I clowns – Federico Fellini

un documentario (così viene classificato) di Fellini è sempre un film di Fellini.
qui c'è la pietas e il divertimento, il racconto di un mondo che muore e il piacere delle cose semplici, il riso e il pianto.
imperdibile - Ismaele

…Fellini's playful but slightly melancholy work shows a way in the world has changed; clowns are still around, but they are overshadowed to the point we might not even realize it. Fellini longs for the aging clowns to be replaced by glorious new ones so future generations can have wondrous experiences similar to the ones he recreates, but if nothing else he's done the world the best service he could, preserving for all eternity some of the masters who keep us from becoming too serious.

da qui

…A great deal of energy has been expended trying to label The Clowns as a "minor" Fellini movie, and the distinction was important at the time, since Fellini had elevated himself to the status of the world's most celebrated and admired filmmaker. (His last name began to appear at the front of his film titles.) But now that that has all blown over, The Clowns can be seen and enjoyed for what it is. It's a simple, sweet tribute to something that Fellini loved and felt didn't get enough attention…

da qui

… Whether read as universal or personal (or both), The Clowns’ marriage of yin and yang is all the more impressive for embracing a pathos largely out of fashion amidst the heavily political, deconstructionist, and antispectacle art cinema of the late Sixties/early Seventies. This is where The Clowns fails for some: where La Strada and other earlier successes develop pathos from dramatic situations and fully rounded characters, The Clowns slips into sentimentality by turning to an unearned, last-second pathos that cancels out the film’s previous pluralistic and unresolved approaches toward its subject. Here it isn’t very hard to disagree. Fellini may not be working with three-dimensional characters or a conventionally structured narrative in The Clowns, but nonetheless understands his subject as a source and symbol of a pathos, one that can provide the proper counterweight to art cinema’s tendency toward purely intellectual concerns and methods. Perhaps that’s what makes The Clowns so powerful: it not only longs for but also enacts an amalgamation of low comedy and high experimentation, personal essay and documentary-like journalism that in a perfect world would be both popular and challenging, fun and thought-provoking. The Clowns is not only nostalgic for a lost world, but also excitedly proposes a utopian art.

hda qui

…'I clowns' (1970), una producción televisiva (programada el día de Navidad, y estrenada en los cines al día siguiente), es otro rutilante derroche de ingenio y agudeza,en donde ficción y documento, poesía, prosa y ensayo, se entreveran de un modo sorprendente, como si las múltiples capas de lo 'real' se conjugan con los múltiples ángulos de 'la mirada'. El escenario queda manifiesto en las primeras secuencias, el 'entre'. Un afuera que es una carpa de circo, evidenciada como maqueta, que se erige en un amanecer, frente a la ventana de un niño, del 'yo', que no es otro que la representación del propio Fellini (cuya voz conduce la narración). Una representación en una pista de circo, tétrica, sombría, como sombras turbias, da paso a la primera equparación (paralelismo) con la realidad, en el espacio de la evocación, pues Fellini apunta la comparación entre aquellos payasos de la pista y una serie de personajes que conoció en la realidad cotidiana, seres de la misma estirpe, grotescos. Es el espacio de la evocación, y es el espacio de la imaginación: esa forma de encuadrar la realidad, de (re)componerla (de disponer las figuras en el encuadre), esos rostros tan singulares que sólo parecen habitar la pantalla felliniana; unos pasajes que parecen anuncio de la inminente 'Amarcord' (1973).

da qui