Even as We Speak (25 page)

I called some friends in the Czech Republic recently, who said they were looking forward to seeing
8
½
the next evening on a satellite movie channel.
Fellini distrusted television. In the later part of his life, when big movies were harder to finance, he made films for television, but he always disliked the restrictions: the TV screen
didn’t have enough information in it; the shot could never go deep; the lighting had to be too even. Above all, he disliked the atomization of the audience – one, two, or, at most, a
few people in front of the set, eating, drinking and talking. He thought that the movie house as he had known it for most of his life was the last church. He valued its sacred aspect. Well, TV
screens will get bigger, and the resolution will get better. It doesn’t take a clairvoyant to envisage the day when all you can see in the cinema you will be able to see at home, without some
lout behind you laughing through his popcorn at all the wrong moments. Every movie of any consequence that has ever been made will be there in front of you at the touch of a button. But
l’aspetto sacrale
probably won’t be coming back. On the information highway, each of us is going to be alone in the middle of a hundred lanes of traffic. It will be a lot like
trying to walk out of Los Angeles on the freeway system.

In any case, most of the entertainment that people all over the world touch their telephones to get will be manufactured somewhere in the San Fernando Valley. And I suppose a more horrible fate
for the world can be imagined: American films at their most mindless have seldom been as toxic as any totalitarian country’s films at their most sophisticated. On the whole, back in the
sixties, we were right to restate our enjoyment of the old Hollywood as admiration, to turn fandom into scholarship.

But this development had one lasting deleterious consequence. The attention that had been focused on the great national directors of other countries began to lapse. Renoir, Bergman, Ray, Wajda,
Kurosawa, Ozu, Fellini: we had been preoccupied with them for a long time; we had grown bored with endorsing their obvious eminence; and, anyway, they could look after themselves. So we sort of let
them go. Yet they had something that their successors didn’t always have – we could see that Truffaut might be another Renoir, but Godard obviously wasn’t anything of the kind
– and that the American directors didn’t have at all. To begin with, the earlier masters were mainly true filmmakers, not just directors who were nothing without the right producer to
bring them the right script. They developed a project from the beginning and got the whole of their country’s life into it, and they went on doing this until they were old and grey. In
America, Orson Welles might have done that if his personality had been different. Peter Bogdanovich might have done it if his life had been different. But it has always been hard to avoid the
conclusion that what really needed to be different was America itself.

Not that Hollywood lacked a sense of history. Contrary to what foreign intellectuals usually thought and had such fun expressing, Hollywood always expended huge energy on getting the historical
details right, right down to the buttons on the costumes. Where history went missing was in the people. Even today, when some of the cleverest people in the world are writing and directing
Hollywood films, the characters on the screen are usually present only in the present. They haven’t got a past, except as a series of plot points. They might say wise things, but not from
experience. They are happily married until they love someone else, and then they leave the person they were with and go off to be happy with the other, as if love were some kind of moral
imperative. And if one of the miracles of modern Hollywood is the energy that is lavished on these sleepwalking ciphers, another is how the people doing the creating often end up behaving like
their creations.

Too many of the people busy with their careers in Planet Hollywood are just boys and girls, whereas a man like Federico Fellini was a man. Called ‘sentimental’ by those for whom his
emotions were too big and too pure, he was really the enemy of sentimentality, which he had correctly diagnosed as being only a step away from cynicism. The typical aria of sentimentality is from
an operetta: it breathes the perfumed atmosphere of
Leichtsinn
, that dreadful Viennese word which makes the heart heavy the moment it is sung. In
8
½
, Mastroianni
at first glance looks like a refugee from an updated production of
Die Fledermaus
. But there is no
Leichtsinn
here, no glibly wry tolerance of other people’s suffering, no
easily borne betrayals. Instead, there is melancholy. It comes from the self-examination without which life is not worth living. Fellini’s is the tragic view of life, the gift of the old
countries to the new ones where people think their life is over if they are not happy. It is the view of life formed in that aspect of the mind which, even when all the religions are dead, dying or
preaching holy war, we still feel bound to call the soul.
Anima
: the word denotes a thing.

Fellini was by no means a perfect man. He was not an ideal man. He was a real one. His individuality resided in his being able to see what was universal about himself; he had a scope, within and
without, that made him in postwar Italy what Verdi had been for the Risorgimento: the great cultural figure of Italy’s recuperation, and, beyond his own country, one of the great men of the
modern world.

Fellini was even beyond the cinema as a specific art. Though he was the master of all its techniques, he pursued it not as one art form among others but as if it were art itself. The last scene
of
Les Enfants du Paradis
is magnificent, but it is just cinema. Its director, Marcel Carné, would have been lost without Jacques Prévert’s screenplay, and Baptiste and
Garance were only symbolically separated by the crowd flowing past the Théâtre des Funambules – they could have met again around the corner. The last scene of
8
½
is often compared with Carné’s flag-waving finale, but the difference is the difference between substance and stylishness, between a revelation and mere
flair. Fellini’s outburst of exuberance has a grief in it that leaves the children of paradise looking like the children they are patronized by their – parents, the makers of the film.
Fellini patronizes no one. He knows himself too well. When Guido joins the circle with his wife and all the people he lives and works with, the spectacle is no pretty ring out of an Arcadia by
Poussin. It is an acknowledgment of a truth that the most prodigious artists realize with their souls, even if they sometimes deny it with their mouths: that, despite their uniqueness, they are not
alone, that they live and work for the people, of whom each of them is only one.

The evidence suggests that Fellini, for all his mighty ego, was a man with no vanity (except about his thinning hair), and that he experienced his talent as a responsibility to be lived up to as
long as his life lasted, even when his best collaborators were gone, the money had run out, the young directors who had hoped to emulate him had given up or gone abroad, and Italy’s
mondo
del cinema
, stripped of its atmosphere by the voracious gravity of Planet Hollywood, was reduced to a lifeless satellite. As long as the art prince Fellini was alive, the Italian film industry
had a face.

But though
la faccia
is gone,
l’anima
yet lives. Fellini’s films are already popping up everywhere, even out of the armrests of airline seats, and at least one of
them will be watched in awe when human beings live in spaceships and have at last grasped that the longest voyage is inside the mind.
8
½
will transmit the distillation of a
national culture to an international, homogenized future that might well be condemned to have no other source of such qualities except the past. It is the work of a man who could realize his gift
because he realized what a gift is. A gift comes from Heaven, as an elation of the spirit. For its recipient not to enjoy it would be ungracious, despite the grief it might bring – which is
why Fellini told Marcello, before he began his long, weary walk down the corridor, to flick that foot.

New Yorker
, 21 May, 1994

Peter Bogdanovich doesn’t need a career, because he has a destiny. The same once applied to his hero Orson Welles, and it is a tribute to Bogdanovich’s mind, soul
and stature – all increasingly rare attributes in modern Hollywood – that the comparative powerlessness of his mature years should remind us so much of how Welles’s exultant
precocity came unstuck. In at least one dimension, the comparison works to Bogdanovich’s advantage: his opening moves, though uncannily assured, might not quite have ranked with
Welles’s for their lasting impact, but his endgame, despite a private life undeniably baroque in some of its salient aspects, is showing a lot more class. Welles wound up narrating
commercials for social-climbing brands of mid-price wine, and one of the reasons for his inability to get a film financed was that he was a spendthrift: prodigal even with peanuts, he was the enemy
of his own best gift. Bogdanovich, though he might never be allowed to direct another movie, looks admirably determined to keep at least one side of his best gift well tended and fruitful.

Right from the jump, he could write about the movies with a cogency that placed him in the top flight of critics, and as an interviewer he has always been without peer. His latest book,
Who
the Devil Made It
(Knopf), is just further confirmation of a quality he seems to have had since the cradle. When it comes to movies, the master of the medium is often a buff but rarely a
scholar – he hasn’t the time, even when he has the inclination – yet Bogdanovich somehow always managed to service his debt to the creativity of his past masters while he was busy
with his own: articles and interviews, slim monographs and fat books were all done with manifest love, despite his being in a tearing hurry. Here, from the new book, is Bogdanovich on the Lubitsch
Touch. First he defines it as ‘a miraculous ability to mock and celebrate both at once’. Then he gives an example.

When a critic can quote so creatively, his criticism becomes a creation in itself. Among Bogdanovich’s previous volumes,
Pieces of Time
remains a model of how a miscellany of
pieces can add up to a lodestone, and
This Is Orson Welles
rivals Truffaut’s mega-colloquy with Hitchcock as an example of how a sufficiently instructed disciple can get his master
to talk revealingly about the nuts and bolts in the mechanism of his miracles. Bogdanovich was, and remains, the kind of star student who goes on studying after he graduates.

Being a star student was how he got into movies in the first place. He started off as an enthusiastic young archivist, putting retrospective screenings together for the Museum of Modern Art in
New York. Catalogues for the retrospectives would include interviews with veteran directors, conducted
in extenso
by Bogdanovich himself. His licence to pester gained him entrée to
the Hollywood studios, where in time he was allowed to try his hand as a director, perhaps because it was less trouble than showing him the door. After proving his competence with a low-budget
effort called
Targets
, he was off and running like Craig Breedlove. But when his run of hits –
The Last Picture
Show
(1971),
What’s
Up,
Doc?
(1972),
Paper
Moon
(1973) – was wrecked by the failure of the musical
At Long Last Love
(1975), his wunderkind’s privilege of creative freedom
was brutally withdrawn. (The memory of that deprivation must surely have been rekindled by the recent success of Woody Allen’s
Everyone Says I Love You
, another musical full of
people who can’t sing, but this time with the sour notes meeting critical approbation.)

Bogdanovich, his career as a director already in irretrievable trouble, was then stricken by tragedy on a Greek scale. In 1980, his muse and mistress, a twenty-year-old
Playboy
centrefold named Dorothy Stratten, was murdered by her low-life husband:
The Killing of the Unicorn
was what Bogdanovich titled his subsequent book about the event. On any objective scale,
the Unicorn was not greatly talented as an actress, but Bogdanovich can be forgiven for thinking otherwise, because she was greatly beautiful. Unable to get over his loss, Bogdanovich began looking
after her thirteen-year-old sister, whom he married seven years later; the dream lived on. But his fame faded, to the point where his name is now starting to sound foreign. Perhaps he never was a
typical American in the first place. The tradition behind his work was American, but the way he
thought
of it as a tradition was European. Now that the work has dried up, the
thoughtfulness remains, and might well be his lasting contribution.

Extraordinarily concerned in his films with the integrity of his technique and the burden of what he was saying with it, he has shown in his publications where he got that concern from: his
predecessors. He was Hollywood’s Mr Memory even while he was its golden boy. Now that he has become the Man in the Iron Mask, he is free to cultivate the archives at his leisure. Executives
who played a part in condemning him to strangle in his own beard might be in for an unpleasant surprise. What makes them pygmies is that there once were giants: it’s a cliché, but on
the strength of the documentation assembled in
Who the Devil Made It
, Bogdanovich looks as if he might raise it to the status of an axiom.