[Can] one ever have too much of Federico Fellini's special brand of excess? The maestro, after one of his customary long silences, has come out with all cameras firing….

[For his film Provo d'orchestra] Fellini had the majestically simple idea of using a rehearsing orchestra as a symbol of social order and hierarchy. And of their fragility. No sooner does discipline break down in the orchestra—when its members stage a sudden, headstrong rebellion against their autocratic conductor—than Heaven itself seems to thunder in anger by pulling down the walls of the ancient Italian church in which they are rehearsing. Order is restored amid the dust and debris, but is it the same as before? The conductor seems to have gradually changed his brand of Italian autocracy for a more sinister Teutonic version, and as the screen darkens at the end of the film, a führerlike voice starts to bark forth in fluent German.

The natural heir to anarchy, the movie suggests, is despotism. Fellini's film describes the same teasing trajectory as many of those trompe l'oeil episodes from Roma: What begins as an apparently documentary slice of Roman life imperceptibly changes course and metamorphoses into a full-blown surrealist allegory. Provo d'orchestra plays with the audience's uncertainty and adds the Chinese-box, film-within-a-film complexity of a television crew filming the orchestra as well. Only gradually, like a slow-motion jack-in-the-box, does Fellini reveal the dramatic trick he is playing on us. The film's throwaway humor and eye-blink editing are a marvel…. (p. 66)