Intervista has been termed a semi-documentary: This is in fact the filmed autobiography of Italian director Federico Fellini, framed in the form of an interview conducted by a Japanese film crew. As the interview progresses Fellini's mind wanders to his earliest days (the reenacted events conflict with several of the "official" stories of his life). His fascination with filmmaking is manifested in the "wonderland" atmosphere of the old Cinecitta studios. With the cooperation of Fellini's loyal co-workers, we are permitted to see tantalizingly brief excerpts (some self-mocking) of Fellini's modus operandi. A visit by Fellini and guest-star Marcello Mastroianni to Anita Ekberg's home leads to a lavish (and poignant) "reliving" of the 1961 Fellini/Mastroianni/Ekberg effort La Dolce Vita. The climax of Intervista scene invokes Fellini's previous inward-looking classic 8 1/2, with a novel twist calculated to send the director's disciples home with a knowing smile. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
Federico Fellini is gone from us now, with the sad consequence that there are no new Fellini films for us to view; but happily, before his death, he created a cinematic autobiography in Intervista, which shows the director at work at Cinecitta, surrounded by his associates from former films, most notably Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg. A young group of cineastes follows Fellini around for much of the film as he makes preparations for a film that doesn't seem to have any particular shape or direction, much like Fellini's masterpiece 8 1/2 (1963). But in 8 1/2, the future was all before him; now, Fellini has only the past, and he knows it. The scene in which Mastroianni and Ekberg watch themselves in Fellini's epic of modern decadence, La Dolce Vita (1960), is absolutely heartbreaking. On the screen, they are forever young; on the sofa, watching themselves nearly 30 years earlier, death awaits. There are numerous jokes about illness, impotence, the passing of time, and the vicissitudes of cinematic fortune, and Fellini presides over the entire affair with a benign air of resignation. Intervista isn't so much a film as it is a meditation on a life lived in the cinema; it is an inescapably minor work, and it knows it, but it is also a deeply felt examination of ambition and mortality. Once seen, the film will never been wholly forgotten; it reminds one of Jean Cocteau's dictum that "film shows us death at work." Intervista is a must-see for all Fellini fans, and a gentle and nostalgic valentine to his viewers, and to his own past. ~ Wheeler Winston Dixon, All Movie Guide
Quick: how many female jazz trombonists can you count on one hand? Not too many, to be sure. Priska Walss may not be a jazz performer, per se, but on this recording she presents a remarkable collection of freely improvised duets (some jazz-tinged) with pianist Gabriela Friedli, with whom she forges a special bond. The opening "Weibs" is the highlight of the album, with Walss sputtering forth with splendid technical skill. Elsewhere, she experiments, applying her classical technique to the vagaries of the pieces, offering fascinating takes on sometimes simple melodies. On "Traulich," for example, the trombonist's muted excursions fascinate, while on "Bubalus Bubalis," the disjointed phrasing sets the listener on edge. Walss rarely engages in extended techniques and neither does Friedli, though, to be sure, each is well versed in the vocabulary of the avant-garde. The trombonist's bombastic interpretation of "The Lost Trombone's Adventure" incorporates the advances of George Lewis by using vibrato, growls, flutters, and gruff low tones to make her points. Walss and Friedli perform as a single purposeful unit, with an extraordinary synergy. If the music sometimes tires, it has little to do with the imaginative improvisations; sometimes the compositions are simply uninteresting. The kernels are there, though, for something more, and it is not difficult to imagine Walss and Friedli doing something even more adventuresome, perhaps with a larger ensemble. ~ Steven Loewy, All Music Guide
Interviewed by a Japanese TV crew for a news report on his latest film, Fellini takes the viewer behind the scenes at Cinecittà. A nighttime set is prepared for a sequence that Fellini defines as “the prisoner’s dream” in which his hands grope for a way out of a dark tunnel. With advancing age and weight, Fellini is finding it difficult to escape by simply flying away but when he does, he contemplates Cinecittà from a great height.
The next morning, Fellini accompanies the Japanese TV crew on a brief tour of the studios. As they walk past absurd TV commercials in production, Fellini’s casting director presents him with four young actors she’s found to interpret Karl Rossmann, the leading role in the maestro's film version of Kafka’sAmerika. Fellini introduces the Japanese to the female custodian of Cinecittà (Nadia Ottaviani) but she succeeds in putting off the interview by disappearing into the deserted backlot of Studio 5 to gather dandelions to make herbal tea. Meanwhile, Fellini’s assistant director (Maurizio Mein) is on location with other crew members at the Casa del Passeggero, a once cheap hotel now converted into a drugstore. Fellini wants to include it in his film about the first time he visited Cinecittà as a journalist in 1938 during the Fascist era.[1] Past and present intermingle as Fellini interacts with his younger self played by aspiring actor, Sergio Rubini. After the crew reconstruct the facade of the Casa del Passeggero elsewhere in Rome, a fake tramway takes young Fellini/Rubini from America’s Far West with Indian warriors on a clifftop to a herd of wild elephants off the coast of Ethiopia. Arriving at Cinecittà, he sets off to interview matinee idol, Greta Gonda.[2]
Seamlessly, the illusion takes over the realities of moviemaking as the viewer is thrown into two feature films being directed by tyrannical directors. But only for a short while; for the rest of the film, Fellini and his assistant director (Maurizio Mein) scramble to recruit the right cast and build the sets for the film version of Amerika, a fictitious adaptation that Fellini uses as a pretext to shoot his film-in-progress. This allows Fellini/Rubini to go back and forth in time to experience filmmaking first-hand including disgruntled actors who failed their auditions, Marcello Mastroianni in a TV commercial as Mandrake the Magician, a bomb threat, a visit to Anita Ekberg’s house where she and Mastroianni re-live their La dolce vita scenes, screen tests of Kafka’s Brunelda caressed in a bathtub by two young men, and an inconvenient thunderstorm that heralds the production collapse of Amerika with an attack by bogus Indians on horseback wielding television antennae as spears.
Back inside Studio 5 at Cinecittà, Intervista concludes with Fellini’s voiceover, “So the movie should end here. Actually, it’s finished.” In response to producers unhappy with his gloomy endings, the Maestro ironically offers them a ray of sunshine by lighting an arc lamp.
Blurring the line between documentary and fiction, Intervista threads four films into one[3] or a film-within-four-films:
Film 1 is a television news report: Japanese journalists arrive on the set to interview Fellini and his crew preparing sets, location scouting, searching for actors, inspecting photographs, and shooting screen tests. Fellini, Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni appear as themselves.
Film 2 is filmed autobiography: while interviewed by the Japanese, Fellini evokes memories (real or invented) of his first visit to Cinecittà in 1938 as a young journalist commissioned to interview a female matinee idol.
Film 3 is the making of a non-existent movie at Cinecittà, an adaptation of Kafka's Amerika.
Film 4 is the movie itself: Intervista subsumes all three films, making them cohere into the Maestro’s portrait of himself and cinema.[4]
^ Interviewed by Alain Finkielkraut for the Messager europeen, Fellini explained that the “first time I visited Cinecittà, I was 18 years old, a journalist from Rimini who considered Cinecittà as something legendary.” In Fellini, Intervista, 228.
^ "I came to interview an actress named Greta Gonda and it was the first interview I conducted, the first time I went to Cinecittà, and the first encounter with an actress I liked very much.” Fellini, Intervista, 228
^ Olivier Curchod, "Intervista: J'écris Paludes" in Positif, 168
^ In an essay on Intervista, Carlo Testa argues that “autobiography wins out over the transposition of literature into film.” Cf. Testa, "Cinecittà and Amerika: Fellini Interviews Kafka" in Fellini: Contemporary Perspectives, 199
