The Fellini Spectator/A Man of the Right
Ledeen, Michael
A Man of the Right by Michael Ledeen L ike all great artists, Federico Fellini had an ambivalent attitude toward his society, and in return he incurred his fair share of its misunderstanding and...
...Such people cannot understand because they will not stay around long enough to see the whole picture...
...Today he is hailed as one of the great artists of postwar Italy, and everyone who is anyone in contemporary Italy came to pay him homage, but it was rarely thus during his lifetime...
...Thus, years after giving us La Dolce Vita, he insisted on re-creating the world of the Michael Ledeen is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...
...The film tells the story of an or-chestra that revolts against the severe discipline of its conductor, and by mid-film the players have driven him away...
...I remember studying the Renaissance tapestries in the Palazzo Medici Borghese in Florence, and wondering how it was that the artists had made the Tuscan hills with sharp points instead of rounded crests, but once there I saw that the tapestry was accurate...
...His last creations were bank commercials for Italian television...
...For those of us fortunate enough to have lived in Italy during his prime, Fellini was uniquely important, for he presented the full drama of the country, from its carnivalesque public spectacle to its heart-rending private misery, and he painstakingly extracted the archetypal personalities from the confusion of daily life...
...Radical-chic intellectuals proclaim the death of Italian cinema, but the Italian left never hesitated to call him a fascist...
...But they then degenerate into civil war, destroying instruments, music, even each other, and end by calling back the maestro, who now taps his baton on the music stand and counts out the tempo...
...Fellini was nauseated by the thought of television viewers, watching a tiny screen, with an electronic box in their hands, ready to switch channels at the first hint of boredom...
...C oncerned that his enemies might somehow assimilate him into their own misguided views of the world, he left us with a long filmed "interview" in which he mourns the departure of those spectators capable of watching and understanding real movies...
...The two great masterpieces of his mature period were both political: Amarcord and Prova d'Orchestra...
...Produced for Italian television, it is a blood-chilling commentary on the consequences of the "revolutionary" ideologies of the late seventies...
...In like manner, the seemingly bizarre scenes of La Dolce Vita were often accurate portrayals of Roman life, and the worlds of 81/2 and Guiliette of the Spirits were impeccable portraits of the Italian psyche of Fellini's generation...
...in German...
...For in movies, as in literature and essays, the hard work of searching for the truth requires readers and viewers who will stay with the author long enough to comprehend...
...When asked for the "meaning" of Guiliette, he dryly responded: "I've made a color movie—don't you find it attractive...
...To most Americans, Fellini's movies created a world so fantastic that it could only be explained in psychological or mythological terms, but much of it, and many of the characters, were real...
...Even the president of the Italian Republic came to pay homage to the fallen genius, but for the last three years of his life, Federico Fellini could not find official support for his projects...
...A Man of the Right by Michael Ledeen L ike all great artists, Federico Fellini had an ambivalent attitude toward his society, and in return he incurred his fair share of its misunderstanding and wrath...
...In each case, Fellini was going in the teeth of the political correctness of the day, and the elegance and power of his presentations quite predictably intensified the hatred of him in the corridors of cultural power...
...In the end, unable to find official funding for his movies and shunned by the dominant culture, he remained a lone voice who nonetheless, more than any other cinematic figure of his generation, defined the era, and gave it some of its most memorable moments...
...Like other "outsiders," Fellini found it easier to sense what was really going on in his society, and his cinematic genius made it possible for him to translate his understanding into some of the most powerful images in the history of art...
...And in Roma, a movie rarely seen outside Italy, he took us on an underground ride in the subway—at the time only partially finished—in which twentieth-century engineers were constantly frustrated by their encounters with ancient ruins along their construction route...
...The first is an autobiographical movie about fascism, showing the great variety of life under Mussolini's dictatorship...
...Yet this is the contemporary audience, and it is unlikely that a marketplace dominated by them will permit the emergence of such a grand master as Federico Fellini anytime soon...
...Fellini was a man of the right, and loathed the pseudo-revolutionary theater and movies that passed for high culture until the very recent past...
...CI 74 The American Spectator January 1994...
...Although its political incarnation was only achieved little more than a century ago, the Italian spirit has been formed over more than two millennia, and Fellini knew that one had to go back to ancient Rome to understand the moderns...
...Satyricon, a realm of such moral confusion that even hermaphrodites appeared on screen...
...His remains lay in state at Cinecitta's Studio 5, the set he used for all his great movies, but the living Fellini had been exiled from Cinecitta, and his last movie, La Voce della Luna, was made elsewhere...
...The Vatican, attentive as always to the final roundup of souls, today hails his religious spirit, but La Dolce Vita was excoriated by the Church...
...Fellini made Amarcord (dialect for "I remember") at a time when the Marxist stereotype of fascism was coming under discussion, and the movie was the first in postwar Italy to suggest that fascism was variegated, with true believers, cynical opportunists, camp followers, and secret enemies at the top, and a whole spectrum of life underneath...
...Prova d'Orchestra (orchestra rehearsal) is a different matter altogether...
Vol. 27 • January 1994 • No. 1
