8 1/2 + 5 years
When I first saw 8 1/2 five years ago, I admired it without quite understanding it. The other day, after reading many terrible reviews of Nine, the movie based on the musical based on the movie, I watched 8 1/2 again.
Bang! Every scene affected me on an emotional/visceral level. I think I actually get it.
So I have learned something in the last five years. What it is exactly, I have no idea.
Marcello Mastroianni was one of the first actors I ever saw on the big screen. My mother snuck me into a movie theatre to see Vittorio De Sica’s Sunflower—she used up a whole box of tissues, she cried so hard, especially when Sophia Loren walked across Russia looking for her lost Marcello. I remember the first scene in which Sophia and Marcello are snogging on the beach and he swallows her earring. (Hmm, this movie may account for three of my fixations: Russia, Italy, and earrings. If anyone’s seen Sunflower lately, please confirm my memory.)
I liked Sunflower a lot better than Love Story, which my mother also took me to see (The ushers did not dare argue with her). That one also took up a whole box of tissues, but I was less impressed since no one trudged across Siberia.
I wonder if my childhood associations with the cinema account for the fact that I hardly every cry in real life, but have no problem with weeping buckets at the movies.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
January 9th, 2010 at 08:33
Sunflower was the first movie I watched on a colored TV (Our family was the first to have one in the semi-squatter’s community) in the mid-70′s. Pre-school aged and I was thinking: Claim him! He’s yours!