FELLINI: SPECTACULAR OBSESSIONS at TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King West), from today (June 30) to September 18. 416-968-FILM. See Indie & Rep Film. Rating: NNNN
If you want to know who Federico Fellini was, watch La Dolce Vita. His 1960 study of decadence and loathing in postwar Italy gathers and distills all of Fellini’s obsessions – celebrity, popular culture, misdirected romantic obsession, the idea that art can revitalize even the most ruined soul – into a single three-hour blast of pop cinema.
Everything you could ever want to know about Fellini is contained in this one film, which is why it’s the centrepiece of TIFF Bell Lightbox’s new exhibition, Fellini: Spectacular Obsessions.
Opening today in the Lightbox gallery space and running through September 18, Spectacular Obsessions explores Fellini’s life and cinema through the prism of his iconic work, the gallery space broken into clearly delineated subsections.
Walls of publicity photos and magazine covers comment on one another like buzzing paparazzi. Anita Ekberg’s iconic Dolce Vita fountain dance, and the Italian media’s reaction to it, are considered in an alcove near the back, the better to suggest its scandalous nature. And pages from the sketchbook in which Fellini feverishly drew his dreams are positioned alongside stills from City Of Women, which brings many of those dreamscapes to vivid life.
The exhibition is supported by two film programs – a retrospective of the Italian neo-realist cinema from which Fellini sprang, which starts later this month, and a series of double features pairing Fellini’s films with complementary features chosen by filmmakers, critics and programmers.
Fellini/Felliniesque: “Dream” Double Bills kicks off tonight (Thursday, June 30) with Atom Egoyan’s pairing of 8½ with Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Beware Of A Holy Whore. But I’m much more excited about seeing Fellini’s magnificent short film Toby Dammit, produced for the 1968 Edgar Allan Poe anthology Spirits Of The Dead, alongside Dario Argento’s Suspiria Saturday (July 2), matched up by screenwriter-producer James Schamus, with superfan Guillermo del Toro providing the introduction.
Other pairings include Sunday’s (July 3) double bill of Roma and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, deftly selected by Apichatpong Weerasethakul later in the month, TIFF director Piers Handling smartly matches Fellini’s Casanova with Hal Ashby’s Shampoo (July 23) and the critic Molly Haskell connects the coming-of-age drama I Vitelloni to Barry Levinson’s scrappy, distinctly American Diner (August 8).
It’s a savvy reversal of the way double features were used in the Tim Burton exhibition last winter. Burton’s films were paired with the work that inspired or influenced them here, we’re led to understand the way Fellini’s influence permeated cinema around the world – and how we’re all the better for it.
normw@nowtoronto.com
