Screening Log

This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.

October 2007 activity

Total Log Entries: 46

Total Comments: 12

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A Marriage Agency / Un Agenzia matrimoniale / Italy / 1953

This 16-minute contribution to the Zavattini-orchestrated omnibus film Love in the City/L’amore in città is what I like from fifties Fellini, the productive play between the neorealist impulse, the on-location depiction of Italian life in the streets, and Fellini’s own structural reworkings of that reality for symbolic, sentimental, or aesthetic ends. (See La Strada.) Here, A Marriage Agency falls into two parts. First, a reporter is guided by a gaggle of little children along an unrealistically long warren of corridors to the marriage agency of the title. Then, after the reporter invents an incredible story of a rich werewolf friend looking for a wife, the agency, equally incredibly, finds a prospective bride whom the reporter takes for a drive into the country. It’s at this point that this apparently light piece takes on an emotional (and social-critical depth) with its insight into the impoverished background of the woman involved. This is very nicely done — a fine, delicate balancing act on Fellini’s part.

by Ian Johnston | Source: 35mm print
15 Oct 2007 1:19 PM | Submit Comment

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