AFTER FINDING A VERY GOOD quality and I'd guess entirely pirated online posting of Frederico Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits and watching it, I wondered how long ago it was I watched an entire feature-length movie. It's been long enough that I don't remember. I was never a devoted movie-watcher, either in theaters or on TV or video. Lots of movies I saw were on TV, especially whenever they were on a public TV station where you wouldn't have to watch commercials. Don't even know if they do that anymore now, having given up TV entirely when they made the switch to HD.
I watched most of Fellini's movies as I could see them and saw Juliet of the Spirits once, as I recall with subtitles a few years after it was made. The one I saw online last weekend us far better quality than the copy I watched and didn't have subtitles so I understood very little of the sound track except for a little in French and a tiny bit in English. My knowledge of Italian isn't very good, at all. But I was struck at how little I needed to understand of what was being said to understand what was going on. A lot of that was because of the very fine silent acting of Giulietta Masina (Fellini was her husband) whose expressions expressed that she was always looking past what was being said and done around her. It confirmed what I concluded, the characters in the movie were either spouting useless nonsense or lies (her husband the biggest liar in the movie) that demonstrated the banal futility of their lives. Watching it with such hazy memories of the text was something like my experience of trying to learn to understand spoken, vernacular Spanish by watching telenovellas only on a far higher level. I didn't need to understand much about who the bad girls and guys were, you'd have to be a stupid as a Republican to not get it from the costumes and makeup. The central story of Juliet becoming aware of her husband's infidelity and her reaction to that and getting past that isn't that much different and it's almost incidental to the substance of the movie, so little is actually made of it. It was an interesting choice that in the last scenes of the movie, it was her own mother who tried to stop her from making that break.
Watching it made me remember something I'd concluded from watching his other movies, that they are mostly a documentary and commentary on the vapid materialism and emptiness of post-WWII mainstream materialism. Unlike the reaction to the corruption of church and government in the Reformation, the materialist reformation of the 20th century didn't try for anything that would be better, it was more of a surrender to what made institutions secular and church objectionable to start with. I can't say that I find there's any positive recommendation for living a better life in any of it. I find that's true of most of the literature and, especially, theatrical presentation I've seen in my lifetime. Most of it from the 20th century.
I wouldn't deny that Fellini's movie making is artistic, if sometimes wanting of substance. The use of color in the movie is rightly famous, it is fascinating to watch as is the use of bizarre imagery in the supernatural, perhaps merely fantasy experiences of Juliet, but I kept thinking of what a waste of potential it amounted to. But that's true of almost every movie I've ever watched, even those with an underlying or overt attempt at presenting edifying content. It reminded me, in the end of the weekend I spent reading through a large collection of the music of Eric Satie which I came away from with an abiding and life long revulsion for him and his music, apart from a few of his pieces - no, probably not the ones you'd expect, if I hear those Gnossiennes and Gymnopédies again I might go off of music completely.
I don't know if I could watch my favorite of his movies, Amarcord again, I'm sure I don't have to see Satyricon again any more than I need to watch Salo again. Maybe 8 1/2 or La Dolca Vita but I don't think I need to watch most of the movies I saw again. Maybe any movie. I'm really off of them. For the most part I think it is the most lavishly expensive medium for producing the most minimal amount of actual substance. Opera is practically a poor cousin to it, though a lot of the same criticism could be made of easily 98% of that.
Update: I would contrast this least conventional operatic but most effective production of Schoenberg's Moses Und Aron
Bochumer Symphoniker
Conductor: Michael Boder
Moses - Dale Duesing
Aron - Andreas Conrad
Ein junges Mädchen - Ilse Eerens
Eine Kranke - Karolina Gumos
Ein junger Mann - Finnur Bjarnason
Der nackte Jüngling - Michael Smallwood
Ein anderer Mann/Ephraimit - Boris Grappe
Ein Priester - Renatus Meszar
Vier nackte Jungfrauen - Ilse Eerens, Hanna Herfurtner, Karolina Gumos - Constance Heller
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