2652 Fellini in Woodstock

Friday, November 6, 2009

A lot of people you hire with good paper education
can't actually do the work you hire them for.
They learn while doing the job or they don't learn at all.

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I watched a Frederico Fellini film, "Amarcord" (1974) this evening, with six other people, strangers, in Woodstock, in an ordinary living room, on a huge screen, something like maybe 6' by 12'.

There was no real story, no cohesive plot, no apparent point to be made, but it was good nonetheless. There were glimpses of many lives in a village in Italy over the course of a year, circa 1920s or 30s.

One had the sense that these same stories, the archetypes, had been repeating in different combinations and variations for as long as the village had existed. My comment was that I wished I were an English composition teacher. I would assign each student a character, show them the film, and then ask that they write their character's backstory. The town slut, Volpine(?), would have been an interesting study, for example. Or the leonine school teacher, what is her life like? Or the old count and the ancient countess.

Gee, there were twenty or more movies in this one 2-hour film....

I spent most of the evening with a 70-pound dog in my lap. Which was good, because the host had turned the heat off during the movie because the blower made too much noise, and otherwise I would have frozen. I had a cold draft hitting my right side. There's ice outside tonight. 28 degrees F.
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