Fellini Roma

Screened the Inaugural Quarterly Art's Soirree...

"Roma" - (Italy, 1972; 128 min) Federico Fellini''s 1972 ode to the city of Rome is far from a coherent narrative, but as a selection of images and sounds celebrating the famed Italian capital, it''s dazzling and hugely enjoyable. Stylistically, it''s a perfect bridge between the excesses of Satyricon and the nostalgia of Amarcord, and it showcases the true love that Fellini had for the Eternal City. Mixing autobiographical flashbacks with the travails of a present-day movie company making a film about the city (headed up by Fellini himself), Roma is an impressionistic tour de force, delivered via Fellini''s unique cinematic vision.

Through it all, Fellini''s passion for Rome (and moviemaking) shines through, especially in the film''s climax, a dialogue-free sequence of motorcycles roaring through the city at night, a tour that ends at the magnificent Colosseum. At that marriage of past and present, Roma is about as perfect as cinema can get.

Antonio Monda is an Italian film director, writer, journalist, and professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He is the the US cultural correspondent for “La Repubblica” and writes the column “Central Park West” on Vanity Fair Italia. He has curated shows for the Guggenheim Museum, the MOMA, Lincoln Center, the American Museum of Moving Image, and the Academy. A promoter of Italian-American cultural relations, the New York Times, has called Monda a “one-man Italian cultural institute”.

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