Federico Fellini: Revisiting His Films 50 Years Later

Netflix makes it possible for the film lover to program a film festival or career retrospective in the comfort and privacy of his own home. In deciding to do this with the work of filmmakers whose works I had seen in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s, it was a no-brainer for me to begin this project with the work of Federico Fellini. Netflix makes available 18 of the 22 films he directed. I can think of no filmmaker, other than Ingmar Bergman, who created so many iconic images that continue to linger in my mind through so many years as if they were my own memories. But of course they are my memories now. By recording his memories in such detail, Proust, mentioned in two Fellini films, recaptured the past not only for himself but made those memories mine as well, he recaptured the past for me. Fellini works from this same awareness but from a different perspective.

No artist appears in full bloom out of nowhere and by referring to The Internet Movie Data Base it can be seen that Fellini is no exception. In his early days in Rome, in the late thirties and early 40’s, he worked as an actor, a cartoonist and as a writer. He made his first contribution to a film script in 1942. By the time he co directed his first film, Variety Lights, in 1950, he had twenty seven writing credits. During those early years he had a chance meeting in a sidewalk café with Tullio Pinelli and the two of them, in collaboration with others, would continue to co write all the Fellini scripts. Pinelli, who died earlier this year, was a noted Italian authority on literature; he was an esteemed poet and a playwright.

Fellini and Pinelli wrote the screenplay for The White Sheik as a project to be directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, but when he passed on it, it was decided that Fellini would direct it. Although he seems to have been established at Cinecitta, this is a point in his career that should be explored: movie making is an expensive undertaking and no one directs a film without the backing of the money men. Because the White Sheik was somewhat successful, Fellini and Pinelli set to work on their next film, Il Vitteloni, Fellini’s memories of his early twenties in his home town, Rimini, and that was followed by Il Bidone, The Swindle, an effort that was an undisguised reference to American film noir.

I don’t know how successful that film was commercially, but I have a sense that it did not please Fellini: from that point on all of Fellini’s films were self referencing. He has said: an artist can only speak about himself. And indeed this is true. I have read elsewhere about another artist that the words are Hamlet’s but the thoughts are Shakespeare’s. It would be very interesting to know why the money men decided to underwrite this excursion into personal vision as opposed to the usual studio product. Perhaps they had the cultural education and wisdom to realize that among the Cinecitta stable of filmmakers Fellini, Vittorio de Sica, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Lucino Visconti were men who deserved their full support. But once Fellini’s early efforts, La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, and La Dolce Vita, proved to be artistically and commercially successful, it is easier to understand why it continued to be bankrolled: with those films Fellini had become a major filmmaker on an international scale.


In his essay, Create Dangerously, Camus wrote that those who go in for being famous in our time destroy not only their creativity but themselves as well. La Dolce Vita seems to be an illustration of that observation. It explores the influence of his social experience on the creative force of the individual. Marcello has a recognized writing talent but he has married and has a need to support himself and his wife. He works as a newspaper man covering the good life in mid century Rome. But as he becomes more and more involved in that life and as he becomes more and more comfortable with the recognition he receives from those within that circle, the less he is able to write the things he wants or feels he must write. Thus he becomes dry…nor can he any longer live in the isolation required for creative work. His innocence is lost as well and he cannot hear innocence, the young waitress at the seaside café, when it calls to him.

After making that film Fellini became interested in Jungian psychology…I would think from his book, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, just as I did at about the same time …a work that discourses on the collective unconscious and the archetypes. 8 ½ is the story of a creative film maker, like Fellini, of course, who cannot make the next move forward…he is blocked. The film lacks a linear narrative…it is a sequence of episodes around the mental/creative block. The Jungian syntax first begins to appear in Fellini’s work in this film.

Juliet of The Spirits is a more wholehearted embrace of that intellectual framework…in addition there is much discussion of and imagery from modern psychoanalysis.

From the first films Fellini directed he questioned the need and the value of narrative, the structure of the well made play with a beginning, a middle and an end, a clearly delineated antagonist and protagonist, a plot, a situation, and a denouncement. Considering that he worked with some of Italy’s best writers, it is easy to assume that they had many discussions regarding the technique and the structure of screenplays. Satisfied that plot is not needed, they created in all his films a sequence of visual experiences that arrest our attention.

Fellini’s films are about illusion, about telling the truth, being honest: about being dishonest, lying. (That dishonesty is defined by Fellini in I’m a Born Liar: He says that the memories he reconstructed for his films are more real to him than the actual persons and places he remembers.) This theme is elaborated through movies, memories, and dreams. Generously laid over these illusions is his great compassion for the human experience and his tremendous love of life.

Movies.
Fellini grew up in a small Italian town in the twenties and 30’s and the dominant cultural influences for him was the cinema, just as it was for me growing up in a small town in Kansas in the 1940’s and 50’s. Each one of his films is loaded with film references. In Il Viteloni the movie house is one of the settings, movie posters are splayed on the walls in the backgrounds, and the influence of the Hollywood stars can be seen in the dress and manners of the characters.

In La Strada the Guieletta Masina character is based on Harpo Marx, complete with blond hair, white make up, heavily drawn eyebrows, the overlarge coat, the silent miming, and in the melancholy music played on a variety of instruments.

In La Dolce Vita Anita Ekberg plays a visiting Hollywood sexpot, Lex Barker a former Hollywood Tarzan (himself), and in Intervista Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni play themselves as the aging stars of an old Italian movie, La Dolce Vita, complete with a screening of the scene in the Trevi fountain.

In all of the films there are the elaborate sets that reference the sumptuous 30’s Hollywood sets without architectural logic such as those seen in the Fred Astaire Ginger Rogers movies. There are scenes in which the lighting, both indoors and out, is nothing other than studio lighting. In many films there are film crews set up with all the possible film equipment in the world. There are cardboard ships that sail on oceans of fabric.

The movie reference comes completely to the forefront in the late film, The Ship Sails On. It is a ship of fools, a comedy, but you dare not laugh. In this film the ship travels from A to B. The ship sinks. There are characters and they are busy doing things but nothing they do refers to a plot or to a meaning. It is a movie just as an opera is an opera, just as a modern painting is an object in and of itself. It is not a documentary, it is not a history, it is not a drama or a comedy or a musical or a thriller …it is just a movie but presented in such a way as to never lose our attention. And The Maestro is having his fun with it. It is creative illusion, art, and only that makes life significant. In I am a Born Liar, an excellent meditation on art and the creative personality, Fellini states that art is the essence of life, that without art life is only a heart that beats or an eye that records. For Fellini, art is vital energy. His premise is very clearly stated and understood in this film.

Memories.
As I wrote earlier, all of Fellini’s films are based on his memories, whether they are his memories of actual events or memories that he has made up, according to his collaborators, is not for us to know.

Dreams
While recuperating from an illness after making La Dolce Vita, Fellini read Petronius’ Satyricon. It is an incomplete fragment of a classic work …rather like the ruined and fragmentary wall murals from old Roman structures. Understanding the various archetypes within the work, Fellini turned these elements into a motion picture. But rather than a narrative that presents a world view for consideration, it is instead an exploration springing from the question: Do these images resonate with modern man? When the viewer gives himself up to the events, to the jumps and skips and the lack of narrative and continuity, when he gives himself up simply to this visual experience, the film can be understood as a dream. It is without cohesive narrative logic. It covers a wide range of cultural artifacts from ancient Rome, through the Italian Renaissance and on to modern times, through monuments, references to Italian Renaissance paintings and in the focus on the two young men who are very much like the footloose young hippies in modern day Rome, as if agreeing with T.S. Eliot that all time is contained in time present.

In the film the dream quality is enhanced by the words being out of sync with the mouths of the characters. This was a Fellini device used in all his films. He wanted that disconnect from reality because it enhanced the dreamlike quality of the visual experience. When he directed he sat beside the camera and told the actors what to do. Some ambient sound might or might not have been recorded. Once the film was edited, then he would record the dialogue and lay it over the picture. For those of us who sit and read the subtitles that is not as noticeable as it was to those who speak Italian. But if you turn off the subtitles and just listen to the Italian dialogue, you can see that it is indeed, out of sync.

This film is one in which the filmmaker has used archetypes in such a way as to show us the value of this as a dramatic device. In the sequence wherein the couple sends their children off before committing suicide, the entire scene is presented in white costumes and in a muted light…this is a scene of purity. After their death the two young men enter and explore the house and discover the maid. It is implied that the two of them together become sexually involved with her and immediately after that they indicate that they are sexually attracted to each other as well. (They are satyrs: the basic energy of the characters in the film is libido energy.) In both inferences the information is conveyed as fact and without moral judgment.

In the Christian religion disobedience is considered the original sin, a sin of which all subsequent men are guilty: Man is by his nature disobedient. Civilization is but a thin veneer over man’s inherent nature. And indeed the social conservatives tell us that unless we have strong law and order we will live in a state of social anarchy.

Thus it can be said that those of us who think ourselves moral and on our guard against temptation can find that when we see the two young men in bed with the young woman we will have an emotional/moral response to that and we will also have an emotional/moral response to the inference that they are sexually intimate with each other. But in the absence of a moral standard, the official Church dogma, on the part of the filmmaker, our response, whatever it is, can be said to be our own response…and we must own up to that response, or, in Jungian terms, when we accept the dark, the hidden, side, by acknowledging our emotional response as our own, we gain personal knowledge. Triggered by the mechanism of the archetypes, that knowledge then expands our understanding of what it means to be human.

And just as the role of the church is minimized in this film, as indeed it is in all these works, it is generally presented as a social institution divorced from the lives of the people, so the role of the state is minimized: there are very few politics in Fellini’s films, when they are there, as in Amarcord, it is seen as being so much less emotionally vital than the quotidian reality of the characters or the archetypes and the strong images of the memory and the imagination of the film itself. In Fellini’s world nothing is political, life is visual experience …the passing ocean liner on the late night sea… and much of it raises the question: why is this visual experience so meaningful?

Film is a director’s medium…hence these works are The Films of Federico Fellini. But film is a most collaborative process and they are only as good as the work of each of the contributors. This director was extremely fortunate to have worked with some of the most creative and talented men and women in the industry. In the early black and white films he had the good fortune to work with cinematographer Otello Martelli and his work, as seen in the restored La Strada print is among the very best of film photography. He died in 1966 and from then on Fellini worked with Giuseppe Rotunno in color films that are as rich as Italian Renaissance paintings.

Danilo Donati, Piero Gheradi, and Dante Ferretti were his costume and set designers. In addition to Pinelli he worked on scripts with Ennio Flaiano, Brunello Rondi, and Tonino Guerra. The films were all edited by Ruggero Mastroianni, brother of the actor. And in the music department there is Nino Rota who created a music for these films that is so perfect for them, but so iconic that it cannot be used in other films, it cannot be heard, without evoking the memory of Fellini and Rota. In all areas of this filmmaking each collaborator has given the director a perfectly conceptualized and flawlessly executed component and no expense seems to have been spared in the execution thanks to some very generous producers.

It must have been wonderful to have been so creative and to have had all these very, very talented people help realize the creator’s vision. The felt sense of personal reward must be wonderful for each of them as well. These films can be viewed over and over again and each time more and more of the details become apparent …such as the young man with a white streak in his black hair that grows wider and wider throughout the film until near the end, standing at the church door at a funeral, he looks as if he has a skunk on his head ala Davy Crockett. Fellini is so sly!

From this body of work it is no exaggeration to say that Fellini is to film as Picasso is to modern art: with all due respects paid to his predecessors, he is the outstanding creative energy of twentieth century cinema. His movies are not theatre or painting or photography, Fellini’s movies are movies. Real movies! Bravo Fellini! Encore! Encore!