You can hear six bars of Elgar, Holst or Vaughn Williams and you know they are English. Russians have their novels Italians their opera Iberians their fado and zarzuealas. German painting is instantly told apart from Italian painting. But there are national and regional styles, psychologies, approaches and techniques that show up across the arts. I’m cheating a little with these images - not all German painting is so dour, or Italian so extravagant - but only to make a point.
He took things personally when I didn’t - I always remembered the line from Renoir’s film, Rules of the Game: “The terrible thing about life is that everyone has their reasons.” I.e., it isn’t personal. Sal was always intense and expressive, and sometimes prone to anger and moods. Sal - or Salvatore - was as Italian in ancestry as I was Norwegian. I used to have long discussions with friend and colleague Sal Caputo, who was pop music critic for the newspaper I worked for. When focused, as in La Dolce Vita and 8½, he was one of the three or four greatest filmmakers of all, and even when he was noodling in fevered Fellini-Land, still provided indelible visions and emotions. As he once said, “Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me.” It gave him the secret of breaking out of the Neo-Realist mold and find his own way, but it also let him wander off into a sometimes almost solipsistic dream world of images and obsessions. As is so often the case, Fellini’s best and worst were manifestations of the same thing - his ability and his need to put himself into his films.
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