Fellini’s Orchestra Rehearsal (1978) is a charming satire in which an orchestra gradually descends into anarchy, challenging the conductor’s role to keep his musicians in order. Its themes of collective pressure, balanced with the role of the individual, come to life through its narrative structure and camera angles, highlighting both the single musician and the unified orchestra.

The film opens with an empty hall made of stone: a former medieval-era oratory, now used for rehearsals due to its strong acoustics. The orchestra’s copyist sets up the chairs and music stands, and gradually the musicians file in, tuning their instruments and chatting amongst themselves. A documentary crew is present, and musicians are interviewed, speaking on their instrument of choice, their place in the orchestra, and in the world. Eventually the conductor steps in, uniting the players in a singular sound, for a fiery rehearsal before taking a break.

Some of the group adjourns to a local bar, while other, mostly older, musicians stay put in the hall, waiting patiently for the practice to resume. When the conductor returns, he sees the rehearsal has broken out into pandemonium. The hall is now covered with graffiti, defaced and vandalized, and the musicians protest by drumming, chanting, and calling for the dissolution of the orchestra, and of music overall. The chaos reaches an absurdist peak, and the group is stunned into silence. The conductor calmly takes his place back at the head of the room, raises his baton, and the orchestra plays, more beautifully than ever, returning to order following disorder.

In a similar spirit to Fellini’s earlier film I clowns, Orchestra Rehearsal brings an existentialist layer to the life of a musician, and their choice of instrument. Within the power dynamics of an orchestra, each instrument has a role: the first violin as the leader among musicians, the oboe as a solitary voice, the percussion and tuba to keep the group in tempo. Each musician describes their role with pride, their technical function extending into who they are and what they contribute to the world.

Orchestra Rehearsal is often described as a satire of politics, and it’s easy to see why: the bickering among parties, disunity among the masses, all culminates into anarchy resolved by a single authority figure, ruling over a diverse body, of all ages. It can also be taken more broadly, as any form of a collective effort as the aggregation of individual actors: certainly filmmaking, art, or any act in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

This theme is evoked through effective camera angles, creating distinct feelings of scope and scale, all while shooting within one single rehearsal hall. In the opening scene, the copyist sets up chairs and music stands, places sheet music, one by one, leading to a moment of quiet power as the image becomes a wide shot, a full room of all the music stands, anticipating the performance about to come. Similarly, once the rehearsal gets going, the camera focuses on particular musicians and sections, before opening up to the full orchestra in the lushest moments of musical glory: building tension within tighter shots, releasing to a wide, satisfying view of the collective whole.

At just 70 minutes, Orchestra Rehearsal is Fellini’s shortest feature film, and is a tight, economic satire with enough time to explore its themes. In fact, its short length helps prevent the film from ever growing too self-serious, or delving too heavy into political commentary – it’s more observational, establishing a particular idea or joke then swiftly moving the action along. If it’s a reflection on the political and social turmoils of 1970s Italy, it’s natural it would be adapted with brevity and satirical extremes, within the hands of Fellini.