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No-one could at first explain how the grand piano (pictured above) appeared on a sandbar in a Miami bay on this New Year's Eve. The image is so Felliniesque. Later on, this mystery (unfortunately, a mystery can be a good thing sometimes) was solved. It was simply a couple of teenagers who thought to display it as some kind of art piece. I think their idea did succeed somewhat, at least conjuring images of Fellini films for me. There was also some fire (and burning) involved, but I won't go into speculations about the symbolism of all that - this article does so quite well.
And the Ship Sails On is a Fellini film where the ship's passengers have come together in memory of a deceased opera singer. Many are artists and musicians, and present their eulogies in their respective art disciplines. The beautiful and the absurd are often juxtaposed in the film, as in this scene in the ships boiler room, where I wrote:
The ship's upper class, mostly musicians and artists, decide to go down to the netherworlds of the boiler room. One of the laborers asks them to sing. This sets off a rivalry between the singers - like some kind of operatic duel. But, still in this moment of aggression and competition, the beautiful music shines through, and the laborers below cheer with appreciation.Part of the intrigue of the above image is that a grand piano - associated with great art - sits by the ocean on a thin insignificant strip of empty beach. The grand and the mundane joined together, like in Fellini's successful films, provide for imaginative journeys. The surrealists, after all, thought that one way to make art was to deliberately place unlikely imagery together, releasing the audiences imagination to come up with new explanations and perceptions. Dali was the master of that. His grand piano piece in Un Chien Andalou involved dead donkeys.
