Roma

Eschewing any classical narrative construction, Fellini’s Roma is a film that takes stock of Fellini’s past and questions a present torn between modernity and the ruins of ancient times. Whereas La Dolce Vita filmed the upper classes, Roma is more interested in the teeming fauna of the Italian capital. Among the sketches that take the form of reconstructed memories, there is one very impressive one that shows a crowded popular restaurant at the end of the day. The scene is full of extraordinary vitality even though, in a sense, nothing is happening. The overall narrative of the film does not move towards a conclusion. There are scenes of pure fantasy (such as the ecclesiastical fashion show), a film within the film of the shooting that shows Fellini himself at work, an almost documentary sequence on the creation of the metro, and so on. Fellini saw Rome as a city of spectacle. For him, Rome is a powerful reverie, full of paradox. What is at stake here is the creation of an omnipotent gaze, capable at every moment of seizing the essence of the outside world, namely its absolute heterogeneity. Not only is the scopic impulse the driving force behind the film, but Roma has no other centre than this gaze, this power of vision of the auteur, organising all this chaos around himself, as if the camera were the focal point where all the disorder and triviality of reality are reflected. (Mathieu Macheret; Le Monde)