"Belmont Nights" and "Port-of-Spain Blues" (original) (raw)

The Nights and Knights of Cabiria

The Psychotherapy Patient, 2001

Among the filmmakers whose work both merits perennial admiration and scrutiny as art and is of a fundamentally psychological cast, Federico Fellini is the one to whom I find myself most eternally returned. It is through some diabolical admixture of native intelligence, reverential awareness, Italian intuition, and narrative pathos and lyricism that the filmmaker attains his utterly unique perspective and brilliance. Fellini hits, truly, on all cylinders, an accomplishment that had earned for him, almost from the beginning, the accolade of having been a poet in whom we might have absolute faith.1 He is auteur par excellence, one with humanitarian large-heartedness and uncanny humor and postmodern nostalgia that can put the academic, in her or his typical sterility, to shame. Through an abiding belief in the story at hand and the power of imagination to inform, the director illumines the fundamental human themes and, as any artist must, gives voice to his distinct variation on these themes in the process. What is life, after all, if not a theme with variations?