Fellini's Roma

Fellini's love letter to his hometown, made in 1972, is a series of vignettes, nearly documentary like at times.
There isn't really a consistent camera style here, which Fellini in a roundabout way explains in some weird meta-sections. Instead we just have the shots that apply to the particular moments. There is super colour in every scene, a certain use of pretty violent filters, that all round gives this the look that is now known as classic Fellini, that hyper styled look.
Some of the vignettes perhaps go on a little long, but each usualy manages to resolve itself in an image we can certainly remember (the fresoes as they collapse perhaps the mpst ambiguos, even the most pwerful, melancholic, mournful). This doesn't mean they are always funny, but Fellini is able to create atmospheres that genuinely surprise, take one off guard.
The vignette style has its high points and it has its limits. We can say the same thing as we said about the 'Satyricon'; the lack of continuity means these films are less fun to watch than some of his earlier ones. The character of the director himself is on the edge of films, deliberately not truly identified with and appearing in the corners of scenes, watched rather than watching. These earlier scenes are at once the most fascinating, and perhaps the most experience; what does Fellini really love here, what does he celebrate? Perhaps this is a bizarre kind of realism from Fellini; he wants to say that Rome is itself a place of fights and an ugly mess in some ways.
Other vignettes strike strongly. Let us take two examples; the scene going into Rome, first ot of all. This is a lovely meta-scene, with some nice quick cuts and that now cliched, but still spectacular, panorama of raining on cars. The cameras on screen add an extra element. The final shots are, genuinely, reall, electrifying. As the people of Rome come into focus, the striking angular beauties for the very first time, we see a locale transformed. Like a jolt of lighting, quite genuinely. And then we have that spectacularly colourised shot of the Colliseum. So spectacular, it is almost laughable. Deliberately stagey?
This aformentioned is perhaps the best, but the scene of the ecclesiatical fashion parade perhaps sums up the film better. It is not particularly funny, but the point is well made and then used and used, to the extent that the gaudiness takes on a beauty.
This film has its problems, and we would like to see more of Fellini's films that are 'conventional'. Perhaps this is our problem though, not Fellini's who has managed to create something individual, personal, a work of art that we find difficult to categorise in our traditional conventions.