Martin Scorsese on Fellini and the devaluing of movies as "content"

If you want your love for cinema reenergized you'll want to head to Harpers to read Martin Scorsese's wonderful essay on Federico Fellini and his 1960s heyday and artistic influence. Though much of the essay is a love letter to cinema and Fellini himself (and I Vitelloni, La Dolce Vita, and 8½ in particular) Scorsese also sticks his neck out again to comment on today's cinematic landscape. He always runs into trouble when he does this because people are so quick to misinterpret or take notions out of context or dismiss artistic concerns as "get off my lawn!" generational warfare. But art is for everyone of all ages and it's important and we should always rise up in its defense. That's not being 'out of touch,' that's simply caring about something deeply!

Take this bit for example, in which he discusses streaming culture and the way it devalues movies as "content" a business term, no longer an artistic one...

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Fellini @ 100: His Self-Referential Masterwork "8½"

A few volunteers from Team Experience are revisiting Federico Fellini classics for his centennial. Here's Eurocheese...

A filmmaker stands out as a master because of the distinctiveness of their voice, and how they speak specifically to the human condition. Well, that, and a filmography where we can point to classics, even stone-cold masterpieces. If I was to ask you which director seemed to examine life through a fun house mirror, you might be able to guess we were talking about Fellini. I hadn’t rewatched 8½ (1963) in several years and one of the things I had forgotten, maybe because of the joyous memories of so many individual scenes, is the way the razor sharp editing creates such a sense of panic right from the start; we're watching our protagonist suffocating with hundreds of eyes on him. The iconic image of the director flying high in the sky like a kite, only to be pulled down to the ocean, adds terror to the upcoming, more realistic scenes. This movie itself must provide answers for him to escape his terrible fate.

The way the film consistently rushes one character after another at the camera gives us a taste of the control Mastroianni’s Guido is experiencing. He's both suffering from a god complex where he can toy with the depictions he is sending us, and building towards a fate he's desperate to avoid...

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