Celebrating the IU Cinema
It is a great pleasure to join you for this IU Cinema online screening of Federico Fellini’s 1983 film, And the Ship Sails On.
I want to begin by once again congratulating the staff, past and present, of the IU Cinema on the cinema’s 10th anniversary, which we celebrated in January of this year.
In my inauguration address in 2007, I noted that IU had a superb scholarly reputation in film for many decades, but at the time, it had no facilities. I announced that to address this need, we would begin converting the former University Theatre into a state-of-the-art facility that would fully support the scholarly study of film in its traditional and modern forms.
After a superb renovation of the University Theatre space, the IU Cinema opened with a sold-out screening of Lawrence of Arabia in January 2011. In its first year, ticket demand was much higher than anticipated. The cinema staff expected that there would be in the neighborhood of 18,000 to 19,000 ticket requests in the first year. There were over double that many requests—at around 45,000—with many events selling out in the cinema’s inaugural year. The cinema has since held around 3,000 public events and screenings, more than half of which have been free of charge, and it has hosted more than 300 visits from highly distinguished filmmakers and scholars.
I am immensely proud of the IU Cinema’s success. It has quickly grown into one of the finest university cinemas in the nation—not just in the opinion of those of us who have frequented it, but also in the opinion of many luminaries of the cinema who have visited it.
The cinema’s staff, including founding director Jon Vickers, who stepped down last fall, interim director Brittany Friesner, and of all their many colleagues, have done a superb job of developing the Cinema into one of the nation’s finest university cinemas, bringing highly innovative programming to the venue, and making it a warm and welcoming place where members of the Bloomington community can engage more deeply with film. The cinema has also been—and will continue to be—a vital tool for educating generations of IU students as a venue for exploring the humanities, world cultures, and social sciences through the lens of film.
I also want to express my most grateful thanks to the many donors who have generously supported the cinema’s mission through their generous philanthropic donations, including Jane and Jay Jorgensen, whose support enabled the creation of the "Jorgensen Guest Filmmaker Lecture Series," which has helped bring many of the world’s most renowned filmmakers and industry leaders to the IU Bloomington campus to share their experiences and insights. I also want to thank Jane and Jay for providing funding to offset the costs of producing and printing a new book—Indiana University Cinema: The New Model—which will be released this fall by IU Press. Jane also wrote the foreword for the book, and actor and IU alumnus Jonathan Banks contributed the afterword.
I was deeply honored and surprised when, in 2017, several friends and colleagues endowed the Michael A. McRobbie President's Choice Film Series Fund to support an annual film series at IU Cinema featuring films specially chosen by me or future IU presidents. I am enormously grateful to all of them.
Celebrating Federico Fellini
The current President’s Choice Film Series features works from three decades in the career of one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time—and one of my favorite directors—Federico Fellini.
As the dominant figure of the golden age of Italian cinema, Fellini’s films have been ranked on numerous lists as the greatest films of all time. His work has influenced countless filmmakers.
Last year, the Cinema began screening films intended to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Fellini’s birth on January 20, 1920, which also happened to be the 100th anniversary of the founding of Indiana University. Unfortunately, most of those screenings had to be canceled due to the pandemic, but the talented and creative staff of the IU Cinema have arranged for the tribute to Fellini to continue this semester through online screenings of several of his films.
In February, the cinema hosted an online screening of Fellini’s 1963 masterpiece, 8½, which is widely considered one of the greatest films of all time. In April, the cinema hosted an online screening of Fellini’s 1973 film, Amarcord, his satirical critique of everyday life in the small town in northern Italy where he was born and raised. Both of these films received the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.
Introducing And the Ship Sails On
The film you are about to see tonight, And the Ship Sails On, was one of Fellini’s final films.
When it was screened—out of competition—at the Venice International Film Festival in 1983, it received a 15-minute standing ovation.
The film depicts the events on board the Italian luxury liner Gloria N, as friends and colleagues of a recently deceased opera singer have gathered to mourn her and to transport her ashes to her remote native island of Erimo. This unusual voyage takes place at approximately the same time as the events surrounding the 1914 assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, which are regarded as the immediate catalyst for the First World War.
And the Ship Sails On was filmed almost entirely in the legendary Cinecittà Studios, where Fellini constructed a vast plastic ocean and employed hydraulic jacks to simulate the ship's movement. The other great Italian director of the era, Michelangelo Antonioni, visited Fellini on the set—and Antonioni later cited And the Ship Sails On as one of his favorite Fellini films.
And the Ship Sails On employs a more traditional linear narrative structure than is typical in his films, which often move back and forth between dreamlike illusion and reality. It is also one of Fellini’s few films not scored by his frequent collaborator, Nino Rota. It incorporates pieces from a diverse range of Verdi operas, other pieces of classical music, and a score by Italian composer and conductor Gianfranco Plenizio.
Fellini called And the Ship Sails On “a little fable on hyper-information.”1 The chief vehicle for explicating this theme is the character of the bumbling journalist Orlando, played by British actor Freddie Jones, who attempts to report on the events on board the ship. The late IU Distinguished Professor Peter Bondanella, an expert on Fellini, wrote that by “hyper-information,” Fellini meant “to imply that far from possessing too little information, today the average person has far too much of it and is, in fact, bombarded by mass media to the point where an authentic relationship with reality or an intelligent separation of the good and useful information from the ‘static’ is no longer possible.”2
Those of us at Indiana University would firmly maintain that a quality education is extremely useful in helping to discern what is good and useful information, but you can see just how relevant this particular theme of the film remains nearly 40 years after it was made.
With that, the Gloria N is about to board. Enjoy the voyage of Federico Fellini’s 1983 film, And the Ship Sails On.
Source Notes
1. Federico Fellini, E la nave va, (Longanesi, 1983), 158.
2. Peter Bondanella, The Cinema of Federico Fellini, (Princeton University Press, 1992), 214.