William Bayer’s The Great Movies (1973) included the film as one of the top five in his category of “Cinema of Personal Expression.” I took his word-and the black and white image of a downtrodden travelling circus-for it. The year prior, a more pragmatic Martin Scorsese wrote a save-our-cinema essay for the March 2021 issue of Harper’s, where he reiterated La Strada ’s turning point.īefore seeing it, I read about La Strada from a book tipped from my parents’ bookshelf. This continued as recent to this writing as Alejandro Iñárritu’s Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (2022), a film that walked out on various limbs of Fellini-tended dreamscapes. Tambourine Man ,” the lyrics recalling its imagery, and, in passages, seeming to telegraph its viewing, as Dylan invites the listener to “hear vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme / To your tambourine in time, it’s just a ragged clown behind / I wouldn’t pay it any mind / It’s just a shadow you’re seeing that he’s chasing.” He takes us “out to the windy beach” and is “circled by the circus sands.” Within the sanctuaries of movies, La Strada would circle everywhere through the second half of the 20th century and upward. Bob Dylan, in his Biograph (1985) liner notes, cited La Strada as having inspired his song “ Mr. Pope Francis has mentioned La Strada as one of his favorite films, and correlated its themes to St. Whatever truth there is to that story, we know that the film broke its own heart by asking the question “Why was I born to this world?”Īnd we know that La Strada ’s influence went wide and its resonance still sounds. At the end of shooting, Fellini allegedly suffered a nervous breakdown. Through the very act of watching this film, I am not alone.įor the artist, La Strada marks Fellini’s transcendence from the neo-realism of his fellow countrymen and cohorts to the teeming surrealism that became his signature. Only later I realize that, in positing this truth, Fellini has performed the larger miracle of providing this essential human connection. I catch the illusion hiding in plain view, and, despite its allegorical metaphysics, see the profoundly basic idea that humans need one another, that we are not meant to be alone. I first watched the film young enough to cross the literal with the figurative, and old enough to call it a fairy tale. Winnowing this idea down further, this magic springs from his 1954 film La Strada. Instead, I like to believe they trace back to Federico Fellini. Maybe, with an alternative taken, I could have experienced such moments as a higher kind of grace. I might have ascribed meaning to these scattered fits of beauty without a received visual language for them. I sense a reminder like a tap on the shoulder that there are many roads and also I am already on one. I roll out my own abstract end and beginning when I arrive at a beach. My young daughter leaps from a giggle to a pout in her own miniature sad-clown act. In a show of strength, I measure the tell of vulnerability. In a lull of transition, I can picture a small band playing buoyant music and marching in a single-file line. It travelled with me.įrom there, the world could be porous enough for apparitions.Ī change in the dark rises with me out of my seat once a movie has ended, and rearranges the scenery on my way home. I wouldn’t doubt what expanded out of the grainy light of film. It helped that the word magic had already been generously applied here by the makers and the goers. The exception that endured was the medium of movies. But I grew into a consciousness that made religious belief feel limited and a self-consciousness that dismantled into pieces the art forms I attempted as craft. I could take this as given evidence of mystery flashing through life. What I invented could be as real as what already existed-a monster was obviously there a miracle could always occur a tale had a presence. I slipped through a childhood full of faith in what I could draw or pray to or conceive of. I trusted in something like magic before.
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