RoGoPaG

"Gli allegri principi della fine del mondo," modernism and its perils in four sketches. Illibatezza is Roberto Rossellini kissing off fiction film, an analysis of Logan's Bus Stop in which the Man of Today is "a psychopath with an Oedipus complex." The American TV executive (Bruce Balaban) has at hand Playboy issues and dating guides, in Bangkok he clings to the Italian stewardess (Rosanna Schiaffino), she dampens his ardor by switching from chaste brunette to brazen blonde. "I'm a fool and you're a whore." The rebuke of cinephilia ends with the dope fondling and smooching the projected image. A breakup in Jean-Luc Godard's Il Nuovo Mondo is the center of the apocalypse, the shift in the world that matches that of a nuclear blast. "An atomic future that's already started," fallout in Paris, pill-poppers and demolished monuments (a swift pan left, following a car, finds a half-obscured Eiffel Tower in the background for a few seconds). In the midst of this, an abstracted gazelle (Alexandra Stewart) dumping the lumpy beau (Jean-Marc Bory) with a simple "I ex-love you." If Godard's segment anticipates Alphaville, Pier Paolo Pasolini's La Ricotta foreglimpses The Gospel According to St. Matthew as an airy joke on the shambling sacrilege of moviemaking. A Biblical project on the Cinecittà meadow: Florentine color for the painterly tableaux, rock 'n' roll and stripteases for the extras, cheese and indigestion for the starving actor (Mario Cipriani). As il regista, a jet-lagged Orson Welles reads poetry from Mamma Roma and fields a reporter's questions. (On Fellini: "Egli danza... egli danza.") Finally, free will as a matter of caged and roaming chickens in Ugo Gregoretti's Il Pollo Ruspante. Kids recite advertising slogans and even Topo Gigio is an accessory of consumerism, Dad (Ugo Tognazzi) drives the point home. In black and white.