roma (1972)
Shadows of the past and the ghosts of antiquity lie in wait, stoic (they’ve got nothing but time after all), while the living run (at increasing speeds) toward their their pleasures and their destruction. Roma sees Fellini in a contemplative moment, a mark of the era in the early 1970’s, mulling over ideas of what they were trying to communicate with their work, what was a film really? What was society? Where are we all going anyway? The pervasive feeling of being the inheritors of the past and squandering a legacy handed down over thousands of years. Nowhere is this more chillingly communicated than in the vignette of tunneling beneath the city to build a metro line. The populace of Rome, eager to modernize, have been impatiently waiting for the construction of a subway, though the legal hurdles and challenges of carefully plotting its route to avoid disrupting archaeological heritage sites have made the job nearly impossible. As they reach another such point in their dig, they break through into an ancient Roman house, a place undisturbed for many centuries, with its first new encounter with the outside world. Within minutes, the fresh air pouring in begins to erase the frescos from the wall, destroying the past the moment we come into contact with it. For Fellini, this is the effect that the modern era has on our legacy; a global population so ready to embrace the new and bulldoze the old, we feel the deepest sense of loss at its destruction, a planetary balance of the ages washed away in the winds of time. He speaks of hopes and fears for the future, already cognizant that overpopulation and man’s pollutions could stifle the world he knew.
As the culture changes rapidly, one generation clashes with another and all of the vestiges of the society of his youth are quickly altering to fit this new era; even the clergy delights in a fashion parade to show off this year’s style of tradition. This is where Fellini’s film finds all of its charm, and all of its drudgery; many moments are told with enthusiastic remembrance, or wry combinations of the old and the new, never a lamentation and always embracing the tides of time in all of their eccentricities and caveats. He envisions himself as a young man in Rome with all of its contradictions and internal conflicts. He notes that the youth of today are not hung up on traditional sexual mores as laid out by the church, he sees them as freely engaging in sexual desire and fulfillment without grappling with the implications of immorality that plagued himself a young man. In essence, in the brothel, shown as a widely popular and generally accepted practice, the possibly ‘deviant’ behavior is given a place to express itself. Now he sees the unity of these worlds, out in the open, the private and the hidden coming into plain view. He also sees the past and the world of antiquity which was buried for centuries underneath the streets of Rome returning, again the hidden has come into public view. Roma sees Fellini at a pensive crossroads, no longer in the freedom of his 60’s pictures, which flew with reckless abandon toward anything his subconscious became preoccupied with. Here we see Fellini still regarding the past and present, yet with less of the joy of those pictures, with a dark eye toward what is to come. Roma exists in darkness, the rain, a traffic jam, the cars passing by quickly in their onslaught on the ancient city, a world that can perhaps no longer handle the speeds at which man desires to live, our wants outpacing what is possible on this planet, and what of it?
Roma embraces the sense of community that the city brings, the sense of alienation, the connection to the past and the overarching pillars of society that hold the whole thing up. Fellini skews these for us in ways that make them feel alien, but at the center of it all is the Rome that exists in all of his pictures, shown here transforming as it has for thousands of years. The ghosts of the past and the youth of the present, driven from their perch on this Spanish steps by Rome’s police force, as the elder generation sits very near to them, only in chairs with a plate of food in front of them, just as in Fellini’s youth. One completely acceptable pass time, one an affront to orderly society. Fellini sees his way of spending youth and theirs as two sides of the same coin. The film begins and ends in this rumination, never showing us beyond small glimpses of what life could be in all halls of all the different classes of people Rome has been home to in its time. Rome stands apart from all of its children, and yet is a part of all them and they it. It is with the sound of the engines of a motorcycle and loud clangs of traffic that Fellini leaves us with, we see only the colosseum out there in the distance, the past looms over the present in its way, it lives with the present in its way, it is drowned out by the present in its way. The dance of this life continues for Fellini, in a picture that, while not reaching his usual virtuoso heights, still exclaims the joy of living in a way only this filmmaker can.
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