La Strada (1954, Italy, Frederico Fellini)


Dan Jardine:

The legendary Frederico Fellini began his career in movies as a screenwriter for neo-realist pioneer filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, and his great success would establish the expectation that Fellini would follow in his mentor’s footsteps. While his earliest films, including I Vitelloni, met with neo-realist’s approval, Fellini was soon subsequently denounced as a turncoat to the cause for crafting films, the first of which would be La Strada, that operated at a heightened level of reality, where fancy and fantasy would play vital roles. Fellini considered his films those of the Italian reconstruction, and rather than dwelling on the devastation left behind by the war, he wanted to point his films in a more guardedly hopeful direction. Yet, there is little doubt that La Strada has at least one foot firmly in the "old school" language of neo-realism, with its unvarnished depiction of a ravaged countryside, peopled by an often inarticulate and taciturn citizenry. Still, the film has an unmistakable other-ness to it as well, as it is an early precursor to the sort of magical realism the would take hold in Fellini’s late-career efforts.

La Strada is centered around the decidedly atypical and quite possibly symbolic figure of the part imbecile, part saint Gelsomina. Played by Fellini’s wife, Guilietta Masina, Gelsomina is an expressive, Chaplin of City Lights-era character who’s as open-hearted as she is dull-witted. It seems fitting (if cruel) that she is sold by her impoverished mother to a carnival strong man, Zampano (Anthony Quinn), who viciously trains her as both his sidekick and sexual conquest. Gelsomina has a bird-like quality, delicate and strangely beautiful, as well as a prophetic ability to predict the weather, yet she is unable to avoid the brutish Zampano’s fits of ineffable rage and violence.

With Gelsomina operating in full clown make-up, it is fitting that much of the film’s second half takes place in and around a circus, filling the film with quirky secondary characters who help give the film an alternate sense of reality. It is here that the put-upon Gelsomina meets the Fool (Richard Basehart), who appears to her almost as an angel, full-winged and floating above her on a tightrope (an image Wim Wenders would apprehend to full effect in the magnificent Wings of Desire). While he would later disappoint her, the Fool tries to guide her with his parable of the pebble, an act that would prove to be both her doing and undoing, urging her as he does to remain with and tend to the spiritually bereft Zampano.

Typical of most Fellini films, the narrative is episodic in nature, with the familiar motif of travel (La Strad literally means the road) providing the justification for the picaresque nature of the film. The film’s central characters —Gelsomina, Zampano and the Fool--are character types who somehow manage the neat trick of also being distinctive and dimensional creations. And Fellini knows how to push the empathy buttons, particularly with Gelsomina, whose innate saintliness and simultaneous powerlessness sometimes threaten to flood the film in tidal waves of pathos, as well as with the judicious deployment of a memorable Nino Rota-penned score (The Godfather). Fellini’s talent for using striking images to evoke moods and themes operates throughout, as the shot of a deserted Gelsomina watching a lonely horse clopping down the street in the wee hours can attest.

La Strada ends where it began, on a long stretch of abandoned shoreline. However, the journey that we (and the characters) have traveled leaves us perhaps even radically affected, and, like Zampano, changed permanently, and hopefully for the better.

Reefer Madness (1938, USA, Louis Gasner) 

Reefer Madness opens with a siren-warning that "[m]arijuana is…a violent narcotic…the Real Public Enemy Number One!" The camera then focuses on Dr. Carroll, a school principal working on the side for the "Department of Narcotics" lecturing a middle-aged audience on this scourge, preaching right to the camera (and you and me, by obvious implication) warning the assemblage that ganja is a greater Menace 2 Society than heroin or opium, in the apparent hopes that they’ll scurry home and lock their kids in the closet to keep them safe and sound from the temptation of the spliff. Didn’t anyone tell these folks not to oversell their product? Regardless, as the evidence mounts before us, it becomes clear that general purpose of Reefer Madness was not pedantry, but vicarious lasciviousness. 

According to Reefer Madness, "marihuana" use leads to rampant sex, brutal violence, murder and mental insanity. You’d also think that with such debauchery to its credit, the film would be more entertaining, wouldn’t you? Ah, well. The film proper then gets underway, as Dr. Carroll’s hysterical warnings segue into a flashback that serves as both example and once-lost hour long episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. All right, I’m kidding about the latter, but not so much. Reefer Madness soon tips its intent to be the same sort of instructional film as those lensed at the time that were aimed at educating young people about perils of sexual promiscuity. However, (gasp!) oft-times these films were made to appeal to the very audience they were supposedly railing against. That’s right, those less-than-pure of heart who bought their tickets in hopes of seeing some less-than-wholesome action portrayed up there on the big screen, and you can be sure that the filmmakers knew it, tossing in just enough lurid shots to keep the customer satisfied. 

And one suspects that the Reefer Madness’s filmmaker’s intentions may not have been exactly above reproach here. Either that or they were a group of terrible hypocrites, because the way the camera leers at the behaviour of these crazy mixed up kids as they engage in all sorts of degenerate activities will make you want to take a shower. The film is not much more than a series of ogling shots of women getting dressed, couples smoking dope (these have gotta be the most inefficient smokers of this particular herbal remedy that I’ve ever seen. It’s a wonder they were able to find any sorta buzz at all) then making out, and finally descending into the sort of group lunacy (whose rapid deterioration from weed is mystifying. I mean, how’d they get their hands on such killer grass back then?) that you can only appreciate if you view the film as pure camp, or make a drinking game out of spotting cliched expressions of mental illness (bug-eyed, jibbering hyperventilation being a personal favourite). 

Director Gasnier, who built his minor career around these sorts of instructional flicks, uses a lot of silent film school techniques—extreme close-up (ill-advised when working with a group of mediocrities, as is the case here) to push the film’s key emotional buttons (both of them), as well as rapid cross-cut editing to build tension and establish mood through contrast (again, recommended only if you have tension to build and moods to contrast, unlike here). So, while the movie is pretty poorly written, and terribly overacted, at least you can give Gasnier his props for understanding some of the basic grammar of film. That he uses his limited skills to produce such ridiculous material is to his embarrassment something that can only be appreciated through our amusement. 

Tupac: Resurrected (2003, USA, Lauren Lazin) 

Dan Jardine:

Tupac: Resurrected is a fascinating, if flawed, documentary that finds an unusual hook to lure in its audience: The film tells Tupac’s story in his own words, culling the ubiquitous voice-over narration from a plethora of interviews and layering them over videos and found footage of Shakur. This is at once the film’s greatest strength, as the immediacy of hearing Tupac tell his own story in his own words, years after his own death, is both eerie and affecting, as well as its Achilles heel, as the story of Tupac’s life would benefit from the sort of critical external analysis and interpretation that Shakur is unable to bring to his own life. Still, there’s something unshakably powerful and affecting in this tragic tale of one gifted young man’s rise from misery of poverty to the sort of fame and great wealth that most of us can only dream of. That this did not bring him the peace and happiness we would have hoped, and in fact almost certainly contributed to his very early death, is the film’s final sorrowful lesson. 

A gifted actor and poet, a teenaged Shakur was invited to attend the Baltimore School of Performing Arts. Although he loved all his classes, his mother withdrew him from the school to head to California where she hoped to escape the violence of Maryland’s mean streets. Unfortunately, once in SoCal, the Shakur’s found only more of the same. Tupac claimed that this helped him to relate to everyone’s struggle, and that he was able to dedicate his music to depicting this reality in graphic detail in hopes of stopping the disintegration of the African American inner-city reality. To critics of his song’s brutality he retorted, "I didn’t create the violence, I diagnosed it." There is no doubt that Tupac’s music has a rawness that speaks directly about things that affect his community, but Tupac’s life, riddled with violence, arrests and imprisonment, leads one to wonder if he wasn’t just identifying the problem, but also identifying with it. He seems to have been well on the way to becoming the self-destructive figures depicted in his music when he was shot to death in 1996. 

The enigmatic Shakur was perhaps the most influential rapper to emerge out of hip hop’s remarkably fruitful era of the early 90s. His paradoxical life was both extraordinary and typical, as he was a sensitive and artistically-inclined mama’s boy who filled the paternal gap in his single-parent home by gravitating to the macho world of gangsters. Yet, unlike so many young men who fall into a life on the streets, Tupac was encouraged by his street patrons, those same shady pimps and drug dealers who would swallow up the lives of so many other young men, to get out of this life, to use his talents to rise above the gangsta life. That he would take their advice to such wild success, yet fall victim to the influences of these same figures and forces, is perhaps the film’s ultimate irony. That this keenly intelligent and socially active young man would be foolish enough to believe that Suge Knight, a gangsta record exec of the ominously-named Death Row Records, was not only a good man to trust his career with, but even a trusted friend, shows something of Tupac’s naivete and desperate need for strong masculine models in his life, and his willingness to turn just about anywhere to satisfy it. 

"You need a man to teach you how to be a man," notes Tupac, which is something Bill Cosby might wanna think about before he starts condemning the behaviour of young male African Americans, and the lyrical content of many hip hop artists, whose work he proclaims is letting the side down, to borrow a sports metaphor. And if Tupac were still here, I’m sure he’d ask the Cos where all the successful elder male role models have gone? They sure aren’t in the ‘hood anymore, imparting their pearly wisdom for the younguns. They’ve fled the communities from which they were born, and by and large successfully melted away into the giant, insular pot of secure, patrolled and fenced neighbourhoods. Tupac would surely remind Bill of the perils of being raised by a single mother, where the only strong men available to turn to for guidance were drug dealers and pimps. While drug dealers were urging Tupac to get out and live his dream, where are the Bill Cosby’s of this world when the Tupac’s of the ‘hood are casting around for positive male influences? 

As a young man trying to find his footing and establish his place in hip hop culture, Tupac promoted the theory of Thug Life, which he suggested as a means of championing the underdog, rather than the criminal. Thug life, he contended, is about overcoming obstacles, about being strong. "America" he famously suggests, "IS thug life." Tupac also noted, in a moment of introspection, that he was "most like my mom cuz I’m arrogant, totally arrogant." His self-diagnosis proves astute when he states that "My ego was out of control; I had to get humble." Unfortunately, this lesson came at a cost, as Tupac’s early supporters seem to have had a profound effect upon his behaviour. He began to evolve into the stereotype, beginning to look more and more like the criminal gangsta rather than a follower of the thug life. Whether it was residual resentment against his mother, one-time Black Panther and radical activist Afeni Shakur, a rising antipathy borne out of her drug addiction or arrogance, or if it was merely the predictable effect of having as his principle male influence people with pronounced destructive and misogynist viewpoints, Tupac’s attitude towards and treatment of women in his music and subsequently in his life was to prove troubling, and even vile, as his later arrests for sexual misconduct and assault would attest. As a statement on the significance of Tupac’s life, the film would have been strengthened if it had been a little more willing to challenge Tupac’s behaviour toward and treatment of women. The central contradiction in Tupac’s life, that he was capable of astute self-analysis, yet often too cocky to wonder if he wasn’t being as adversely affected by this life as the people he wrote about, is one of the keys to understanding Shakur’s complex life. 

In the end, the pressure of being a 20-something black role model for men may simply have been too much to bear. Tupac expressed his fear of the responsibility that such a position put him in. And while he hints at some personal growth and maturity, particularly after his eventual incarceration proved a humbling experience that "Kills the spirit. I couldn’t write in prison," it remains something of a gap in the film that, while he assures us it is so, we cannot be sure that his time in prison caused Tupac to abandon his youthful hubris and destructive treatment of women. However, his evolution as an artist showed us a young man who was an activist, involved in the community, who showed signs of becoming a more self-aware and self-critical artist, as his music moved from the political to the personal. Was he learning the skills of self-examination necessary to be not just a great artist and good citizen but also a good person? Unfortunately, his murder renders the question moot.