The first movie we watched in our supposed Cinema 2 series (an idea all but abandoned at this point) was Amarcord by Fellini. I would consider myself a Fellini fan, not the least because my mother in law considers his work obscene, but I’m not into his, like, famous movies. I’m into Nights of Cabiria and Juliet of the Spirits, even La Strada somewhat - the movies with Giulietta.
Sidenote: I have trouble with the word cinema. While exploring this trouble the other day, I realized it’s because when I think the word cinema, I assume it EXCLUSIVELY encompasses the work of David Lynch and Todd Haynes. Nothing else.
When Slim Volume and I had been together only a couple of months, we went to the Henry Art Museum on the University of Washington campus. I had been there with my Evergreen program, Transcendent Practices, the month prior, when Kaden had mono. I was distracted; we’d just started sharing a room and he got really sick.
Our friend Giselle showed up to dye her hair red and brought some older guy who was wearing an Iron Maiden sweatsuit. Seriously. Sweatpants (not track pants) with Iron Maiden, in the Iron Maiden font, printed down the legs. Just this August, I was trying to write something about it, while drunk and stoned and watching the David Allan Coe parts of Heartworn Highways, with sound, while also listening to Devendra Banhart’s first two records on shuffle, all of this on headphones. I wrote: “DAC’s Rhinestone Cowboy trousers = Giselle’s friend in the Iron Maiden sweatpants when [Slim Volume] had acute healing crisis (mono).” So Slim Volume was home sick, we were 20 years old, he had to call out from Starbucks and they made him call his coworkers on his own to have someone cover his shift even though he couldn’t get out of bed (soon after he was fired because he had been a couple minutes late 3 times). I did mushrooms with my co-workers from McDonald’s and Slim Volume was in bed with a fan on in yellow lamp light and his lips were all fucked up (they really were, like, with eczema) and I envisioned us in a World War I hospital (I’d read All Quiet on the Western Front in high school). (Recently we discussed this and decided that I was Walt Whitman befriending Civil War veterans in a past life. Taking selfies and tit pics with them). One of my co-workers’ boyfriend was installing new windows in our apartment the next day. That was weird.
My class went to the Henry Art Museum. We had only been together for a few days, and I’d missed one of them, taking Slim Volume to the doctor. The art exhibit had a room where you looked out a hole in the roof and you couldn’t believe you were looking at the sky. The art exhibit had a wall where the flickering lights of a television were reflected. The different colors displayed were outrageous. A classmate who had clearly just left home for the first time was astonished to learn that mites lived in his eyelashes and were causing the shifting cloudiness in his vision. An older classmate was noticeably annoyed at having to tell him this. I ate a sandwich that had just mayonnaise and green olives, because that was what I had to make a sandwich with that morning. I remember it being gross.
I wanted to take Slim Volume to see the art exhibit. We went when he was better. The secondary exhibit was Fellini’s sketches.
I felt like I knew about Fellini, although I had never seen any of his films, because something about Patti Smith. I am going to see if I can figure out where I got that notion. I am going to stop writing this and look at some Patti Smith materials right now.
I don’t have the patience to find it. Ctrl+f has spoilt me and I can’t consider reading the entirety of Babel right now; I just read it for a bit and there was so much finger fucking! I don’t remember that. I know exactly where I could look online, but we have used 75% of the data until the 22nd. What did Patti Smith write about Fellini?
I had some notion that I knew about Fellini, because of Patti Smith (I was really obsessed w/Patti Smith in high school). His drawings, at this secondary art exhibit, were of soft, round women and men with comical genitalia. I felt badass enjoying his drawings. I remember them being fun; joyous; delightful. The first time I saw The Big Lebowski, I saw Jackie Treehorn’s drawing as Fellini’s.
Amarcord has the same color palette as The Serpent’s Egg, and takes place around the same time, and I assume was made around the same time. I am imagining that this means they used the same type of film/film coloring (I don’t know shit about this aspect of cinema). The first thing I said about Amarcord was that the color palette reminded me of Revolutionary War themed wallpaper from the American bicentennial. Which makes sense.
Amarcord’s strapping young lad reminds me of Jeff Bridges in The Last Picture Show (speaking of The Big Lebowski): the corpulent, nerdy author/filmmaker (McMurtry or Fellini - though obviously McMurtry is a fucking turd and Fellini is cool) visioning himself as an athletic blonde with 20/20 vision. I will never forgive Larry McMurtry for continuing to give Duane younger and younger women throughout the never-ending book series (the motherfucker even gets viagra for christ sake), while making Sonny into a “creep” who ends up just dying. I’m just saying, that’s what it reminds me of. Like I would portray myself as Dawn Weiner not the cheerleader in American Beauty, you know? (ps. I acknowledge my privilege as cisgendered, average BMI, and white. I’m not a corpulent nerdy man. I totally appreciate the corpulent nerdy men that I know! I just don’t know what it would be like to be them, obviously. Maybe I would portray myself as a strapping young lad on viagra. Or maybe I’d portray myself as Dawn Weiner).
I like that Fellini (in Amarcord) does portray corpulent characters not as comic relief but as people with realistic desires and also as sensible objects of desire.
Sidenote: Slim Volume reminds me that being corpulent in Italy - then and now - doesn’t have the same connotations as being corpulent in present-day USA. But I am watching this film in present-day USA.
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