Anybody going to check out the new doc: "Fellini: I'm A Born Liar"?
Review from Los Angeles Times:
Federico Fellini, unfettered
The documentary 'I'm a Born Liar' is as charming and exasperating as the man himself.
"Fellini: I'm a Born Liar" is a documentary about the celebrated Italian director and what he called "a life spent with light and shadows" that's made with an ambition the maestro himself would have appreciated and approved. For the rest of us, that is largely, but not entirely, a good thing.
Canadian Damian Pettigrew's film centers on 10 hours of interviews he did with Fellini just months before the director's death in 1993. "Born Liar" is both completely fascinating and intermittently frustrating; however, as with Fellini's own films, the downside is far outweighed by the pluses.
One thing that is beyond doubt is Pettigrew's devotion to Fellini, whom he first met in 1983 and pursued for a decade to get the extended interviews, which the director called "the longest and most detailed conversation ever recorded on my personal vision." Then Pettigrew sat on the material for years before he found collaborators willing to finance his vision of how it should be used.
Pettigrew used the intervening time to dig up remarkable visual ephemera. Some of the most intriguing items, like an unnerving baby picture of the great man and candid, 8-millimeter black-and-white footage of the youthful director and star Marcello Mastroianni on the set of "La Dolce Vita," have never been made public before.
Though Mastroianni is unaccountably missing, Pettigrew also interviewed key people in Fellini's life, from actors Terence Stamp and Donald Sutherland to some of the director's old friends and collaborators. Though the actors are recognizable, individuals like Titta Benzi, Rinaldo Geleng and even cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno are not, and the film's overly arty decision not to identify any of the speakers until the final credits is an unnecessary irritant.
This unwarranted insistence that "Born Liar" is, in the press kit's words, "no mere biographical portrait but an energetic philosophical inquiry" leads to another bothersome omission. For though Pettigrew has gone to considerable trouble to shoot contemporary footage of the exact spots where some of the director's classic scenes were filmed, the lack of identifying subtitles make it unclear, except for those who've memorized every frame of Fellini's films, exactly what locales we're revisiting.
Despite these self-imposed obstacles, there's a lot to like about "Born Liar," starting with that comprehensive interview, which reveals Fellini to be an intoxicating conversationalist, articulate, expansive and capable of giving radically different takes on the same subject.
At different points, for instance, Fellini describes a director as "a craftsman who's a medium," "an impostor, clown, general and chief of police" as well as "a creator who always has something of almighty God."
He also claims not to recognize his films once they're finished and talks engagingly of how when he directs "a mysterious invader takes over the whole show.... It's someone else, not me, with whom I coexist, someone I don't know, or know only by hearsay."
Though Fellini claims to have wonderful relationships with his actors, he is immediately contradicted by eye-popping anecdotes from both Stamp ("Toby Dammit") and Sutherland ("Casanova"), the latter calling him "a martinet, a tyrant, a dictator. The first five weeks of shooting were hell on Earth."
Equally intriguing is vintage behind-the-scenes footage showing Fellini in the act of directing. For a sequence in "Amarcord," he intensively coaches an actor, playing two parts and giving verbal as well as facial clues. Shooting a carnal threesome for "Satyricon," he walks the actors through the scene, talking them through it beat by beat as they are performing just as if he were directing a silent film.
After experiencing all this, it is no surprise to hear the director say that "things that are most real for me are invented.... I feel exiled, a bit empty away from the set. I can't cope with what is called normal existence."
Fellini may have been a born liar, but that made him a born filmmaker as well.
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Related Article:
Lurking beneath the legend, Fellini is there for the discovery
Ten years after the director's death, his aesthetic and style can be reappraised in several local screenings.
Beware the adjective. As the descriptive term "Felliniesque" has become part of the lexicon, it has lost its specificity with regard to the output of Italian film director Federico Fellini. Any fresh consideration of his life and work requires a viewer to set aside the vague images of grotesque clowns at the seaside that have attached themselves to the term in order to fully appreciate the stunning breadth and beauty of Fellini's films.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of Fellini's passing, and two local art-house exhibitors are commemorating the occasion. The Landmark chain will be showing Damian Pettigrew's new documentary, "Fellini: I'm a Born Liar," at its Nuart theater for one week beginning today, while Laemmle Theatres will screen many of Fellini's greatest works, including "8 1/2," "I Vitelloni," "Nights of Cabiria" and "La Strada," on weekend mornings throughout the spring and summer at their Sunset 5 and Monica 4 theaters.
Fellini, along with directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni, was among the wave of filmmakers who brought international cinema to the American public during the 1950s and '60s, achieving tremendous popularity and acclaim. Massively influential during his creative heyday, Fellini would win four Academy Awards for best foreign-language film, as well as an honorary lifetime achievement award.
A Canadian-born documentarian living in Paris and a longtime fan, Pettigrew first met Fellini in 1983 while working on a project about the writer Italo Calvino. It was not until the early 1990s, however, that Fellini would sit for more than 10 hours of interviews.
Combining the interviews with recollections from actors Terence Stamp, Donald Sutherland and Roberto Benigni, as well as such collaborators as production designer Dante Ferretti, screenwriter Tullio Pinelli and cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, the film is less a straightforward biography than a survey of Fellini's aesthetics and style.
Fellini's outsized personality, both on-screen as a filmmaker and off-screen as a loquacious raconteur and tall-tale teller, has led many people to view his films as if each were only about him, chapters in an ongoing autobiography. While there is certainly a large element of that in his work -- "8 1/2" is in fact the eighth film he directed (plus one co-direction for the 1/2), and he frequently cast his wife, Giulietta Masina, as a much-put-upon spouse -- it is shortsighted to think of his films only in this way.
As Pettigrew concedes via e-mail from Paris, Fellini's own showmanship and urge to talk were rarely about revealing himself to others. "Fellini was a hugely original spirit," says Pettigrew, "a bona fide gagman, the king of contradiction, a well-oiled motor mouth -- in short, anything except a thinker. He needed the interviews and the media because it was during these seeming exercises in vanity that he discovered things about himself. If you pushed him hard enough, he would come up with things that surprised even him."
If the passage of time has left Fellini's popular standing in flux, as viewers struggle to find the merits of the films themselves beneath the weight of their reputation, the difficulty of grappling with Fellini is nothing new.
Even at the height of his productivity, Fellini underwent a fair amount of critical reappraisal. For example, writing about "Nights of Cabiria" in 1959, Andrew Sarris noted positively the "familiar landmarks of the anarchic sub-world of Fellini's imagination." Ten years later, Fellini's "Toby Dammit," a loose adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe short story for the omnibus film "Spirits of the Dead," would move Sarris to ask, "At what point, therefore, does a personal cinematic language become a tired cliche?"
Which brings back the vexing notion of the "Felliniesque." Whether one sees the filmmaker as mining the same vein over and over again or creating and engaging an aesthetic world all his own is perhaps a matter of personal taste. Simply cataloging the similarities from film to film overlooks the extreme breadth of styles Fellini's work could encompass, from the cluttered, hallucinogenic kaleidoscope of "Juliet of the Spirits" to the spare, haunted, Giorgio de Chirico- inspired imagery of "8 1/2." Although he did often resort to his infamous "life is a circus" metaphor, Fellini's worldview seemed to comprise equal parts hope and resignation.
As Pettigrew notes, "With a few exceptions, Fellini's films have failure and despair running through them: Life continues, but I can't imagine 'Felliniesque' as an exclusively uplifting adjective. Fellini's best films are the ones that distill this essence -- the paradoxical quality of melancholic ecstasy, a surreal, bittersweet vitality -- to perfection." Taken together, Pettigrew's documentary and the retrospective screenings provide an excellent opportunity to discover with fresh eyes what it was that vaulted the films of Federico Fellini, as well as their creator, to international acclaim.
Asked to summarize how Fellini should be remembered, Pettigrew replies, "Probably for one thing only: a deeply personal vision of cinema that, at its height, expanded the boundaries of what cinematic art could be."
