I love film, but I don't know if you really can be a music geek and a film buff at the same time. Each tends to take up too much time. The two come together in good scores, of course, but occasionally also when music is a subject. No, I am not going to write about "August Rush." or "Mr. Holland's Opus"! I am sure the former has its moments and the latter was inspirational to some, but I am thinking more of art and foreign film. In the last two weeks I happened to watch two films with fascinating plots involving the music biz.
One is Federico Fellini's "And the Ship Sails On." Stylized like his "Amarcord," this underrated film from 1984 follows a motley crew of singers, conductors, vocal coaches, impresarios, fans, press and more on a luxury cruise ship that, in 1914, sets out to spread the ashes of a great Italian soprano by a Mediterranean island. It's a hilarious send-up of the opera world at that time, but also the starry-eyed culture in Italy in the 1970s and '80s (the main tenor looks like Pavarotti, for instance).
Freddie Jones plays a journalist who is covering the event, and the world he tries to enter is quirky and funny at every turn. Overlayed on this absurd plot is the looming Great War. The film takes place a few weeks after Francis Ferdinand's assassination by a Serbian nationalist and the climax of the film occurs after the ship picks up some Serbs from a distressed boat.
If you want a fun portal into what opera might have been like in the early days of the teens and twenties (Fellini conflates them), rent this (the opening scene is also a must for film buffs -- it ingeniously transforms from a silent film to a talkie to a modern movie). I have never had much of a feeling for this time period since the recordings aren't great even when they do exist, but this film has put me on that path beyond Caruso. But really, there is much love for the art form here, something that Fellini admits he didn't have for opera earlier in his life. Check it out
Tomorrow, I will tell you about the other rarity that I ran across. Tell me some of yours...I already have blogged about "Autumn Sonata" here, which is a great film, but there are others with conductors, singers, composers and performers as subjects..."Impromptu" is another...though not the same level...
First Published: December 18, 2007, 5:00 a.m.
