"Casanova" from "The Director's Talk"

Casanova described in the film is indeed a real person, an 18th-century Italian priest, writer, spy and diplomat, but mainly known as an adventurer and swinger. Casanova was born in Venice in 1725 to actor parents who died early, and he was later abandoned by his mother. While studying at the Seminary of Padua, he began his bohemian career when he was expelled for misconduct. He had been a priest, had fought in wars, had been a theatre violinist and a cardinal's secretary. Still restless after being taken in by a senator in Venice, he began wandering around Europe in 1750. When he returned to Venice in 1755, someone accused him of developing a Freemasonry organization and was sentenced. He escaped from prison the following year and went to France, where he became a celebrity in the financial world for introducing lottery tickets to France. Later, he roamed in many European countries such as the Netherlands, often fornicating with women, playing tricks, and using various means to make money. Even the detectives in Venice became his close friends. He wrote a lot of books, "My Life" as many as 6 volumes, but it was not officially published in Italy until 1960-1962. He flaunts his adventures in this work, trying to portray himself as a learned, educated, and virtuous man.

But Casanova in Fellini's film is the exact opposite. Fellini just used Casanova's "My Life" as a pretext, using some events in his life as material, to create a negative image opposite to the positive image, he is a "should not be so". ' typical, he epitomizes all that is ugly. Of course, Fellini's depiction of this 18th-century villain is not to simply criticize him, but to express today's era through him, and to let the audience understand and recognize today's era through this character.

The Casanovas in the film are tall, energetic, proud, confident, cunning, unscrupulous, and shameless. When he first seduces a nun in the film, he shows her a mechanical bird that flaps its wings and sings when people have sex. Throughout the film, whenever Casanova commits adultery with a woman, the mechanical bird flaps its wings and sings to the melody of Liszt's piano piece "The Bell" based on Paganini's violin concerto .

Here again, Fellini uses his usual symbolism: Casanova is, after all, nothing but a sex machine. When he sees a woman, he wants to hook up, but he ends up going to bed and then going his separate ways, like a passerby. There is no emotion, no affection, just sexual venting, just the fulfillment of individual desires, and nothing else. And this kind of venting is public, there is no shame at all, you can vent in front of mechanical birds, even in front of diplomats. In "the city where the Pope is", he was openly competing and having sex with others in front of so many men, women, children and nobles, and he was extremely brazen. And the phrase "in the city where the Pope is" is what he said. He wants others to treat this city as a holy city, and his behavior should be polite, but he himself is blatantly doing such shameless deeds, and his rogue and hooligan face is exposed. Not only did he vent his love, he didn't care about life or death, as his relationship with the pale seamstress showed. He doesn't treat his love partner as a person, but only treats her as a tool to vent, and throws it away after use. He regards sexual vent as more important than life. When he jumped into the Thames, it seemed he was going to take his own life without hesitation. When he looked back to see the tall and attractive woman, he threw all the insults he had just received and his determination to die because of it all over the sky, and went back to pursue the prey to vent. In his opinion, personality, face, his own determination, and even his own life are insignificant things, women are above everything else, and sexual desire is above everything else. In a word, in the aspect of sex and love, Casanova portrayed in the film is a cold, shameless, dissolute person, a person who only knows sex but does not have love, a person without personality, vulgarity, without human dignity and human beings worth of people.

In other respects, Casanova is also an underdog. On the occasion of the gathering of the upper class, others said that he was a "remarkable person", which can also be said to be a trap that Fellini deliberately set for Casanova: the audience naturally wanted to see where he was outstanding, and he His actual performance shows that he is precisely a person who is not outstanding, or a person who is outstanding in terms of meanness, obscenity, and shamelessness. In Parma, he seduced Enriceta. She is young, beautiful, artistically gifted, and very seductive. Casanova should be very fond of her, and they also hooked up. After Casanova found out that his sweetheart had been taken away by a "more important person", he was heartbroken, indignant, and even determined to "take the entire European army to fight this robber". His humanity seems to prevail, he seems to have become a bloody person, his determination can be described as firm, and his tone is indeed admirable. But when the man told him lightly that the robber who took his sweetheart was "there," just seconds before he made up his mind with a firm tone, his impassioned instantly vanished and he just burst into tears. It turned out that he was a bloody person on the surface, brave in words, and impassioned in private. When he actually put it into action, his bloody, heroic and impassioned people suddenly became petty, cowardly and depressed, and became a useless person.

In London, when the men were beaten one by one by the big women in the arm wrestling match, the confident and proud Casanova became angry again, shouting that he was "a Venetian" and came to the stage, at the expense of his own reputation. This woman competes. At this time, Casanova can be said to be bloody, like a man. However, when the two were at a stalemate, he began to pray to the woman in a low voice. His despicableness and shamelessness overcame the bloody moment just now, revealing his despicable nature. Of course he could only fail.

Casanova is a very conceited person, a complacent, ignorant person. Yes, he wrote poems and translated the Iliad, but he was by no means a real poet, he just wrote occasional poems. However, he regarded himself as a celebrity, and he boasted about himself in front of the Roman aristocracy. Saying that he is "a special person who grew up under the influence of British culture", has physical strength, and has "a physique built on the basis of culture". When he jumped into the Thames, he even said boldly, "I am going to talk to Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto." He compared himself with these famous poets who wrote immortal poems, which shows that he thinks highly of himself. And he also asked himself "what did he do for mankind", which was not a big deal. In fact, what can a man like him do for mankind? After that bragging in Rome, he did win, but what kind of victory was that? It is a victory in venting animalistic desires, and it is not only incomparable with the "cultural foundation" he boasted, but also incompatible. His victory was not something to be proud of, but it was a step towards death for him, because he was lustful and exhausted, and finally fainted. He was cured by a doctor, but he still lived a lewd life, and finally ended up with no place to stand, and his requests for recommendations were ignored. Even at this time, when there is no real woman for him to vent, he still uses a mechanical doll to vent, which is really hopeless. After being scorned and abused by the earl's servants, he can only return to his hometown alone, recalling the past in misery. This man with only animal nature, no humanity, self-confidence, arrogance, and dissoluteness and shamelessness has finished his life.

Why did Fellini choose an 18th-century character for a film? How does he feel about this character? In a reporter's question after the filming, Fellini said that he imagined Casanova as a fascist who showed the arrogance, conceit and meanness of men. There were many actors who offered to play the role at the time, and Fellini chose Sutherland, the ugliest of them all. That's his attitude towards the character. Fellini also said that women might think that the way the film is presented hurts them, but they don't understand that this is a film about Italian men who are still young and uncivilized. He explained: "This is the adventure story of a vicious puppet, who has no thoughts, feelings and beliefs of his own." The man in Fellini's film is such a man without feelings and thoughts, who pursues only rough, vulgar, Typical of lewd enjoyment. This kind of pursuit will put people and society in such a state: the goal of all pursuits is possession and consumption, and the final foothold of human activities is endless pleasure, that is, material consumption and sexual pleasure. After such pursuit is satisfied, a new emptiness will appear, and then pursue it again. In this cycle, there is no motivation for development and no qualitative leap. Such a rigid circular movement cannot make people communicate with each other, and cannot make people communicate with real cultures and civilizations. And this situation is exactly the typical situation of the consumer society in the 20th century. Therefore, Fellini's critique of Casanova is a critique of all the evils and rotten things of this century. The scum, scum and adventurers like Casanova constitute an abnormal society, a corrupt society, a degenerate society, and this society can only end up in the end.

Fellini said after watching Casanova's "My Life" that the work only aroused his unhappiness, anger and annoyance, "It was this feeling of unhappiness and disgust that prompted me to make this film. ”, and the entire film is thus “designed from the point of view of a hopeless emptiness”. He said: "No thought, no sensationalism, no emotion or even aesthetic feeling, not the 18th century, no criticism, nothing. Just a funeral film. Then you ask, there is nothing left. What? The rest are forms, they make up a huge volume, something cold, rigid, hypnotic. It seems that I'm dazed again, and that's the only thing that allows me to tell about Casanova and his The starting point of a life that does not exist."

It can be said that it is the story of Casanova, the thoughtless, emotionless and arrogant adventurer who evoked Fellini's hatred of contemporary society, and therefore expressed this story in such a form. Fellini hates parasites like this thoughtless adventurer who are completely empty-hearted, who only pay attention to what can be possessed, exploited, acquired, stolen, like a card. Like Sanova, there is no flash of thought, no head, no desire to try to understand reality, to affect it. They have no kindness and human emotion, are lazy and lack humanity. They, like Casanova, are only human in appearance. They are the opposite, the antithetical, who bring society to disintegration, to death. Fellini's criticism of Casanova is not a personal criticism, but to arouse people's thinking and association through the life of this scum. His target is not just a Casanova, but a character like this some of them and the society that is mainly composed of them.