Thursday, June 8, 2023

"Dreams & Nightmares: The Films of David Lynch" at SIFF Cinema: Jun 16 - Jul 6


Over the course of the next month, SIFF Cinema will be presenting a near complete retrospective of the major works of David Lynch. Encompassing ten feature length films, an essay film, and a anthology of short films, "Dreams & Nightmares: The Films of David Lynch", begins mid-June with the premiere of "Lynch/OZ". Following non-chronologically, the series sounds the depths and heights of one of the great auteurs of the 20th century, with "Mulholland Drive", "Blue Velvet", The Short Films of David Lynch, "Dune", "Wild at Heart", "Inland Empire", "The Straight Story", "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me", "The Elephant Man", "Eraserheard", and "Lost Highway". Viewed together, it is clear that the landscape of American independent cinema would have an altogether different topography without the work of it's sublime sculptor of atmosphere, David Lynch. Referred to as "the greatest director of his era" by The Guardian's 2007 panel of critics, topping their 40 artists listed as having defined the last quarter century of cinema. His bold feature length entry of 1977 "Eraserhead" became one of the most influential midnight movies of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Playing in arthouse and independent cinemas late-night screenings alongside Jodorowsky's "El Topo", Water's "Pink Flamingos", Sharman's "The Rocky Horror Picture Show", and Romero's "Night of the Living Dead". More than a cult and underground phenomena, the film earned him the attention and funding of Mel Brooks and assistant director on "High Anxiety", Jonathan Sanger. Sanger became a champion of the young director, presenting him the working script adaptation from Sir Frederick Treves and Ashley Montagu's  "The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences" and "The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity". Distributed by Paramount and Universal worldwide, while independently funded, "The Elephant Man" would become Lynch's first feature film for a major studio.

Working with an exceptional cast of professionals was also a first, the film's central characters of Joseph Merrick and Frederick Treves, portrayed by John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins respectively, remains among both of the actor's most notable roles on film. While Lynch sourced Peter Ivers for the soundtrack for his first feature, and John Morris for his sophomore effort, the director's hands-on approach was already evident in the film's sound design and audible palette colored by it's pervasive atmosphere of ruin. Not limited to his boldly experimental freshman effort, this looming industrial underworld buried beneath the facade of everyday existence remains one of the recurring themes throughout the totality of his work. Time Out London spoke with the director on expressing this theme through the period setting of his second feature and personal scouting of the locations and shooting of key scenes in Liverpool Street Station and Butler’s Wharf in Southwark; "I always loved smokestack industry, and I love towns or cities that have grown up around factories. So here is Victorian England, and I don’t know this land, but I know factories, I know this is the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, so that side of it resonated with me. Then one day I’m standing in East London Hospital. A derelict hospital, but it still had beds in the wards. Thousands of pigeons, broken windows, but long, glorious hallways, fireplaces, all the details. I’m there in the hall looking into a ward and a wind entered me, and I was back in time. I knew it: 100 per cent. Victorian England. And I said: “Now I know it. No one can take it away from me.”

One of the stranger of all the twists in all the director's turns of fate was to come in the wake of "Elephant Man"'s critical success. The most popular film franchise of the 1980s helmed by George Lucas, had turned the spotlight on Lynch for him to direct the third installment in the Star Wars trilogy. He declined, citing Lucas' comprehensive vision of the fictional universe would allow for very little in the way of space to express his own. Soon after, another notable science fiction property would come the director's way in the form of Dino De Laurentiis licensing Frank Herbert's epic, "Dune", in the wake of it becoming available following the now legendary aborted project from Alejandro Jodorowsky. In a 1985 interview with the German periodical Tip Filmjahrbuch, Lynch details De Laurentiis' approaching him with the project and the source of his personal conceptualization of Herbert's universe; "This is how it happened: I went to Venice, just for an afternoon, to see the Piazza San Marco. Dino De Laurentiis bought me a book, which inspired all these things... A book about Venice. It inspired the idea, that in the world of "Dune" a Renaissance had taken place thousands of years ago, and this Renaissance had been very powerful and far-reaching. And people built beautiful machines; they were so well-constructed, that they remained intact until now, the time, when the story begins. Of course this Melange enables the humans with certain mental abilities. But they need machines nonetheless, and these machines were built before discovering the "spice" Melange. This world is not a world of machines, but they are part of it." The final cut for "Dune" was in the hands of Universal Studios rather than its director, and the resulting film remains a subject rarely broached by Lynch to this day.

As part of the contractual details of directing the film for De Laurentiis, Lynch was under obligation with the producer to direct two more films, the first of which was to be a planned sequel. In the wake of the film's poor box office and mixed critical reception this sequel was never developed beyond the stage of its initial script. The other was a more personal work. Developed from ideas that had been gestating as far back as 1973, and a screenplay that had been shopped around by the director since the late 1970s, De Laurentiis then became both its producer and distributor. Where other studios declined the screenplay due to its tarnished depiction of smalltown American life, foreground presentation of violence, and strong sexual content, the Italian independent gave the director free reign within its budgetary constraints and most importantly, power of final cut. This project would go on to be considered one of the most notable, and influential independent films of the 1980s. Not only a significant film within the independent cinema landscape of the decade, "Blue Velvet" earned David Lynch his second Academy Award nomination, and came to rank significantly within the BBC's 2015 global critical assessment of the 100 Greatest American Films ever made. No discussion of Lynch's contribution to the language of cinema would be complete without his and Mark Frost's 1989 reimagining of the American soap opera. "Twin Peaks" struck a chord with the American consciousness of the late 20th century, reformatting television viewing itself into a serial artform. This being decades before such viewing would become the de rigueur of longform streaming tv. An equally dissonant chord was hit by the series' theatrical prequel, which delivered the dark and unexpurgated side of the "Twin Peaks" coin, one which many audiences were not prepared for.

Though Booed at Cannes and the target of frustrated Twin Peaks fans and critics upon its release, the film has since gained a reevaluation with context and distance, with pieces like Calum Marsh's "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me Is David Lynch's Masterpiece" now increasingly more common. With the cinematic expansion of the series' narrative offered by "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me", and new context enriched by the even more experimental "Twin Peaks: The Return" miniseries of 2017, many have returned to the prequel with fresh eyes and decades distance, and found it to be less of a departure, and more true to "Twin Peaks" cinematic world and its concerns, making for an, "Anatomy of a Fascinating Disaster: Fire Walk With Me". A set of less successful experiments with genre and tone would come after with the adaptation of Barry Gifford's novel, "Wild at Heart", and a G rated family film for the Walt Disney corporation, in "The Straight Story". Yet these were followed by a trio of the most adventurous and satisfyingly substantial of his films, which employed longer durations and expressly non-linear devices, and proved to be as boldly experimental as they were traditionally cinematic. A film of halves, "Lost Highway" is a compelling, yet lopsided neo-Noir thriller from the late 1990's utilizing a split-persona structure which Lynch later refined to greater effect in what many consider his masterpiece, 2001's "Mulholland Drive". This second film stands as a pinnacle of all things that make the work of this American auteur great; an inscrutable mystery, a shifting and ambiguous tonal palette, high tension, visitations from nightmare worlds and subjective intersections between the beyond and the everyday mundane. As if in a dream, the protagonists of the increasingly unstable realitie(s) depicted in these contemporary noir find themselves enticed into realms of ominous portent on their journey to discovery.

Thom Anderson's "Los Angeles Plays Itself" will remain the defining exploration of film about film in The City of Dreams. Yet there are few contenders in the way of dramas set within the glitz, grime and glamour of Hollywood, that approach the corpus of Los Angeles as seen in the exploratory surgery of "Inland Empire". In a filmography of nonlinear, nestled, Borgesian structures and metaphysical dreamlike intrusions to the real, Lynch assembled his most expressly matryoshka vessel for "Inland Empire" in its amalgam of his own fictional cursed production and the mythic nature of some of Hollywood's greatest, lost and never-completed films. Lynch's film itself containing a contemporary variation on a Polish folktale in which a boy who, sparking a reflection after passing through a doorway, "caused evil to be born" by his doppelganger entering the world. In its other facet it also tells of a girl who, wandering through an alleyway behind a marketplace, "discovers a palace". These two threads are woven into the production of the fictional film-within-the-film, titled "On High in Blue Tomorrows", which is revealed to be a remake of the folklore's original cursed vehicle, a German feature titled "47". The multifaceted, multilayered nature of the "Perpetual Evolution" of Lynch's art, as seen in this film about film is possibly best encapsulated by Jim Emerson in his review for RogerEbert.com; "Inland Empire" presents itself as a Hollywood movie (and a movie about Hollywood) in the guise of an avant-garde mega-meta art movie. When people say "Inland Empire" is Lynch's "Sunset Boulevard", Lynch's "Persona" or Lynch's "8 1/2", they're quite right, but it also explicitly invokes connections to Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining", Jean-Luc Godard's "Pierrot le Fou", Bunuel and Dali's "Un Chien Andalou", Maya Deren's LA-experimental "Meshes of the Afternoon", and others.".

Thursday, June 1, 2023

Clan of Xymox "Limbo" West Coast Tour: May 31 - Jun 16


Rescheduled over the course of almost three years due to the complications of the pandemic, the seminal Dutch minimal synth wave group Clan of Xymox, return to the United States this month for a much-delayed summer tour. Forty years ago, Xymox, which formed as a project by Ronny Moorings and Anka Wolbert in 1981, produced their first self-released mini album, "Subsequent Pleasures" following the duo's move to Amsterdam in 1983. Having secured a performance in Paris in the wake of the release's positive reception, the lineup enlisted keyboardist and vocalist Pieter Nooten, and second touring guitarist Frank Weyzig. In the following year, this central trio of Moorings, Wolbert and Nooten would become Clan of Xymox for their signing to Ivo Watts-Russell's influential British postpunk and ethereal music label, 4AD. After a chance meeting with Brendan Perry of Dead Can Dance at a concert in Nijmegen, the British duo brough Xymox on as their support for a tour of the United Kingdom. The resulting attention produced a commission for a demo by Watts-Russell, and subsequent signing to their shared label, which released Clan of Xymox eponymous album in 1985. Working from the demos, the label's inhouse production team of Watts-Russell and Turner looked to accentuate the unique topography of their sound, positioned between the gothic guitar pop of The Cure, and the synth-driven electronic dance wave of New Order. Refined by Watts-Russell, Jon Turner, and John Fryer's guidance at Blackwing Studios, the sui generis qualities of their sound can be heard across the eight tracks of "Clan of Xymox". Distinguished amidst the abundance of wave, post-punk and gothic music of the time by its complex meeting of acoustic, electric and electronic arrangements, naive sometimes broken English, and an aesthetic assertion of the band's bohemian European origins.


Their sound was unambiguous to the extent that Wolbert's "Seventh Time" was picked up by the greatest of the underground British radio tastemakers of the time, John Peel. This led to the band recording two Peel Sessions at the BBC, and a greater focus of resources and time given by their parent label for the sophomore album, "Medusa". An elegant, haunting album of instrumental passages, propulsive synth wave songs, and gothic rock crescendos, "Medusa" would prove to be the apogee of the music Clan of Xymox would produce as a trio. On the following tours across Europe and a first in the United States, inner tensions as to the music's focus and Nooten and Wolbert's respective roles began to force its central trio in opposing directions. This culminated in Xymox leaving 4AD, following a signing to Polydor and the release of 1989's more expressly synthpop influenced "Twist of Shadows", which saw Wolbert and Nooten's contribution increasingly marginalized. Pieter Nooten briefly remained with 4AD, but from this point forward Xymox and its later reformatting as Clan of Xymox, would solely be the project of Ronny Moorings. Moorings has since found new listeners in a second generation of gothic and post-wave audiences across Europe, and massive success at gothic culture events like Wave-Gotik-Treffen festival in his current home of Leipzig, Germany. Signing to domestic label Metropolis, this second iteration of Clan of Xymox has made a number of returns to North America since their formation, with significantly greater frequency than the original trio. The music of this iteration is also more clearly delineated as a dark and sometimes angst-driven gothic synth pop, gone is the genre ambiguity of their more artfully cryptic 4AD era. This year's tour, with a date in Seattle follows the early pandemic release of their album "Limbo", and marks their third return to the United States in a decade.

Sunday, May 7, 2023

Tim Hecker's "No Highs" & North American Tour May 10 - 20 | "Tim Hecker Helped Popularize Ambient Music. He’s (Sort of) Sorry" | The New York Times


Canada's electronic noise sculptor, Tim Hecker returns to the west coast after many years with a date at Neumos, on the cusp of his new album for Kranky Records. As with his recent string of albums for both Kranky and 4AD, his newest is an immersive music of unease, or in Hecker's own words, "‘I Make Pagan Music that Dances on the Ashes of a Burnt Church’". Discussing the rise of omnipresent streaming music organized into "moods", Hecker sees ambient music becoming a genre of convenience. Rather than inoffensive soundscapes that distract or soothe, with little utility beyond backdrop to work, study, or relax to, Hecker has returned to reflecting the pollution, agitation and conflict of our confounded reality. Like its more wholesome and innocuous ambient siblings, "No Highs" is immersive and embraces the listener in an ocean of sound. Unlike that growing body of work, it restlessly rejects easy submission to its tide. On this subject, Hecker spoke with the New York Times, inquiring; “What is the function of music? Is it to serve as a background for a WeWork, efficiency world, for someone who just wants to code?” Hecker asked. “Or is it for driving down a foggy road at night, wanting that experience amplified?”, he asks in Grayson Haver Currin's feature, "Tim Hecker Helped Popularize Ambient Music. He’s (Sort of) Sorry.". He details how, in the early days of the pandemic lockdown like so many who make their creativity their enterprise, he felt confounded and anxious, overwhelmed by home-schooling and managing living costs. He was concerned that there would be little or no music industry on the pandemic's other side, and wondered what he might create next, and for what purpose. He describes how he turned down an offer to produce sounds for a startup meditation app, and instead focused on streaming tv and film scores. The results were, Andrew Haig's miniseries "The North Water", and Brandon Cronenberg's third and higher profile feature film, "Infinity Pool". The process of bringing "Brandon Cronenberg’s Rich-on-Holiday Horror" to the screen were as difficult as its subject matter. Part body horror, part science fiction economic allegory, with hints of Ian McEwan and more than a little conceptual debt to J.G. Ballard's "Super-Cannes", the concerns and themes of this exploration of "Body Trouble", elucidates the conceptual underpinnings of Tim Hecker's work more transparently than any other recent offering by the composer. The film's gruesome commentary on class and a dividing global economy of haves and have-nots, speaks to Hecker's own thematic interests, which fittingly was a labor to bring to the screen, and wasn't without its own complications, "‘Infinity Pool’ and the Battle for an R Rating".

Thursday, May 4, 2023

Northwest Terror Fest at Neumos & Barboza: May 25 - 27


The Northwest Terror Fest returns to Neumos and Barboza for its fifth installment at the end of May. As with many festivals and arts events, the 2020 edition was postponed with the intent on returning when the global pandemic abated. This year's edition arrives after its successful return in summer of 2022, showcasing some of the most potent sounds from the heavier end of the 21st century issuing from the mutating offshoots of black metal. An all-things-metal festival with a previous Southwest iteration, Terror Fest's three days host a lineup featuring no small quantity of metal issuing from this particular low-lit landscape of black and doom metal mutations. Initially launched under the opportunity to, "Bring Warning to America: An Interview with Terrorfest founder David Rodgers", Rodger's wider curatorial vision for the festival, was detailed in Decibel's, "It's Good to Have Goals and Dreams Can Come True", and in a 2019 interview, the festival's co-organizer Joseph Schafer describing how "The Third Time (Is Still) the Charm". This year's lineup encompasses everything from gloaming atmospheric ambiance and doom riffs, blistering thrash and hardcore, and heavy psychedelic and stoner rock explorations. Making for a cross-genre spectrum of metal sounds and weighty atmospheres to be heard in sets from almost forty acts, in six showcases, spanning three nights. This year's lineup includes the highlights of metal pioneers Autopsy, the massive durational epics of Bell Witch, psych, stoner and doom from YOB, the theatrics of Ghoul, death metal revivalists Necrot, Misery Index, and classics like Impaled. Truly heavy doom from Conan, a rare appearance from Singapore grindcore band Wormrot, and grinding death metal from acts like Fetid and Horrendous, can also be found on the bill. Attending Northwest Terror Fest is to witness an annual summation of the global scene's ongoing and burgeoning development. These sounds have now come to encompass melodicism and atmospheres lifted from shoegaze and spacerock, eruptions of heavy psych rock, industrial drumming, synth exploration and electronic atmospheres, and pure experimental noise. The expansiveness of this sound is further detailed in Brad Sanders' essential overview, "Untrue And International: Living in a Post-Black Metal World". Beyond this primer, deeper reading and curation from this sphere can be found in the past decade of excellent selections in The Quietus' Columnus Metallicus column, covering releases dominantly sourced from labels like, Hydrahead, Neurot, Ipecac, Deathwish, 20 Buck Spin, Dark Descent, Sargent House, Profound Lore, Season of Mist, Roadburn, The Flenser, and Relapse.

Sunday, April 30, 2023

Seattle International Film Festival: May 11 - 21


Looking to the international festival circuit, there is abundant evidence that the world of cinema is not only expanding and developing in its style, content and form, but thriving. Reviews from the recent string of years since pandemic restrictions were lifted have seen reporting coming back from Cannes Film Festival, where "A Great Festival went Pear Shaped, Awarding the Palme d’Or to Ruben Östlund’s "Triangle of Sadness", or in the case of Berlin, where last year's festival it was seen "Women Dominate Berlin Film Festival Awards as 'Alcarràs' wins Golden Bear", and this year, where the festival was one of, "Prestige, Politics and Ethical Starpower". Then there's the two-year knockout of Venice, where both 2021 and last year produced historic festivals, even in the wake of the pandemic, setting the barometer, "As the Film Industry Aimed for a Return to Normality". Smaller but no less notable festivals in Locarno and Rotterdam presented vanguard work, detailed in RogerEbert.com's "Rotterdam International Film Festival Highlights", and the "Locarno Film Festival Returned to Pre-Pandemic Glory". Domestically these were then reflected in the programming seen in Toronto and New York which followed. All of the above were shared content agendas that once had prominence within SIFF. Those times though, are now many many years in the past. Very little of the above can be seen corresponding to the programming or general curatorial ethos of the Northwest's largest film festival. Annually, looking to San Francisco and Vancouver, one bears witness to these institutions programming festivals of a caliber that SIFF has seemingly un-learned. Even our neighbors in the relatively rural setting of the Orcas Island Film Festival have annually put together a significantly more incisive assembly of films.

This year's program continues the downward trend that began a decade ago with the painfully omissive lineups we saw in 2010 and 2011. What followed was a short string of years that suggested relief from the lackluster programming described above, which waned a bit in 2012 and expressed a further positive direction in 2013. For the 2014 festival, their 40th Anniversary was celebrated with SIFF's strongest programming in almost a decade, suggesting a renewed vision for the festival. Both 2017 and 2018 also saw a nominal return to the strength of seasons past. Those years marked a trend away from the previously seen glut of middle-ground postmodern contemporary romances and knowingly-clever dramas seemingly conceived for the Sundance and SXSW sects. One can speculate that this middle road approach to programming, clearly expressed by the programming of the 2015 festival and 2016 after it, has been conceived to entice some imagined Northwest demographic out of their suburban hobbles and inner-city condos. One can't help but consider these factors alongside the changing economic and cultural landscape of Seattle and what may be SIFF's conception of programming that corresponds to these changes. After the 2020 edition was cancelled outright due to the conditions of the pandemic, the 2021 edition shifted to online virtual exhibitions, in 2022 the Seattle International Film Festival returned to in-person programming for the first time since 2019. Until this most recent decade, Seattle International Film Festival existed as a focal point of visionary cinema curatorialship, with the resources, funds and the legacy of a hugely influential institution. Yet due to SIFF's ongoing detachment from the values and perspective of the larger international festival circuit, a majority of the films listed below in this year's lineup are simply of interest, rather than what could be considered essential viewing. Such is the festival that we have now.

--------------------------------------------------
Thursday, May 11
--------------------------------------------------

7:00 PM - Celine Song "Past Lives"
Paramount Theatre 

--------------------------------------------------
Friday, May 12
--------------------------------------------------

3:30 PM - C.J. Obasi "Mami Wata: A West Afrikan Folklore"
Ark Lodge Cinemas


--------------------------------------------------
Friday, May 12
--------------------------------------------------

9:00 PM - Dominik Moll "The Night of the 12th"
SIFF Cinema Uptown

https://www.siff.net/festival/the-night-of-the-12th

--------------------------------------------------
Saturday, May 13
--------------------------------------------------

11:00 AM - Felix Van Groeningen & Charlotte Vandermeersch "The Eight Mountains"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian

https://www.siff.net/festival/the-eight-mountains

--------------------------------------------------
Saturday, May 13
--------------------------------------------------

2:00 PM - KD Davison "Jonas Mekas: Fragments of Paradise"
SIFF Film Center

https://www.siff.net/festival/fragments-of-paradise

--------------------------------------------------
Saturday, May 13
--------------------------------------------------

7:00 PM - Charlotte Le Bon "Falcon Lake"
SIFF Film Center

https://www.siff.net/festival/falcon-lake
 
--------------------------------------------------
Saturday, May 13
--------------------------------------------------

9:00 PM - Sam Pollard & Ben Shapiro "Max Roach: The Drum Also Waltzes"
SIFF Cinema Uptown

https://www.siff.net/festival/max-roach-the-drum-also-waltzes

--------------------------------------------------
Saturday, May 13
--------------------------------------------------

11:59 PM - Matthias Hoene "The Last Exit"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian


--------------------------------------------------
Sunday, May 14
--------------------------------------------------

5:30 PM - Manuella Martelli “Chile 76”
Ark Lodge Cinemas

https://www.siff.net/festival/chile-76

--------------------------------------------------
Sunday, May 14
--------------------------------------------------

9:00 PM - Ira Sachs "Passages"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian

https://www.siff.net/festival/passages

--------------------------------------------------
Monday, May 15
--------------------------------------------------

8:45 PM - Martin Skovbjerg "Copenhagen Does Not Exist"
AMC Pacific Place


--------------------------------------------------
Tuesday, May 16
--------------------------------------------------

6:00 PM - Doug Ing "Alan Lau @ Work"
Ark Lodge Cinemas

https://www.siff.net/festival/alan-work

--------------------------------------------------
Tuesday, May 16
--------------------------------------------------

9:00 PM - Rodrigo Sorogoyen “Beasts”

--------------------------------------------------
Wednesday, May 17
--------------------------------------------------

6:15 PM - Clyde Petersen "Earth: Even Hell Has its Heroes”
SIFF Cinema Egyptian


--------------------------------------------------
Friday, May 19
--------------------------------------------------

1:00 PM -  Chie Hayakawa "Plan 75"
SIFF Cinema Uptown


--------------------------------------------------
Friday, May 19
--------------------------------------------------

3:30 PM - Keiichi Hara "Lonely Castle in the Mirror"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian


--------------------------------------------------
Friday, May 19
--------------------------------------------------

8:30 PM - Brillante Mendoza "Feast"
Ark Lodge Cinemas

https://www.siff.net/festival/feast

--------------------------------------------------
Saturday, May 20
--------------------------------------------------

11:59 PM - Marie Alice Wolfszahn "Mother Superior"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian


--------------------------------------------------
Sunday, May 21
--------------------------------------------------

2:00 PM - Margarethe von Trotta "Journey into the Desert"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian


Sunday, April 9, 2023

“Life is a Feast: The Cinema of Federico Fellini" at SIFF Cinema: Apr 12 - Jun 14



The future of repertory cinema in Seattle became even more uncertain with the elimination of the position Greg Olson held for a half-century, as film programmer at Seattle Art Museum. With the loss of the programmer of the longest-running film noir series in the United States, and author of definitive books on the subject of David Lynch, Seattle found that the "Fate of SAM Film Series Unclear as Museum’s Longtime Film Curator Laid Off". Three years later, Olson has brought what was initially intended as Seattle Art Museum's Federico Fellini Centennial in 2020, to the big screen at the SIFF Cinema Uptown. His newly relaunched retrospective, in collaboration with Cinecitta Rome, and co-presented with Festa Italiana, will grace screens for two months, showcasing “Life is a Feast: The Cinema of Federico Fellini". Along with Ingmar Bergman, Roberto Rossellini, and Carl Theodor Dreyer, Federico Fellini's work from the late 1950s to mid-1970s will appear on any critical assessment 20th century cinema. And rightly so. One needs look no further than The British Film Institutes' Greatest Films of All Time Poll for evidence of the greatness of Federico Fellini's standing in the history of European cinema. Having begun under the guidance of Rossellini, while in the midst of his classic neorealist films, he soon found himself working as both screenwriter and assistant director on Rossellini's "Paisà", in which Fellini was entrusted to film the scenes in Maiori. Within a short span of years, he was introduced to Marcello Mastroianni, then a young theatre actor first seen by Fellini in a play alongside Giulietta Masina, and concurrently he contributed aspects of Rossellini's segment in the anthology film, "L'Amore". After traveling to Paris for a script conference around Rossellini's "Europa '51", Fellini was given opportunity to begin his first solo-directed feature, "The White Sheik".



His directorial debut having initially passed through other hands. When the film came to Fellini it was as a revised version of a treatment first written by Michelangelo Antonioni in 1949. At which time, the film's producer commissioned Fellini to rework the script. Its subsequent rejection by Antonioni led the film back to Fellini, and alongside Ennio Flaiano, it was re-worked into a spirited and lighthearted satire on the life of a newlywed couple. This would be the first of many fruitful collaborations between Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, and Fellini, the three men co-writing the screenplays of some ten films over the ensuing decades. In the first of another decades-spanning collaborations, the film highlighted the music of its composer, Nino Rota, who along with Mastroianni, and Fellini's future wife, actress Giulietta Masina, would all become constants in both his filmic and private worlds. One year following, what's considered the first of Fellini's films wholly his own, "I Vitelloni" found great favor with critics and a receptive public after its Silver Lion win (alongside Aleksandr Ptushko's "Sadko", Marcel Carné's "Thérèse Raquin", and Kenji Mizoguchi's "Ugetsu") at the 14th Venice International Film Festival. From here, flying over the expanse of a filmmography too rich and nuanced to surmise, a valiant and intimate account by Anthony Lane for the New Yorker, “A Hundred Years of Fellini”, borders as close to perfection as one could ask. Moving at varied trajectories through specific works, and eras, Sight & Sound’s centennial feature, “The Circus of Life: The Many Faces of Federico Fellini”, offers up a richer array of particulars. In a quartet of pieces, they break down the maestro into four concurrent aspects, first beginning with his relationship to the Italian Neorealist movement, "Part One: The Neorealist", and the studio that was his great enabler, "Part Two: The Felliniesque and Cinecitta Studio".



From there we get a complex portrait of Fellini the man, both behind the camera and as a private and public citizen, "Part Three: Federico by Fellini", and the cast of regular collaborators and cohorts in his art, considered as both a theatre production company and extended family, "Part Four: La Famiglia Fellini". Foremost among them, the writing team of Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli, which he retained from his earliest collaborations, alongside composer Nino Rota, production and costume designer Danilo Donati who's work appeared on many of the director’s more visually extravagant films, alongside Norma Giacchero for script supervision and continuity, actress Giulietta Masina, and Fellini's avatar and surrogate, Marcello Mastroianni. In an excerpt from a 1964 interview around "La Dolce Vita"'s production, The Criterion Collection presents this rich and disarmingly personal account of, "Marcello Mastroianni on Fellini". Further reading hosted by Criterion appears in a series of essential essays on the director's central films, "La Dolce Vita: Tuxedos at Dawn", "8 ½: When “He” Became “I”", "8½: A Film with Itself as Its Subject", "Paolo Sorrentino on Fellini’s Roma", "Roma, Rome: Fellini's City", "Amachord's Satire of Italian Provincial Life", "The Nights of Cabiria: My Kind of Clown", and "Fellini Satyricon: Not Just Friends". Of which, a majority will appear in Greg Olson's post-centennial retrospective at SIFF Cinema, including Fellini's two semi-autobiographical masterpieces, "La Dolce Vita" and "8 1/2", along with a set of earlier films, "Toby Dammit", and his first breakout, "I Vitelloni". From there, the series presents mid-period classics like "La Strada", "The Nights of Cabiria", and "Amarcord", fleshing out the body of his theatrical cinematic world with "Ginger and Fred", and "Juliet of the Spirits".