first time I watched Fellini was the color film "I Remember, Think Back then" ("Amacord") shot in 1973. It seems that this movie is also a gathering. All the elements in his previous movies, the seaside town of Mini, the swinger, the big milk powder in the red boy girl, the comic-style town life, the clown, the fascist, the lunatic, the love affairs, the carnival, in fact, this movie A large part of the plot has already appeared in his 1963 "Eight and Half". Fellini has been filming his autobiography all his life. Which creator is not? When he was old, everything became splendid again. The hometown that had been lost in reality was rebuilt on the screen. The town changed at four o'clock. The clowns and romantic ladies have become fictional minis. The living props of people's laughter are shining, but misty.
The most fascinating part of Italian movies is the carnival absurdity. For a man like me who was born north of the Yangtze River in China, the fog and splendid myths and legends of the Mediterranean are the real distance, the siren of the sea. Singing and the witch burned on the shore, a worker who steals a bicycle, in "I Remember, Missing Years", people celebrated the arrival of spring in a wonderful way. Every household in the town took out unused waste items. The center of the square is piled up into a hill. On the hill is an evil thing, one of the dolls of the evil witch, and then everyone plays music, while the most coquettish lady in town lights the pile of objects, which symbolizes evil things in the raging fire. , One of the evil and cold witches was burned to death, and then everyone danced around the fire and reveled. In this event representing the coming of spring, all the important characters in the film have appeared one by one.
I know that in the Middle Ages, people burned real witches, not witch dolls, but in Fellini’s screen town of Mini, the dolls and the comic-style characters are a carnival absurdity, together with the later film. The peacocks appearing in the snow, the white cows appearing in the fog, the kind of stunned, absurd scenes between poetic fantasy and allegory, are all images of hometown constructed by Fellini, this disappeared. Hometown is actually the absurd destiny shared by modern people.
At this moment, I juxtapose the Spring Festival that I experienced when I was a child and the scene of burning witch dolls in the town of Mini. I found that the two are not as far away as they seem. With Fellini, he painstakingly reproduced his childhood on the screen. The scene is an attempt to find the lost homeland in the work. At the same time, it is also searching for the lost time, youth, lust, growth, and everything entangled around him, because these form the ultimate existence of Fellini, Just like I am writing, why should I write? I can breathe the joy and happiness of the past Spring Festival between the lines.
In the film, the chronological sequence of the changes of the four seasons is obvious. He uses everything that appears in the screen to indicate the characteristics of the seasons. Catkins flying in spring and golden wheat fields in autumn. People lose their direction in the thick fog. Playing snowball fights in the heavy snow, dancing in the falling leaves... This cycle of time is actually the elderly Fellini’s expressive expression of life and the world. At this moment, his creation is not only aimed at social reality, but on life itself and life itself. To speak directly in eternal time, we must know our origin, where does our sense of happiness come from? And the moving and laughing scenes that Minnie appeared in all traveled through the seasonal changes. This travel brought a kind of fluidity to the film. It flowed in a virtual time and space. (This time and space may be parallel to our time and space. ) And those clowns and lunatics are constant beacons in the flow and change. If there are no lunatics in a small town, it will be greatly diminished. The madman is an exaggerated sign of his hometown. He is an unchanging fable. As mentioned above, Fellini is the lunatic who never tirelessly played the accordion in the film. After the carnivals left, he still played the piano in the wilderness and played the same tune.
This lunatic playing the violin in the dimly lit place moved me. There are always people who sing eternal ballads untimely. To him yesterday, it was an inexhaustible treasure. His unchanging stubbornness confronted the world. Change, even if no one wants to listen to his ballads, he has to sing for himself in his heart.
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