Like two filmless filmstars

[sovay]

I see that there is now a film of the musical of Fellini's 8 ½ (1963). I do not understand how this happens. I mean, I was nonplussed enough by The Producers in 2005—having thought the stage version was fantastic; I was lucky enough to get tickets before it won all its Tonys and sold out for several years—and I think it is no insult to Mel Brooks to agree that his original movie is not one of the acknowledged masterworks of the screen in any language: 8 ½ is so purely and deliberately cinematic, I can't see the point of fitting a stage adaptation back into 35 mm just because you can. This version has Sophia Loren. I approve of that. But otherwise I don't know what I'm going to get from the inside of Rob Marshall's head that I couldn't from Fellini's unreliable, free-falling, dream-slipped, embarrassing, transcendent beautiful confusion. Onstage, whatever. Theater is reperformance; it should never be the same twice. But onscreen is time immortalized in light, and the ghost of Guido Anselmi, clown and magus, is hiding under the table, laughing at you.

Comments

[sovay]

Much like Homer, I think, whose stories were oral before they were written, and which therefore changed... until they were written down.

I've been trying to decide if fanfiction is evolving back toward a kind of oral tradition, or whether it's merely the same human impulse to retell that affects everything from classical tragedies to book reviews. It's certainly multivoiced, but by definition not viewed as valid as the author's original work; it seems you need at least half a century before it becomes literarily acceptable to ring changes on novels or plays or operas as well as myths. (I originally wrote "at least a century," but then I remembered Sherlock Holmes, who has been pretty much in a constant state of retelling since Conan Doyle wrote him down.) And of course it's still a fixed medium, unless you're thinking out loud at a con.

In our world where storytelling has become synonymous with the mediums of the written word and film, I wonder how many of us consider this distinction?

I think about it a lot, but that's my brain . . .