Sunday, November 1, at 6:30 pm
Fellini’s Casanova (1976)
(Il Casanova di Federico Fellini)
Director: Federico Fellini
Italy/France, 165 minutes – 2 hours, 45 minutes
Language: English, Color
Rated “R”
Genre: Drama, Romance
High Historical Importance

Casanova - Fellini’s fantasy about the love life of fabled 18th-century libertine Casanova (Donald Sutherland) is one of the maestro’s most opulent films, with Oscar-winning costumes and a memorable Nino Rota score. 35mm print from the Universal Pictures studio archive! Adults only! This is the first of nine Fellini films that the Cinematheque will screen in November and December.
“The initial sequence says it all. It is carnival time in Venice. Fireworks are raining down on the citizens, the young and the old, the beautiful and the misshapen. Suddenly, with the help of an elaborate system of weights and pulleys, the giant head of Venus begins to emerge from the Grand Canal. The crowd cheers as the master of the revels extols the goddess of love. The head rises creakily to eye level and a cable breaks. Slowly she sinks back into the dark waters. A mother screams to a child, "Cross yourself!"

Using as his text Giacomo Casanova's "The Story of My Life," Federico Fellini has created another revel of a movie—spectacular, but singularly joyless—that has the effect of celebrating the absolute end of romance and eroticism. There's nothing left but sex, and sex is a terminal disease. Love is a placebo.” – The New York Times

4 p.m. Eats & Discussion – the Before-Party @ Nighttown
Since the film is so long, we’ll meet for dinner before at Nighttown, 12387 Cedar Road, [masked]. We’ll be in the ornate lounge area that is styled after a turn-of-the-century bordello. Nighttown is so popular that the last time we were here people skipped the movie and just came for dinner. They are welcoming us back with a gracious 15 Percent Discount for everyone at our table.

Nighttown is on Cedar Hill just west of Fairmount. Metered parking is available in the rear with an entrance off Cedar just west of the club. We will have a reserved table so you must indicate "dinner on your RSVP to have a seat! Please let us know your dinner plans on your RSVP so that we can reserve a seat for you at the "Movie Group" table. We have requested separate checks but due to the size of our group, you can expect a standard gratuity to be added. If circumstances force you to cancel, please try to notify the organizer as early as possible. It’s best to pay your check in cash to streamline the process. If you don't see us when you walk in, ask to be seated with Bill Johnson or the Indie Movie Group.

6:30 p.m. Casanova – Cinematheque
Meet in the Lobby 10 minutes ahead of time or look for the group inside the theater. We’ll try to save seats in the first two rows of the upper section, center. The flick is nearly 3 hours, so expect to be out around 9:30 p.m. Seats at this venue are somewhat hard. Considering the length of the film, you may want to bring a stadium cushion.

Plot – Synopsis

18th Century Italy. Giacomo Casanova has a reputation as a great lover. He passes through many adventures in search of passion. He meets the aging Marquise d’Urfe who wants him to impregnate her so that she can reincarnate in her child’s body, is jailed as a black magician but escapes, and enters a love-making competition held by the Prince del Brando, along with many other adventures.

Federico Fellini emerged in the late 1950s, making gorgeous, often deliriously effervescent films of post-War Italy such as Nights of Cabiria (1957), La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8½ (1963). Following his international acclaim as a result of these, Fellini went onto make a trilogy of titularly self-presented films, beginning with Fellini Satyricon (1969), following through Fellini's Roma (1972) and ending with Fellini's Casanova. In each film Fellini revels in extravagantly decadent excess. The films are hugely sprawling in length – Casanova runs at over three hours, for instance. They are films driven by the production designers and costumers – plot comes a distant second to the scenery on display. In Satyricon Fellini made a decadent spectacle out of Ancient Rome and Roma was a series of meditations on present-day Italy, while Casanova charts the decadent spectacle of the Italy of modern antiquity.
The sheer extravagance of Fellini's Casanova is absolutely stunning. Fellini romps in the outlandish creations the design teams come up with – huge orgies in the street by costumed attendees, nuns wearing scarlet-hooped corsetry. When Casanova travels upon the sea he floats upon rippling black polyurethane; at one point he makes love to a woman wearing a crown of candles. There’s a visit to the skeleton of a leviathan where surrealistic slideshows of dreamy womb horror images play, while outside women dance up and down on a horse-drawn swing and a man with a woman painted on his stomach juggles, while inside Casanova arm-wrestles a seven foot-tall giantess.

Reviews –

Fellini's Casanova is much less about the self-proclaimed 18th-century philanderer, his life and his times, than it is the surreal, guilt-ridden confessions of a nice, middle-class Italian husband of the 20th century. This fellow, on reaching middle age shortly before the sexual revolution, is still tormented by fantasies that seem to him to be wicked and to the rest of us merely exhausting.
I don't know how else to interpret this strange, cold, obsessed film, which I find fascinating, because I find the man who made it fascinating, a talented mixture of contradictory impulses, and as depressing as an eternal hangover. Other people, less convinced of the Fellini genius, may be driven up the wall.
With Juliet of the Spirits in 1965, Mr. Fellini seems, in retrospect, to have entered his Roxy Theater-Radio City Music Hall period by making a series of films in which he has steadfastly insisted on giving the customers more than their money's worth of movement, color, sound, light, costumes, décor, specialty acts, sideshow freaks, quick changes and dazzling, theatrical artifice.
The Clowns and Roma, documentary variations on themes close to Mr. Fellini's heart, were virtually meditations upon his methods. In Amarcord, his best film since 8½, the superabundance of style was given purposeful shape by benevolence and good feelings.
Fellini's Casanovarecalls Fellini's Satyricon. Though its concerns are narrower, it's as otherworldly as that nightmare vision of the pre-Christian Roman Empire. Like that film, too, Casanovamakes no attempt to recreate an identifiable era, but, rather, to create a completely subjective impression.
Nothing is real. Mr. Fellini, who now works exclusively within a studio, creates everything himself. The studio is the locus of his interior world. It's not for him to go on location to shoot a tree or a sky when he can choose the sort of tree or sky he wants from the scenic designer. Never for a moment does he ask us to believe that any tree or sky ever looked this way, only to understand that this is how he feels about them.
Now, in Casanova, Fellini has gone one step further by, in effect, constructing his leading actor. He has molded the features of Donald Sutherland, who plays Casanova, much as if he were constructing a set, adding an imperial forehead and extending the nose and chin so that no matter how the actor turns, no matter how he is photographed, they define a grotesque absurd condition.
In one of the more chilly sequences of the movie, Casanova becomes infatuated with a beautiful, life-sized mechanical doll, which he takes to bed with him. The always chastely, almost prudishly photographed sexual encounter that follows has no more, or less, meaning than any of Casanova's other affairs. It's all close-ups of Casanova's sweating forehead, accompanied by panting of the sort that suggests a critical shortness of breath. In these encounters, the orgasm is a death rattle.
The closing image of the film is the aged Casanova dreaming of his youth, dancing with this mechanical doll across the frozen waters of the Grand Canal, where, below the ice, we can see the head of Venus with its empty eyes.
The image is daring and beautiful, but it is repeating the film's single note for one more time than is easily supportable. Like Satyricon, Casanova has the form of a frieze that ends by meeting itself where it began. With the exception of a casual reference to Casanova's father, and a sequence—the best in the film—in which he runs into his aged mother in Germany, Casanova is less characterized than he is presented as if he were someone in a pageant. The New York Times - Vincent Canby

FEE
Goes toward charges incurred for using the MeetUp website. You can access PayPal or pay your fee to the Organizer at the event.
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MOVIE LINKS:
Cinemateque, Cleveland Institute of Art, 11141 East Blvd. http://www.cia.edu/ac...
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