Nowhere in Africa
Recently released on Blu-ray and DVD: Underground, Federico Fellini’s Orchestra Rehearsal, Nowhere in Africa.
Underground
The madness of war is a Fellini-esque carnival in Emir Kusturica’s 1995 masterpiece. The comedy conveys horror and the horror gives rise to humor in this sprawling yet focused story. It begins with the Nazi assault on Belgrade in 1941 and concludes in the Cold War under the dictatorship of Yugoslavia’s maverick Communist, Marshal Tito.
Marko, a hustler with Communist sympathies, sells guns to the wartime partisans. After Tito’s victory he becomes the regime’s leading cultural official. His wife, Natalija, slept with the Nazis and with the partisan leader, Blacky. The latter is lionized as a martyr in Marko’s postwar memoir and the kitschy movie produced from it. Underground shows how facts can be weird and their memorialization can be stranger still. The film was condemned unseen as pro-Serb by Western Europe’s pseudo-intelligentsia, led by Bernard-Henri Lévy, but won the Cannes Palme d’Or. The brass band endows Underground with madcap melancholy.
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Federico Fellini’s Orchestra Rehearsal
Nowadays, seen out of context, Federico Fellini’s Orchestra Rehearsal (1978) could be watched as simply a gentle spoof of the idiosyncrasies in a symphony orchestra rehearsing for an unseen (but heard) TV director making a documentary. But fully understood, the squabbling cast of musicians (performing a score by Fellini’s favorite composer, Nino Rota) is a humorous allegory for the ideologically contentious, disorderly politics of ’70s Italy with its options of militancy, reaction or cynicism.
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Nowhere in Africa
They are lucky. Walter and Jettel and their daughter Regina are Jews who left Germany in 1938 just a few months ahead of Kristallnacht. Life on Kenya’s dusty plains is a hard adjustment for this upper middle-class couple, especially for Jettel, forced to trade satin sheets and china for mosquito nets and tinware. Marital strife, cultural adjustment, wartime internment and mild displays of anti-Semitism face them in this story sweetly told from Regina’s memories.
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