Absolute Fellini flirts with the cinematic great

After its series of critically acclaimed programs delving into the liaison between cinema and other art forms, the POP Cinema (國民戲院) turns to auteurship. Starting today, the cinema presents a retrospective of Federico Fellini's 23 films as well as an exhibition of around 100 film posters, sketches and costumes from Fellini's Roma and Amarcord, which are on loan from Italy's Fondazione Federico Fellini and Comune de Rimini. This is an experience unlikely to be duplicated for years to come.

Festival curator Wang Pai-chang (王派章) and his team spent the past two years tracking down the whereabouts of the copyright owner of each film, negotiating and obtaining permission to show them. The copyright fees and US$954 screening fee per film means that even if the program sees a full-house audience, the revenue couldn't cover the expenditure.

The festival is a rare chance for local audiences to revisit on the silver screen the whimsical world of Fellini, in which the sea, town squares, whores and the circus are combined with satire on Catholicism, a longing for innocence, revelry and debauchery to form surrealistic fantasies. The Italian director's works, known for being simultaneously approachable and elusive, were influenced by Italian neo-realism and abstractionism.

Yet to scholar, critic and curator Wang, there exists another way of interpreting Fellini's works. It has nothing to do with reality or the representation of reality but with a constant yearning to flee from the concrete, and adventure into places foreign, even to the director himself.

Italian realism dominates Fellini's early works, such as The White Sheik and The Road, with clean-cut structures, strong sentiments and tragic endings. Later, the director moves into more mythical work with movies like Vitelloni and Nights of Cabiria in which the protagonist bids farewell to the sleeping townsfolk and embark on a journey into the unknown future.

His most enduring works, however, were those made toward the end of his career: films such as The Sweet Life in which Fellini's alter-ego Marcello Mastroianni plays out the archetypal character who doesn't want to grow up and is denied the chance to become a complete person.

Masterpieces such as 8 1/2, Fellini - Satyricon and Amarcord weave together a web of childhood memories, nostalgia, longing, fairy tales and dreams that are echoed in Fellini's last work The Voice of the Moon.

"The absolute in Absolute Fellini is, in fact, ironic since there is no sense of absoluteness and completeness in Fellini's films," Wang said. "I see in his works the director's desire to press the characters to become fully-formed individuals and refusal to give audiences tangible and concrete things, since the concrete means that there are traces to follow, a logic to be revolved around and from which a narration develops. Fellini adopts a nearly autocratic manner to expel purports, ends and thus becomes complete."

The immortal image of Fellini aside, his hand drawings on display speak of the significant aspiration of his caricatures. A comic artist before his career as a director, Fellini maintained the habit of sketching and drawing, creating visions long before scripts were written.

"Fellini creates imagery out of imagery. That is also why his films differ from the conventional narration as they just keep deviating outwardly," Wang said.