still, considered masterpieces (e.g. But for most films the question is far more subtle yet in almost every instance we have to ask: “What exactly did the writer or filmmaker intend to do, and did he succeed in doing it”? In this regard the films of Federico Fellini are highly illustrative.įederico Fellini was one of the pre-eminent filmmakers of his day (mid-1950’s until his death in 1993). What then is the aesthetic question? Well, if a film has a Lajos Egri-stlye premise, we might ask if the filmmaker did indeed prove or demonstrate his proposition. Nor should they in any canon of great films. Would anyone include a novel with a trite story or developed from a faulty idea in any canon of great Literature, even though the author demonstrates superior writing skills? I think not. Why are these central tenets? For the same reason we would make them the central tenets in any discussion of great novels. von Sternberg and Hitchcock) who deliberately chose badly written scripts and transformed them into good films-if such a thing is actually possible. He even extols American“Auteur” directors (e.g. Van Wert, by the way), along with many of the critics of today, aesthetic questions should have little or no place in modern cinema. The reviewer, an ardent adherent of the so-called AuteurTheory, takes me to task for purportedly dismissing cinematic techniques for “ideas,” something that the above quotes from my book may suggest, but not entirely accurately. “it must always be borne in mind that a film can be no better than the idea from which it has sprung.” Very much related, this reviewer also quotes another central tenet of my book: Although the dictum “The variations of a theme are more important than the theme itself” may be acceptable for music, it could never be acceptable in film, which as we shall see, must deal with reality and not abstraction. Lastly, our study must be more aesthetic than technical: the quality and validity of a particular writer’s or filmmaker’s thoughts and ideas must take precedence over his particular mode of expression. This review, which appeared in The Journal of Modern Literature, begins by stating that “Indeed, the book would not even be worthy of reviewing were it not so symptomatic of the pabulum put forth by most studies which compare film with literature, the former almost inevitably bleached by the latter.” And he wastes no time in getting to one of the core tenets of the book, quoting me as follows: However, one rather scathing review at the time did indicate that the reviewer had indeed read the book and did grasp the arguments that I put forth-although, he was quick to dismiss them. For the most part, I felt that the early critics of my book had not actually read it thus they could not fully grasp its purpose and central tenets. As I have indicated elsewhere in this blog, when my book The Screenplay as Literature was first published, it was not well-received by critics in the United States.