tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8678854279874301592.post1153124176039502976..comments2022-03-25T02:09:48.840-07:00Comments on The Criterion Collection Database: The Criterion Collection #50: And the Ship Sails OnKeith Uhlichhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09366621160453356504noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8678854279874301592.post-58545319857106866942008-02-25T19:15:00.000-08:002008-02-25T19:15:00.000-08:00Hi Ben - thanks for re-posting this comment, and y...Hi Ben - thanks for re-posting this comment, and yes it's taken me this much time to process a response! Seriously, that's a great account of Fellini's lifelong ambivalence to opera.<BR/><BR/>Your last couple of lines are evocative albeit ambiguous -- "At the end when Fellini rips the lid off entirely, he is unequivocally reminding us that his theatre needs no architecture. He takes down his tent." Isn't it more that he is acknowledging the architecture of his cinema while simultaneously dismantling it? The last image of the film - the reporter alone in a boat with a rhinoceros in the middle of an artificial sea - may then be seen as an attempt to represent the minimal essence of Fellini's art. Come to think of it , it also shares something in common with the end of CASANOVA with Sutherland alone with the automaton.alsolikelifehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00413911837893154382noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8678854279874301592.post-67716673562272421242008-02-19T21:01:00.000-08:002008-02-19T21:01:00.000-08:00Hello Kevin and Michael, thank you for your discus...Hello Kevin and Michael, thank you for your discussion of And The Ship Sails On (ATSSO). I believe you touch on a number of essential topics and I was especially informed by your treatment of the absence of an obvious protagonist in the film with which to identify. At the same time, I found your handling of "highbrow/lowbrow" too vague with respect to the dynamic between opera and the circus that I take to be at the heart of ATSSO. I recently addressed this in my review of ATTSO at Dan Jardine's Cinemania site, which I reproduce here for your consideration. Cheers.<BR/><BR/>No, this cannot be ranked as one of his great films. But yes, Fellini is never bad. And remembering that it was made very late in his career, ATSSO is fascinating for the fact that he finally focuses on opera. The cultural status of opera in the national psyche of Italy, well, it is an internationally recognized symbol, a flag for the place, a cliché. That opera is absent from the films of the director prior to ATSSO is neither an artistic oversight nor an ideological accident. <BR/>It is the circus, of course, that constitutes Fellini's field of consciousness. Not the contemporary big business circus, Cirque d Sole with its safe entertainment for the middle-class; politically domesticated, sexually sanitized, kind enough to leave the tigers in the zoo and hypocritical enough to pretend that they're still free in the jungle. What is informing Fellini is an ongoing nostalgic retrieval of his childhood encounter with the traveling circus of the 1930s, which he recapitulates throughout his work, establishing his own personal mythology of circus theatricality. Hence, for example, in Amarcord the central comedic genius of the film is to treat the coming of the fascist black shirts to his hometown as just another itinerant carnival act. Fellini's circus is dangerous working-class entertainment, politically anarchic, erotically dirty, cruel enough to shine the spotlight on all that is freakish and honest about the grotesque being us and not them.<BR/><BR/>In contradistinction to this, is there anything more bourgeois than opera? Actually, opera in different times and at different places has been sometimes more and sometimes less elitist and popular. And as already noted from the nationalist perspective, in Italy it has had the full sanction of the state as “common treasure” at least since unification. Fellini's active ignorance of opera was in reaction to mainstream cultural indoctrination, a purposeful negation on his part conducted as a feature of his bohemian development. His eventual attention to opera in ATSSO is an acknowledgment in his mature years that he himself has become an flag of Italian culture, the pride of his country internationally, a subject for doctoral dissertations and all that. Still, idiosyncratic in the extreme, he is no longer iconoclastic for his work is itself iconic.<BR/><BR/>It is from this position of security that Fellini admits in ATSSO that – hey, you know what? - opera ain't so bad after all. I won't go so far as to say that the film is a sort of apology. It is simply Fellini showing off his new found appreciation for what the rest of his countrymen dogmatically revere. As always, whatever he happens to be dealing with topically he subjects to his weird stylistic concerns, themselves derivative of his circus weltanschauung. This is to say that he shows his appreciation of opera in a very bizarre context.<BR/><BR/>The eve of WWI setting for the story is a twist on Fellini's own pre-WWII orientation that may or may not have resonance for him. I could not make anything of it dramatically beyond being yet another examination of the “roles and costumes” of the past and I found the storyline of the film a tad boring. What does strike me as meaningful, however, is the spatial designation of ATSSO. The ship setting is not just a plot excuse. The hack metaphor of the journey is beneath Fellini's artistry and besides, his characters tend to wait for Godot, run around in circles, as in a circus. Indeed, the ship setting is a compromise position between the circus and the opera, between being on the move outdoors and being stationary indoors, between a tent and real estate, between a circus ring chalked on the street and the opera-house. What corresponds to this in terms of class should be obvious and following this, I stress that Fellini's ship setting is self-consciously petit-bourgeois.<BR/><BR/>This intermediate class perspective is reverberated in the cordial relations that are struck between the aristocratic passengers and the Serbian refugees. Initially divided in a glaring manner, all it takes is a couple of ethically sensible individuals to make the proper overtures and soon enough the classes are mixing in a celebration of humanity. The opera snobs hit the deck and step to the folk dances of the gypsies. It would be easy to see this as the triumph of the circus but I maintain that Fellini is adopting a centrist position. ATSSO is not a critique of opera. It is an appreciation but one skewed through the prerogatives of the circus. I mean – hello – there's a rhinoceros on board! <BR/><BR/>In what I take to be the defining scene of the film, the opera stars competitively perform for the labourers down in the boiler room. Here Fellini makes it plain that he is cool with opera as long as he can have it on his own circus-theatrical/ideological terms. Perched on a staircase platform, the singers perform above the workers, literally singing down to them but definitely not singing “down” to them metaphorically. On the contrary, the opera-house as a whole has been turned upside-down and the dirty, sweaty shovelers of coal have become patrons of the arts. Without picking up the tab, no less. At the same time, the highbrow artists have undergone their own reversal. Singing for free like too many buskers on one corner, they are truly absurd, downright silly, belting it out in the most unlikely of places. Fighting to be heard over the roar of the machines, they have entered the realm of the street performer who must contend with all manner of noise. With the possible exception of the rhino being lifted out of the hold by block-and-tackle, the boiler room scene is THE “Felliniesque” moment in the film.<BR/><BR/>Or could this be the meta-revelation at the end of the film? Uncovering the artifice behind the production, Fellini turns the camera on the infrastructure of the set and the crew operating it. This unmasking may appear unnecessary given how obviously artificial the film is throughout. The sunset is painted and the waves are cellophane and the battleship in the distance is made of cardboard. But for me, it was an effective coda to how the film started. Fellini begins with ersatz black-and-white, jive “vintage” sepia-tone. But behind this supposedly silent footage there is an audio track. We hear the projector running. Already the statement is meta. As ATSSO carries on from here, subjects look directly into the camera to indicate that they know they are being filmed. Once the main film is up and sailing, the central character is simultaneously in the story and outside it, participating in events and commenting on them in asides to the audience. At the end when Fellini rips the lid off entirely, he is unequivocally reminding us that his theatre needs no architecture. He takes down his tent.<BR/><BR/>Then – BenAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com