Images from a studio shoot in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on January 4, 2012
Copyright Steven A Brown and Carla Johnson
"Anita Ekberg's uninhibited cavorting in Rome's Trevi Fountain remains one of the most celebrated images in film history."
~ Wiki entry about Swedish actress Anita Ekberg
During a shoot with Josefina Photography and Steven A Brown the first week of January, I realized my bustiers no longer fit. The waistline is fine, but my cup runneth over. It could be the result of an intense workout program I've undertaken. When I saw these images, the breasts floating above the black bustier reminded me of one of film's most famous scenes, the one in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita where Anita Ekberg bathes in Rome's Trevi Fountain. I studied La Dolce Vita in a Fellini course in graduate school.
Fellini said the star of his film was not Ekberg but Rome, "the Babylon of my dreams…a Rome that never budges, the accomplice, partner, and judge…I chose it for its permanence.” The film documents the decline and fall of Moraldo, a sort of Every Man who takes a downward spiral in what Fellini called "a sick world."
Playing a Swede who becomes an American actress, Ekberg's introduction in the film occurs as she descends from a plane "like a diva ex machina,” according to Eric Rhode. In past months I've been called a diva and also criticized in a dA comment for appearing aloof in all my work, so perhaps the comparison is apt.
After Ekberg's descent, the paparazzi races after the film goddess. Fellini intended the subsequent press conference scene to illustrate modern society's state of continual exposure. He shows blinding flashbulbs, the Babel of many languages, newsreel photographers, still photographers, TV, radio, telephone, lights, wires, technicians. These are all the “devout worshippers of the flesh,” according to Edward Murray, and as a sometimes-nude model, I can tell you this sense of exposure is quite real. Perhaps this aspect of Fellini's theme applies even more today than it did in 1960, the year of the film's release.
As Ekberg wades sensually in the Trevi fountain, we see her as a Valkyrie, a pagan sex goddess who draws Moraldo into the water and baptizes him. Then the sound of the water dies and stops. It is daybreak, time to leave the mythic world and reenter the real one; but the dawn is dead.
Nevertheless, the film ends with a long take of an innocent young girl's radiant, affirming smile. My dissertation director, who happened to be a Fellini scholar and the author of Fellini's Road, describes it this way:
“Something worth searching for exists. Even in his story of the sweet life, Fellini’s bitterest film, he ends with that vision of a goal at the end of an unknown road.”Banned by the Vatican and most theatre chains as an immoral movie, La Dolce Vita broke all box office records, and crowds queued in line for hours to see it before it was banned. It won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Festival. Fellini went on to become one of the most influential filmmakers of the 20th century. He was widely revered when he died at age 73 in 1993, but his personal life was as impressive in the world of film as were his movies. He remained faithful to his adored wife Giulietta Masina, who starred in some of his films. He died a day after their 50th wedding anniversary. She died five months later.
Anita Ekberg and I were born on the same month and day, September 29. But what do I see in this series that would allow me to take such a leap, to have the gall to compare these images in any way to the famous Ekberg scene? It's not just about breasts of goddess proportions. It's about the sensuality, the other-worldly incongruity of black formal dress and white flesh in contrast to the reality of the setting, whether Rome's legendary fountain or our storefront studio set with paint-splattered ladder. It's the blatant theatricality of it. This moment isn't real; it's shameless artifice.
Art, which is always artificial, allows me to pretend to be someone or something else for a suspended moment in time. This is the reason I model.
2 comments:
CJ, this post calls to mind some of the first words we traded, the idea of imagination worked in the dream symbols of the self or the symbols of societies' (at this point I can call them as they are, the collective entities) stereotypes. I've never seen the movie you mention, La Dolce Vita, so I suppose I've got some homework to do, I'm sure there's a rental copy somewhere in town. I'll view it in the coming days, but in the meantime lemme' pop off a thought or two based on what you've said.
The name Fellini I've heard, always associated it with a genteel sort of degeneracy, no doubt ceCatholic's intended attitude migrated in to fill a vacuum of ignorance. As a side note, for the decade that movie was released I was incarcerated among the Mormons, and believe it or not Salt Lake and the Vatican share a fair amount in terms of social attitudes. Not that I criticize a great many of those attitudes at face value, my complaint is the centuries old effects of having a serious chunk of ceReligion besieging the sensual, the erotic, trying to keep that primal power source for their own, setting it into their structures that only compliance to their agendas allows it to be a wholesome thing. Needless to say, the kind of movies Fellini is reputed to make were never allowed on our horizon. Shoot 'em up westerns were fine, saw a lot of the Duke in action blowing away the bad guys, spaghetti westerns and James Bond, but a story involving *gasp* sensuality, sexuality? Horror of horrors, NO.
And of course for me, like so many others, having been totally starved in such quadrants of thought within our lives is what allowed the back side of ceReligion's pincer attack on life the leverage to operate. That starvation is where my comment reconnects with the theme of your post: the ignorance that allows the theatrical to be mistaken for reality, used as an example and a template for reality, which served ceReligion coming and going: if they accept our theatrics as a template for their reality we'll own them and we'll take good care of our flock of sheep, if they don't accept our template for their reality then they'll accept the theatrics of entertainment for a template, and the consequences in their lives of using an entertainment (entertainment: what life is NOT) for their template will bring to pass the bad things we told them would occur if they reject our assertions. Of course it will, we've deprived them of the ability to know the difference between theatrics and reality. ceReligion is a sly and dangerous enemy, and by rights the porn industry should be paying them royalties. They're the balance opposite ceReligion's thrust vector, their works of misery and depravity equally enabled by the same ignorance.
Cyranos, "La Dolce Vita" is Fellini's departure from the self analysis of his early films to a social criticism. As self analysis, you will see Fellini's characters function as his alter ego in their struggle with external forces, including the mysticism of the Catholic Church as well its influences on an Italian man's development as a child and its manifestation in his attitude toward women in later life.
In other words, it confuses him or screws him up, depending on how you see it from your own religious experience.
I think that's why I mentioned Fellini's devotion to his wife. It was quite a beautiful reality set against the struggles of his characters with wife, goddess, mistress, madonnna, and mother.
Critic Emily Woodward writes about Fellini's highly subjective and emotionally charged art. He did not specifically concern himself with the social problems of post-war Italy as did Rosselini, De Sica, and Zavattinni. That's what I particularly like about Fellini, actually. His landscape is inside his characters' minds.
Woodward says, "Fellini, like Joyce, is only concerned with personal truth. Theirs is a mystical abdication into metaphysical reality, a neorealism of the soul, born out of personal traumas and epiphanies."
I think you will like Fellini.
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