E La Nave Va (And The Ship Sails On)

This 1983 effort was one of Fellini's final films. It is rather good, without quite the clarity of purpose to turn it into a great piece of art.
The camera style is what we would expect from late Fellini; a few of the earlier visual tics, but largely elegant, unobtrusive, and not particularly interesting. The most interesting formal point is the opening and closing. Here Fellini essays silent cinema, using different filters in black and white. He also changes the frame speed. It smartly shows how Fellini's wide angle compositions do indeed mirror some silent work, it sets up the music of the piece well, though it is interesting to note that even an artist who uses longer takes, like Fellini, can seem a little rushed when compared so directly with the silent camera. The motif, repeated throughout the later Fellini's work, of an acknoweldgement and, on the part of the directors alter-ego, an address to camera, is also not so much clunky as an epigraph that we are not watching something, but a story of something; an interesting conceit, though the shots of the filmset at the end slightly overegg.
As to the piece itself, Fellini, as always, gets excellent understated performances from the actors. Always the small things, always the small things. This film examines petty conflicts and moments of hope in the return to the rustic, in music and in love. The themes never quite run together, though those of fate and decline are obvious, but this doesn't stop a series of wonderful individual scenes. The translation scene, singing to the workers, the blowing of the ashes, all come to mind.
So these scenes don't entirely gel, but this is a minor problem in what is really a film that we would be nearly comfortable calling a fine piece of work. With its deliberately stagey sets, it is a piece that deserves viewing for both curiousity and pleasure.