Young, the Restless, and the Dead, The: Interviews with Canadian Filmmakers Book

3.5 stars. The author, Peter Bondanella, assesses the life and works of Federico Fellini in this piece, with essays focusing on five of Fellini's major films: La Strada (a film Fellini referred to as "the complete catalogue of my entire mythical world"; referred to by the author of this book as a "multilayered array of symbolic possibilities"), La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2 ("Nothing is more honest than a dream"), Amarcord and Intervista. While the work provides elucidation on some of Fellini's films and themes, at times delivering quotes from the famous Italian director or factual/historical points to substantiate, and other times offering some subjective analysis, the writing comes across at times as a bit stuffy and pedantic (slightly reminiscent in a way of Daumier, the French intellectual in 8 1/2) and many of the things Bondanella accuses other critics of doing, I feel he sometimes does himself in this work. Nonetheless, the work is illuminating, offering some insightful in-depth analysis of five Fellini films and some minor analysis of other films in Fellini's oeuvre.

This work can create a greater understanding for the viewer of Fellini's films (with so many possible subjective interpretations -- Fellini was a great poet, above all, communicating to his audience through images representing the subjective world of dreams, illusions, fantasies and complex emotions) even if one does not agree with the author on all points expressed. Despite some shortcomings, this work presents Fellini as a showman, a puppet-master, a poet and a lover of the art of illusion and the representation of dream and fantasy in cinema. As Fellini himself tells the Japanese interviewers in Intervista, "Film is a divine way of telling about life, of paralleling God the Father! No other profession lets you create a world that comes so close to the one we know, as well as to unknown, parallel, concentric ones. For me the ideal place . . . is Teatro 5 in Cinecittà when it's empty . . . a space to fill up, a world to create."

Aside from some intriguing analysis, the best parts of this work, for me, are: (1) the actual quotes from the auteur himself, something that makes me eager to read my next Fellini book, Fellini on Fellini (an apt title for a book by a director often accused of narcissism)and (2) the analysis of Fellini's pessimistic view of television as a medium antithetical to the art of cinema. For anyone interested in the work of Fellini, I recommend watching the films first, then reading these essays, then watching the films again to see how the interpretations of the author here may have shaped audience interpretation. Critical analysis, at its best (and sometimes worst), can shape or challenge our initial perceptions of art, altering our ways of seeing and understanding the artist's world.