Why do we watch films? This is a question that will elicit many differing answers, but one reason is that we want to see something which allows us to reflect on our own lives and, in a broader sense, the nature of existence. But we are not just shelling out our £6-plus ticket price for just this; if we wanted merely to question the meaning of life, that would be better spent on a half-decent pop-philosophy book. At their best, films are also be about spectacle, a visual communication which cannot be made through any other artform as effectively or elegantly.

A prime example of this would be Richard Linklater’s Waking Life. For anyone who has seen his more recent film, A Scanner Darkly (2006) , it shares the same use of the graphic technique known as ‘digital rotoscoping’; live action footage was shot on DV, and then animators overlaid this footage with roughly approximated graphical versions, creating a simultaneously real yet cartoon-like appearance. The effect can be a little dizzying at first, but is swiftly gotten used to. The technique allows the animators to take liberties with reality; walls shift around unnaturally, faces and bodies seem to metamophose. Within this style, moments of unreality seem perfectly natural and expected.

There is no real plot to speak of; the unnamed protagonist drifts through a dreamlike state, encountering different characters who are conducting monologues and conversations about life. For their screen duration, the film acts as a soapbox for their ideas; along the way, we meet philosophers David Sosa and Robert C. Solomon, eminent chemist Eamonn Healy, actors Speed Levitch and Wiley Wiggins, the characters Celine and Jesse from Linklater’s earlier film Before Sunrise, directors Steven Soderbergh and Linklater himself, among many others. If long discussions about ‘heavy’ topics are not your cup of tea, then this is clearly not the film for you.

Linklater’s films seem to focus on young characters intrigued by life and living, generally motivated by their not really knowing what their role in the grand scheme of things is. This was at the core of his debut feature, the hugely influential Slacker (1991) which Kevin Smith famously credits as inspiring him to make Clerks (1994). Similarly, in Dazed and Confused (1993) we see characters, though this time slightly younger, questioning everything, striving to find the answers that may actually not be out there. Celine and Jesse in Before Sunrise (1995) may be more optimistic, but are still full of the same self-doubts and questions about life, the universe and everything.

And in Waking Life, boy, do they talk. For anyone familiar with Slacker the material can seem slightly derivative: discussions about the significance of dreams, exisitentialist philosophy, the alienation of modern life, reincarnation, free will, the role of the artist in society. These discussions in themselves are all interesting, but on their own do not necessarily make for great cinema. But when fused to the dreamy rotoscoped animation, the words seem to take on a whole different life, and instead of feeling bogged down by concepts and theories, watching the film gives me a feeling of freedom, liquidity and ease. It is a unique and quite extraordinary experience.

I Vitelloni when released in the US was given the unfortunate name The Young and the Passionate, which, though essentially descriptive of the film, does make it sound like a dodgy 1980s US soap opera with big shoulder-pads and even bigger hairdos. A literal translation of the title remains a little ambiguous, most stressing it refers to fattened veal calves, though it is also related to the slang vaudellone, meaning ‘fat gut’. Nevertheless, the meaning is clear in relation to the film’s main theme, that of layabout young-ish men unwilling to face growing up and responsibility.

The vitelloni of the title are a tight group of men who populate a small seaside Italian town not unlike the Rimini where director Fellini himself grew up, and we are initially introduced to them one by one as the camera scans slowly across the bar at which they appear to regularly haunt. There is Leopoldo the intellectual and amateur playwright, Alberto (played by the young Alberto Soldi) a rather effeminate clown-like character, Riccardo a wannabe singer, Moraldo introverted dreamer, and finally Fausto, the womaniser and spiritual leader of the group.

All of the men are, in differing ways, dreamers. They all harbour grand ambitions and dreams, but the one thing that unites them is their unwillingness to leave the comfort and safety of their small hometown. For all of their big talk, and their petulant aloofness towards their town’s fellow inhabitants, they are all of them inexorably tied to the place they claim to depise. They mostly survive from the money doled out to them by their famlies; only one appears to have an actual job, which ends predictably in disaster. All the men seem to do is drift around, stand on the beach philosophising, and generally avoid anything like work or responsibility.

If the setup of the film, idle young men with too much time and too little to do, seems familiar, then it is because of the film’s lasting influence on its cinematic antecedents. The first wave of these would probably come with the ‘movie brats’ of the 1970s: Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971), Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1972), George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973) all betraying a heavy debt to Fellini’s film. Through the early 1980s there were the likes of Barry Levinson’s Diner (1982), and Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill (1983), while more recently the work of Richard Linklater springs to mind, whose Slacker (1991) and Dazed and Confused (1993) both are heavily under its influence.

Fellini had a background in the neorealism movement prevalent in Italy during the post-war decade; he had cut his cinematic teeth co-writing the Roberto Rossellini classic Roma, città aperta [Rome, Open City] (1945), a collaboration which continued with Paisà (1946). But from his early self-directed films, Luci del varietà [Variety Lights] (1950) and Lo Sceicco bianco [The White Sheik] (1952), it was clear that his interest was not merely rooted in realism, but elements of spectacle, artifice and stagecraft. So while I Vitelloni does have some neorealistic elements – there is marital infidelity, out of wedlock pregnancy, domestic violence, unemployment and poverty – there is a lightness and a humour in its tone which sets it apart from that blanket description. Indeed, by the early 1950s, the key neorealist directors were in periods of transition: Vittorio De Sica was emerging into his ‘magical realist’ phase, Rossellini himself into his ‘Ingrid Trilogy’, Luchino Visconti into period epics such as Senso (1954).

Neorealism had demanded that films should be shot on actual locations, using non-professional actors who had lived lives similar to those being portrayed, but Fellini was breaking with that tradition. The Rimini shown in I Vitelloni is not actually Rimini; the beach scenes, for example are filmed in Ostia, just as in the later Amarcord (1973) his hometown would be recreated in the sets at Cinecittà. The main actors, while sharing the names of the characters they portray, are largely professional; in the case of Leopoldo Trieste and Alberto Sordi, previous collaborators with the director on Lo Sceicco Bianco, and soon to be big names in Italian cinema for decades to come.

The point he was making is clear, a summation of his attitude to his art, in contradiction to what he had been doing before; the portrayal of reality demands not ‘authentic’ locales and actors, but artificial contructs. To tell the truth about a situation it is necessary to invent it. This will be seen in much of his later work; the mock Via Veneto of La Dolce Vita (1960) painstakingly reconstructed in Cinecittà, the gigantic Rex cruise liner of Amarcord, the entire staging of Satyricon (1969), the street scenes in Roma (1972).

I Vitelloni is also a useful signpost for what was to immediately to come from il Maestro, particularly in terms of its scoring. Nino Rota had already composed for more than 60 films prior to working on this one, but this would prove to be his first truly memorable soundtrack. The main theme skips along at an andante pacing, somewhat symbolic of the protagonists’ skulking about their town. The theme is then replicated in a variety of means throughout the rest of the film, and like so many of the future Fellini-Rota collaborations to come, helps to hold the film together.

The following year after I Vitelloni, La Strada would gain critical acclaim, the Silver Lion at Venice, and signal a new direction for Fellini: a ‘trilogy of loneliness’ made up by Il Bidone (1955) and Le Notti Di Cabiria (1957). Worldwide fame would then beckon with La Dolce Vita and 8½ (1963), and the word ‘Felliniesque‘ would soon enter the dictionary and cinematic lexicon. But I Vitelloni is every bit as important and classic as any of the director’s great films, and one whose influence can hardly be overestimated, and can be surprising. On first watch, a scene where Alberto Sordi’s character dances in drag at a party seemed to me highly derivative of Jack Lemmon’s similar routine in Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot. But I soon realised that Some Like it Hot had been made six years hence.

It is very possible to read too much into some films; I do always chuckle at the Volkswagen advert featuring the usherette talking about Toy Story and its subtext of sexual awakening, complete with appropriate ‘Woody’ and ‘Buzz Lightyear’ euphemisms. When directors start spouting off about how their films are exploring philosophical issues, this is usually a good cue to start running a million miles from them (see Wachowski brothers, Lars Von Trier, the worst of Gus Van Sant, etc etc..). But on the flipside, there are some films which are perhaps not taken as seriously as they should be; horror films have long suffered from critical prejudice in this respect – maybe not Dario Argento, but is there a greater satire of consumerism than George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978)?

Another area which is often overlooked is comedy. It is a standard witticism that the trouble with comedy films is that ‘no-one takes them seriously’, and nowhere is this more evident than with Groundhog Day. It is perhaps to an extent understandable that it is not considered a ‘text’; director Harold Ramis can hardly be considered an arthouse auteur, his other films including Analyse This (1999), a hideous remake of Bedazzled (2000), and his other comic collaboration with Bill Murray, Caddyshack (1980). The cheesy George Fenton score, though at times hinting at Nino Rota, seems to give the film the feel of a run-of-the-mill early-Nineties Rob Reiner throwaway comedy. And just how serious can a film with Andie MacDowell be??

(granted, she was in Short Cuts and Sex, Lies and Videotape)

Everybody is familiar with the story; Phil Connors is the sarcastic TV weatherman sent to cover the annual Groundhog Day festival at small-town Punxsutawney, an assignment which fills him with as much glee as a trip to the dentist for extensive root-canal work. He plans to do his piece and leave as soon as possible, but ends up getting snowed in, having to stay another night. But when he wakes up, he discovers that he is forced into reliving that day all over again. And again. And again. It is said that the original screenplay had Connors trapped in Punxsutawney for as long as ten thousand years!

The device is never explained, nor does it need to be. Connors is initially confused, but then tries to use the situation to his advantage; finding out about women who he then proceeds to sleep with, punching people who he dislikes, scoffing cream cakes knowing he will not have put on weight in the morning. Not that it is all sweetness and light: he is shown killing himself in numerous different ways in order to try to escape his trap, and many other attempted methods are alluded to later. The situation he faces seems to bring out the worst in him, a heady combination of hedonism and complete despair.

Despite the rather simple premise, what the film touches on is a complicated issue, both philosophical and religious. For example, it touches on one of Nietzsche’s key ideas, that of ‘eternal recurrence’ in Also Sprach Zarathustra, the central idea being that if man were condemned to live his life over and over again for eternity, then he would be forced into going about deriving the greatest possible satisfaction out of life, safe in the knowledge that this satisfaction would be repeated forever. Instead of nihilism, the doctrine actually ends up as a positivist one, the finite being accepting that the way to eternal enlightenment is through benevolence rather than empty hedonism.

The Nietzschean theme is perhaps more well-hidden than the overall Buddhist overtones of the film. Connors is, in a sense, reincarnated at 6.00am every morning, and though faced with an identical day every time, confronts the day’s challenges anew. His progress is measurable; by the final day he is an accomplished pianist, can recite French poetry off-by-heart, and has become acquainted with the life stories of seemingly everyone in Punxsutawney. Despite his situation, he has reached a state of moral and social betterment, has embraced the absurdity of his situation and by the end has acquiesced with it. Here we have the Buddhist concept of ‘samsara’ made flesh in celluloid: the continuing cycle of birth and death that man must escape in order to become a deity.

The real genius of Groundhog Day is that all of this is touched on, and explored in surprising depth, without the viewer feeling preached to. There are fantastically moving moments; late on, when Connors catches a boy from falling out of a tree for what must be near-on the millionth time, his comment is at once comic and yet intensely poignant: “You never thank me!“. That what is such a light comedy can have moments which melt your heart like that is especially extraordinary. Bill Murray is the only man who could pull this act off, and he has never been better as the maudlin, sarcastic meteorologist who finds life affirmation in small town Pennsylvania.

Consulting the list of the greatest ever films, one will always come across two remarkable pictures: Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952) and Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Both deserve more than a brief mention in the history of cinema, and should rank anong the great works of humanity, of the affirmation of life and living over doom, despair and nihilism. To this, I hope, will one day be added Groundhog Day, a similarly great cinematic achievement which, after viewing, makes us all at least think about trying to be better, kinder, more thoughtful human beings.