1972@50: ROMA

Roma is, on the surface, an exercise in nostalgia but a closer examination reveals a warning. Revisitation stories usually do this and end up just joining the chorus: you can't go home again. But this isn't really one of those. Federico Fellini was a country boy and it's his awe at the Eternal City we are watching. This is less a revisitation than a series of reintroductions and whether it's the Etruscans or the Fascists or the Holy See we will be repeatedly informed of the fleeting nature of eternity. It's like a view from the other end of the microscope he used to make 8 1/2 but instead of Marcello Mastroianni and a delirium he plays himself and the figures onscreen are either real or Breughelian exaggerations. The version of the title with his name on it becomes increasingly more accurate.

The first of several entrances to the city is made in the opening shot as two figures with bicycles move through a moonlit landscape with grotesque trees and a ruined ancient roadsign that says Roma 4K. One of the figures carries a scythe. The next entrance is by a teacher who is talking his class through the crossing of the Rubicon. He fords the stream barefoot and the boys remove their shoes and follow him across as he repeats Julius Caesar's quote about the die being cast. A monstage of school life in the fascist years. Then we see the young Fellini as played by an actor arriving by train to a boarding house which seems to contain all forms of human life, up to the gigantic bedridden and godlike Matriarch. The next entrance is a massive traffic jam around the Colusseum with cars as far as the eye can see and the rained in drivers and passengers functionally indistinguishable. And so on. All roads might lead here but some are a lot tougher to negotiate than others.

We are taken to a music hall with a rowdy crowd, chaotic dinner in the piazza, brothels for soldiers and other ones for officers. We follow an archeological team called in when the underground rail project breaks into a sealed ancient chamber with frescos on the walls. The crew marvel at the paintings and the statues before the air that's been rushing in from the broken wall attacks and erases all of it. An aging princess hosts a futuristic fashion parade of styles for nuns, monks, priests and above which starts quaint turns silly and then horrific. All the circular motion might be dizzying but Fellini keeps a firm hand on the tiller, ensuring the constant threat to his audience's stability is kept the right side of chundering over the side. And through all the blurring, the seventies haircuts over forties suits, the ancient and contemporary in the same frame state and restate Fellini's tireless awe at the city of his choice. It blurs, the nostalgia doesn't get a chance against the sense memories of ugliness and brutality. You get a lot of everything because Rome is everything. By the time you are gliding along with the dreamlike motion of the motorcycles in the final sequence as they roll around the curves and create a lightshow between headlights and architecture you might have already forgotten the moment that Anna Magniani begs off being in the film as she tells Fellini she doesn't trust him (nor should she as she wouldn't be there if he was trustworthy).

So, his ranging happy youth was lived in a police state and the hippies that take up every square millimetre of the mansion and the fountain could look like an occupation or an infestation. Flamboyant author has almost the literal last word when he is discovered among the diners at another piazza. He says he lives in Rome because he is nothing to the Romans and like them he might as well be an illusion.

I saw this and the more directly nostalgic Amarcord on late night tv in Brisbane when I was an undergrad. The tv was an op shop special, an old black and white piece of furniture from PYE or AWA or whoever put their wood with gold trim pieces into the showrooms of the sixties. My brother Michael, like all my family, was a film buff and would alert me to anything worth my time that came up on tv and this was one of the first. It was certainly the first Fellini film I saw. The next year I saw it at Griffith University's cinema, big screen and in colour. I became a fan for life but only much later did I find the earlier films, the ones you're meant to revere like La Dolce Vita or La Strada. Wonderful stuff but none of them carried the thrill of that first touch. I had done the same thing with Beatles albums as a teenager, going backwards until the reissues allowed further exploration. Roma, like the White Album, has felt fresh to me over decades. What better can be said of a retrospective?