Go to see Spirits of the Dead about an hour after it begins. It's a three-part film—three Poe horror stories made by three different directors. The first two are silly bores, by the justly disregarded Roger Vadim and the greatly overrated Louis Malle. The third is by Federico Fellini. And his horror story is joyous.
Joyous, not because Fellini has no sense of the macabre—after all, his story ends with decapitation—but because he revels in making films and because his darting invention never stops playing around and through the picture, so that even this film of terror plunges us into a sort of Satanic champagne. Fellini's career easily divides into two periods: the first, in which his cinematic mind serves his humanist concerns; the second, in which his humanist concerns are the base for stylist exultation. (La Dolce Vita is the transitional film between the two periods.) This short film is very much a matter of execution, not content; although I don't suppose there is a "new" visual concept in it, Fellini's familiar ideas are still exciting.
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