Orchestra Rehearsal (PG.)
Directed by Federico Fellini. 1978.
Starring Balduin Bass, Clara Colosimo, Elisabeth Labi, Ronaldo Bonacchi, Ferdinando Villella, Giovanni Javarone. Italian with subtitles. 69 mins.
I doubt more than four months pass without a new Fellini review disc dropping through the letterbox. Which is a splendid state of affairs (though I'm still holding out for a re-release of La Dolce Vita, hint hint.) Colour or black and white; made on location or setbound; neo-realist or oppulently surreal, they are all different yet somehow the same. This though is a break from the Fellini norm – a small, single location drama, made for TV. Fellini films traditionally sprawl off in all kinds of directions almost on a whim; the idea of containing him in a single space is intriguing. But having set himself this challenge, he quickly manages to wriggle out of it and back to what he knows. You can put Fellini in a box, but you can't keep him there.
We start with a caretaker preparing an empty rehearsal room, prior to an orchestra gathering. The various musicians arrive, bickering and fighting and playing tricks on each other. Today is unusual because there is TV crew there to film it for a TV documentary. The union official admits that they won't be paid any extra for this, but they are free to not participate if they don't want to. The conductor (Bass, who bears a strong resemblance to Emperor Palpatine of the Star Wars prequels) is the last to appear and as he tries to go through a series of pieces he finds that the musicians are growing increasingly bolshy.
One way in which Orchestra Rehearsal is unlike his other films is that it is dated. Of course, all Fellini films are dated, harking back as they do to a they-don't-make-em-like-that-anymore era when the arthouse market was robust enough to support the indulgences of highbrow, big-name European directors. Orchestra Rehearsal though is one of the few Fellini films that truly engage with the time it was made in. This is the seventies and if you came into it blind you'd quickly date it as being made at some point between 1968 and 1981. On its most basic simplistic level, it is a political allegory: the musicians are the masses rebelling against the control of the bosses, the conductor.
One aspect that really dates it is the way it takes part in the then fashionable sport of Union Bashing. In these zero hour days, most of us are wondering how we ended up back in the workhouse with Victorian levels of inequality. We tend to forget just how completely trade union leaders abused their power and blundered into squandering away all that workers had fought centuries for, and just how easy it was to turn the public against them. While the orchestra play, Fellini places a group of union leaders on the sidelines, doing nothing apart from occasionally poking their oar in to challenge the conductor's authority and announce an espresso break. In any other film, they'd be crude caricatures, but this is Fellini where everybody looks like they'd been scribbled off by an especially narky cartoonist.
Still, aside from the moments when the film veers off into Carry On At Your Convenience territory, the film projects a much broader statement. Political chaos is always a relative term in Italy but the late seventies was an especially traumatic period with left and right wing terror groups causing mayhem, and the film attempts to bottle up the nation's disarray in a single room. (Actually three, we briefly enter the Conductor's dressing room and a bar where most of the musicians head for during the break.)
It's admittedly minor Fellini and no doubt any number of ideological objections can be made about it, but by the end, the film has acquired a power it should have no right to. Perhaps this comes from having an artist whose primary instinct has always been to escape and to fantasise, briefly being forced to address reality. He largely fails, but the effort is instructive.
Extras.
A slideshow of posters from the Felliniana Collection.
An appreciation of the collaboration between Fellini and composer Nino Rota. This would be their last film together, as Rota dies a few months later.
Biographer John Baxter's 25-minute essay on the film. Some interesting insights, especially on how it was born from the failure and frustration of Casanova, but a little too keen to go through the story and explain it for my liking.
Directed by Federico Fellini. 1978.
Starring Balduin Bass, Clara Colosimo, Elisabeth Labi, Ronaldo Bonacchi, Ferdinando Villella, Giovanni Javarone. Italian with subtitles. 69 mins.
I doubt more than four months pass without a new Fellini review disc dropping through the letterbox. Which is a splendid state of affairs (though I'm still holding out for a re-release of La Dolce Vita, hint hint.) Colour or black and white; made on location or setbound; neo-realist or oppulently surreal, they are all different yet somehow the same. This though is a break from the Fellini norm – a small, single location drama, made for TV. Fellini films traditionally sprawl off in all kinds of directions almost on a whim; the idea of containing him in a single space is intriguing. But having set himself this challenge, he quickly manages to wriggle out of it and back to what he knows. You can put Fellini in a box, but you can't keep him there.
We start with a caretaker preparing an empty rehearsal room, prior to an orchestra gathering. The various musicians arrive, bickering and fighting and playing tricks on each other. Today is unusual because there is TV crew there to film it for a TV documentary. The union official admits that they won't be paid any extra for this, but they are free to not participate if they don't want to. The conductor (Bass, who bears a strong resemblance to Emperor Palpatine of the Star Wars prequels) is the last to appear and as he tries to go through a series of pieces he finds that the musicians are growing increasingly bolshy.
One way in which Orchestra Rehearsal is unlike his other films is that it is dated. Of course, all Fellini films are dated, harking back as they do to a they-don't-make-em-like-that-anymore era when the arthouse market was robust enough to support the indulgences of highbrow, big-name European directors. Orchestra Rehearsal though is one of the few Fellini films that truly engage with the time it was made in. This is the seventies and if you came into it blind you'd quickly date it as being made at some point between 1968 and 1981. On its most basic simplistic level, it is a political allegory: the musicians are the masses rebelling against the control of the bosses, the conductor.
One aspect that really dates it is the way it takes part in the then fashionable sport of Union Bashing. In these zero hour days, most of us are wondering how we ended up back in the workhouse with Victorian levels of inequality. We tend to forget just how completely trade union leaders abused their power and blundered into squandering away all that workers had fought centuries for, and just how easy it was to turn the public against them. While the orchestra play, Fellini places a group of union leaders on the sidelines, doing nothing apart from occasionally poking their oar in to challenge the conductor's authority and announce an espresso break. In any other film, they'd be crude caricatures, but this is Fellini where everybody looks like they'd been scribbled off by an especially narky cartoonist.
Still, aside from the moments when the film veers off into Carry On At Your Convenience territory, the film projects a much broader statement. Political chaos is always a relative term in Italy but the late seventies was an especially traumatic period with left and right wing terror groups causing mayhem, and the film attempts to bottle up the nation's disarray in a single room. (Actually three, we briefly enter the Conductor's dressing room and a bar where most of the musicians head for during the break.)
It's admittedly minor Fellini and no doubt any number of ideological objections can be made about it, but by the end, the film has acquired a power it should have no right to. Perhaps this comes from having an artist whose primary instinct has always been to escape and to fantasise, briefly being forced to address reality. He largely fails, but the effort is instructive.
Extras.
A slideshow of posters from the Felliniana Collection.
An appreciation of the collaboration between Fellini and composer Nino Rota. This would be their last film together, as Rota dies a few months later.
Biographer John Baxter's 25-minute essay on the film. Some interesting insights, especially on how it was born from the failure and frustration of Casanova, but a little too keen to go through the story and explain it for my liking.
