Spanning more than 40 years, this collection of Italian journalist Costantini's interviews with Fellini is a cinephile's delight. Fellini was almost as famous for his ceaseless talking as he was for his directing. Still, the recent spate of ``conversations with Fellini'' books is truly prodigious—he seems to have talked nonstop for several decades. Despite the crowded field, Costantini, a reporter for Il Messaggero, is easily the frontrunner. Unlike other interviewers, who allowed the director to go on at maddening length on any number of ephemeral topics, Costantini carefully sifts Fellini's perorations for bright, essential nuggets. And Costantini's knowledge of film and filmmakers is first-rate: extensive and critically aware without being pedantic. Credit is also due to translator Sorooshian for capturing in English—where so many others have failed—the idiosyncratic, poetically pitched savor of Fellini's speech: ``For my generation cinema was a mythic phenomenon which assumed the dimensions of the great events of existence. Beyond its cultural and visual aspects, it was part of life, like engagement, sex and marriage, snow and Christmas.'' Costantini does spend a little too much time going over old ground, trying to correct minor points of fact or forcing his reluctant subject to retell shopworn anecdotes or opine on minor issues of the day. But when the two get talking about Fellini's work, the book really takes off, producing insight after insight into the director's process and aesthetics. With their unstructured storytelling, their emphasis on dreams and imagination and improvisation, Fellini's films are the compelling antithesis of the slick, tightly wound Hollywood product that dominates world cinema today. He may very well be one of the last major directors allowed to make such personal and eccentric films. A 10 for Fellini, an 8´ for Costantini. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 6, 1997
ISBN: 0-15-600440-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1996
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
