Throughout his long career as a director, Federico Fellini never made what might be defined as a small movie, his tastes too inclined toward the epic and grandiose to broach anything resembling intimacy or exactitude. Yet at a certain point toward the end of the ‘70s, having already left behind Italy’s present-day struggles for fantastical treatments of individual and national history, his scope did shrink down to something resembling succinctness. Here, in a late period typified by the constrained theatrics of And the Ship Sails On…, he segued into a series of broad allegories contained within neat conceptual premises. Brimming over with ideas and emotions, these relatively concise movies are still marked by a typically Felliniesque character, to both their credit and detriment.
This era kicks off with 1978’s Orchestra Rehearsal, a slim 70-minute study of a professional musical ensemble preparing for a concert. Simmering with conflicts both personal and creative, the quarreling group’s fractious state transparently reflects that of modern Italy in what was the director’s first contemporarily-set work in nearly a decade. Following up on 1971’s The Clowns, it retains that film’s proto-docufiction format. Yet where that blended documentary footage with fictionalized segments and included the director himself as a character, this is pure fantasy with an even more quotidian focus, a fact that becomes increasingly clear as the drama mounts and the absurdity expands. Cracks hinted at in interview segments widen precipitously before the entire conflict descends into an outright brawl, any hints of verisimilitude going straight out the window.
For Italy, the ‘70s were a violent, tempestuous decade, known as the Years of Lead. A long economic recession reacted with the churn of political cross-currents. Just as the film depicts, a wide range of civic disagreements, which had been swept under the rug but not remotely settled in the boom years after World War II, were erupting back into view. Considering that many of the decade’s battles were labor-related, it’s fitting that unions and industry are a prominent focus here, although for the members of the orchestra, the awareness of their exploitation never translates into any broader sense of worker solidarity. Instead, everyone remains fixated on the utility of their own instrument, stressing its essential nature, casting aspersions on the others that surround them. The conductor, meanwhile, is a humorless taskmaster defined by his Continental affectations, peppering his language with tossed-off bits of German. This seems significant as well, for a country already once led into disaster by Germany, now still subject to its whims as a second-tier member of an EU increasingly intent upon exercising economic control.
Like much of Fellini’s work, there are lots of ideas at play here, but it’s hard to find much of substance, beyond a loose grab-bag of bourgeois gripes contained within a hastily sketched, sophomoric conceit. Despite his obsession with the national temperament, Fellini was never a strong political filmmaker, and his lack of a firm viewpoint, beyond disgust with the behavior of his constantly carping compatriots, further hampers the effort to shape a coherent statement. It’s appropriate, in this sense, that the film may have been a model for Gaspar Noe’s recent, similarly scattershot Climax, an equally madcap depiction of a dance company dosed with psychedelic drugs that impel all those simmering internal conflicts into overdrive. Here, there’s no such motivation or explanation, just a matted groundwork of disputes that eventually explode into chaos, just in time for the blowout conclusion. At this point, the 13th century church in which the group has been practicing begins to literally crumble, the victim of an apparently accidental demolition, although it appears at first as if the group’s fighting has itself torn the building asunder, the antique structure no longer capable of handling this building cloud of bad vibes.
That superannuated setting serves as the thread which connects peak-era ‘60s Fellini to the history films of the ‘70s and the chamber dramas of the following decade. His vision of Italy is one where the past is always present, history and myth commingling with the often-nauseating excesses of modernity. The big questions that emerge from this synthesis — how does one live in such a place? how does one live at all? — can never be answered. To his credit, Fellini does not attempt to, and while his frustrated efforts to even broach these subjects remain noble, they would only find their true expression in later, more fruitful endeavors.
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