romac
02-21-2004, 01:55 PM
I was reading an article by the great film-maker Federico Fellini (La Dolce Vita, La Strada, 8½, Roma etc…) in the current magazine of the National Museum of Cinema, Torino. The Museum has just started a retrospective season of Fellini’s films at the moment. I’m not sure what year he originally wrote this. His views on cinema are interesting.
I was thinking that many of them could just as well apply to poetry and the process of writing poems. Here’s the article (slightly shortened):
A Personal View on Cinema
I realise that I am incapable of reporting objectively. That isn’t a vice, but a vocation. I have invented everything: a childhood, a personality, nostalgia, dreams, memories, so that I might recount them to others.
The cinema of truth (cinema-verité)?
I would rather have a cinema of lies. Lies are always more interesting than truth. A lie is the soul of a movie, and I love movies. Fiction can go deep into the senses with a truth far sharper than the truth of what happens in everyday life.
It isn’t necessary that what appears on screen must be authentic. Indeed it’s better if it isn’t. However, what must be authentic is the emotion already proved true by what one has seen and experienced. The autobiographical part of a story is that tiny splinter of memory that reaches me even in torpor of spirit and wakes me up.
In a movie, one always tries to give an audience a sense of reality, but of course, a movie is always an interpretation. Why would people want to go to the cinema if movies showed only reality as seen by a cold and objective eye? In my view, it’s more interesting to go for a walk down the street.
For me, neo-realist cinema aims to reveal reality with an honest eye – but every sort of reality – not only social reality, but also spiritual reality, metaphysical reality, everything that human beings hold within.
On the other hand, in making movies, the absolute truth is the only thing that counts. In life, I can be a fraudster or a cheat, but not in film. A person’s film is a person made naked; nothing can remain hidden. In my films, if nothing else, I must be sincere.
Federico Fellini - la Rivista del Cinema: Museo Nazionale del Cinema, numero 12, Febbraio 2004
I was thinking that many of them could just as well apply to poetry and the process of writing poems. Here’s the article (slightly shortened):
A Personal View on Cinema
I realise that I am incapable of reporting objectively. That isn’t a vice, but a vocation. I have invented everything: a childhood, a personality, nostalgia, dreams, memories, so that I might recount them to others.
The cinema of truth (cinema-verité)?
I would rather have a cinema of lies. Lies are always more interesting than truth. A lie is the soul of a movie, and I love movies. Fiction can go deep into the senses with a truth far sharper than the truth of what happens in everyday life.
It isn’t necessary that what appears on screen must be authentic. Indeed it’s better if it isn’t. However, what must be authentic is the emotion already proved true by what one has seen and experienced. The autobiographical part of a story is that tiny splinter of memory that reaches me even in torpor of spirit and wakes me up.
In a movie, one always tries to give an audience a sense of reality, but of course, a movie is always an interpretation. Why would people want to go to the cinema if movies showed only reality as seen by a cold and objective eye? In my view, it’s more interesting to go for a walk down the street.
For me, neo-realist cinema aims to reveal reality with an honest eye – but every sort of reality – not only social reality, but also spiritual reality, metaphysical reality, everything that human beings hold within.
On the other hand, in making movies, the absolute truth is the only thing that counts. In life, I can be a fraudster or a cheat, but not in film. A person’s film is a person made naked; nothing can remain hidden. In my films, if nothing else, I must be sincere.
Federico Fellini - la Rivista del Cinema: Museo Nazionale del Cinema, numero 12, Febbraio 2004