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It's not a dream but the circus that awakens the town in the middle of the night, the big top is raised and the following morning the awestruck boy enters it like Ali Baba's cave of treasures. Meraviglie galore, crimson velvet around the sandy arena, fakirs and elephants, Miss Tarzan wrestling to "Ride of the Valkyries." Above all the clowns, "personaggi pavoroso" who fascinate and frighten Federico Fellini's young self, only greasepaint separates them from the townspeople of his memories. The pocket-sized nun shuttling between convent and madhouse, the glamorous blonde stopping time at the local pool hall, a trainload of schoolboys blowing raspberries at the stuffed-shirt stationmaster—rough drafts for Amarcord. Baggy-pants burlesque is a vanishing art, the shambolic mock-documentary tracks down its phantoms. "They haven't disappeared. It's just that people don't know how to laugh anymore." A roisterous Fellini investigation, and as much an aching reconstruction of a lost world as Visconti's Il Gattopardo. The pedantic Pierrot and the put-upon Auguste, recalled by veterans in Paris, where old circuses are turned into breweries. Jerky zooms for Anita Ekberg by the tiger's cage, a delicate dolly-in for Victoria Chaplin with red nose and streamers. Legendary clowns from the past exist solely in rare footage, Pierre Étaix tries to screen it, the celluloid disintegrates like the ancient frescoes in Roma. The ailing jester on the bleachers gets one last guffaw, elsewhere the cinéaste about to turn pretentious receives a bucket to the head. Death and resurrection as a free-for-all and rediscovery of Mack Sennett, the trumpeting duet in the empty hall refines an image from La Dolce Vita. Welles runs with the form (F for Fake), Tati completes the elegy (Parade).
--- Fernando F. Croce |