"I remain an eternal optimist about love," Jennifer Lopez announces on the cover of this month's Vanity Fair. "It's still my biggest dream." It happens often that great, influential thinkers like this scion from the block view their lives in a such a linear fashion; we progress towards the achievement of our goals and, when they are fulfilled, we believe, we shall be eternally satisfied. Not all great artists see life in such a horizontal manner, however. A visionary like Federico Fellini, admittedly not as glamorous as J.Lo but perhaps (I say "perhaps") more accomplished, often employed a circular narrative structure in his works; while a character might have a beginning, middle and end, the plotting of their story often worked in a more episodic nature: "There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life," he once said. Films like La Dolce Vita, 8 ½ and Juliet Of The Spirits move in small arcs that develop a protagonist's struggle in an increasing move towards enlightenment: Mastroianni's celebrity journalist in Dolce Vita (the director's finest work) begins fully enchanted with the life of the glitteratti he observes and, through a series of soirees and happenings that become more tiresome and shallow as the film progresses, proceeds to lose his soul; 8 ½'s protagonist filmmaker is unable to deal with his enormous success but comes to accept that sometimes being happy to be alive is enough of a statement in itself; Juliet's Giulietta Masina gradually accepts that her marriage is a sham and, through this realization, gets back in touch with the depths of her own soul. In one of the director's most fascinating films, a character wanders the landscape not of a bustling, present day Rome, but of its antique counterpart. Fellini Satyricon has been labeled the maestro's "Magical Mystery Tour," a phantasmagorical epic that freely adapts the surviving remnants of Petronius' ancient narrative into what Fellini called "science-fiction projected into the past". Despite the filmmaker putting his own distinctly personal stamp on his vision of pre-Christian life, the result actually feels much more believable than any of the sword-and-sandal epics made in Hollywood throughout the sixties and seventies: morality is completely reversed from modern-day norms, sexuality is rampantly carnal and pleasure is treated as a religious obsession and not with the suspicion that contemporary religion would cast upon it. It's probably also the director's most queer-friendly film, with a bounty of scantily clad pretty boys running around jealously fighting over each other (Fellini said he hired foreigners to play all the roles because "there are no Italian homosexuals"). The film was an art house hit upon release, pleasing its ardent, super-high admirers, and it earned him his third Academy Award Nomination as Best Director of 1970. The Bell Lightbox, which has been running a spectacular retrospective on the filmmaker this summer, presents a rare opportunity to see this classic on the big screen on Friday, August 26 at 6.30 pm, so don't miss the chance to view it in its proper form. I doubt Jennifer Lopez will be there, a shame considering what she could possibly learn about the search for personal fulfillment. Visit www.tiff.net for more details.
