print May 1992

The Way We Were

THE POLITICAL RALLIES, the International, the interminable debates, the collectives, the films of Bernardo Bertolucci, the strikes, the pickets outside the factories, the class struggle. And more: Mao, Che, Castro, Togliatti, Pasolini, Visconti, the Berlin Wall. I already miss communism. What will I do, what will we do, without it? What will we do now we can’t call ourselves Marxists (of the Groucho-ist tendency) any more? We have lost the brother behind the wall, the fear of an invasion that often seemed like the only possible solution to the political and existential torpor of our postwar

print January 1991

Martin Scorsese’s Betrayals

EVERY FORM OF BETRAYAL is possible for Martin Scorsese. Obsessed with betrayal in The Last Temptation of Christ, 1988, the film in which he gives vent to his religious feelings and his Catholic origins, Scorsese completely develops “l’affaire Judas” (as Thierry Jousse calls it in Cahiers du Cinéma, September 1990) in GoodFellas, 1990. Stylistic decisions also clearly make betrayal an aspect of Made in Milan, 1990, Scorsese’s documentary about the Italian fashion designer Giorgio Armani, and it is the very subject of his current project, a remake of Cape Fear (the 1962 film directed by J. Lee

print November 1990

AD LIB

TELEVISION ADVERTISING IS CHANGING, and on every level. It is changing in terms of quantity, in the sense that fewer ads are being shot worldwide, partly in reaction to the flood of TV commercials in previous years. It is changing in terms of format—people have begun to prefer shorter, more immediate commercials. It is changing in terms of a new “politique des auteurs,” with the most prestigious ad directors, like Jean-Paul Goude or Jean-Baptiste Mondino, limiting themselves to one well-made film a year, as an “event” (as in Chanel’s 1990 “Egoiste” spot, a success for Goude and for the perfume

print May 1990

Federico Fellini

“BLUE MOON, NOW I’M no longer alone, without a dream in my heart . . .” In his latest film, The Voice of the Moon, which will open the Cannes Film Festival this month, Federico Fellini dispenses with dreams and with those who dream them, especially directors. Instead we have Ivo Salvini—a clever, candid Roberto Benigni—fashioned by Fellini as part Pinocchio, part the poet Giacomo Leopardi. Salvini is one who hears voices: not only the classical voices of literature, great and minor, and the murmurings of the oral tradition, but also the cacophony of voices we are forced to listen to every

Marco Giusti