Fellini's Pictures
BOERNER, MARGARET
Fellini's Pictures Rewatching Federico Fellini's image-filled, plot-deprived movies. BY MARGARET BOERNER What you remember about a film by Federico Fellini are the images. A clown walks a high...
...At its most academic, neo-realism postulated that the camera should just follow people around and record what is "really" out there in "real" life...
...Fellini's typical trick for evoking nostalgia is to set up the domestic as it "really is" and then to refuse to deliver an answer...
...All the knaves are fools...
...Indeed, one can conjure up the atmosphere of a Fellini film just by hearing the characteristic music by Rota...
...At twelve years old, he ran away from boarding school to join a circus...
...A "touched" uncle climbs a tree and bellows, over and over, "I want a woman...
...His films after La Dolce Vita were made in color, but he never lost his eye for sophisticated black and white filming, and his later films in color use a lot of black and white with focal touches of red...
...He sneers at no one...
...past and present interpenetrate and are indistinguishable...
...Some scenes, some characters don't belong to the story anymore...
...He makes us realize again that the past is in the present...
...Thus, although Fellini's films are crowded, they don't present "crowd scenes...
...We do not experience catharsis in Fellini's films, but rather a heightened emotional interest in his people...
...The scenes are rarely integral to their films' plots—but, then, Fellini's films never have much plot for scenes to be integral to...
...Indeed, in Intervista, Fellini shrugged off his "failure" to construct plots, saying (as if he couldn't control his own films), "First the story develops in one direction...
...Is he redeemed or not...
...What his crowds are doing is as important as what the lead characters are doing...
...In 1960 he won the Cannes Golden Palm Award for La Dolce Vita, and in 1987 he won the Cannes Fortieth-Anniversary Prize for Intervista...
...Hollywood gave him Oscars for Best Foreign Film for La Strada in 1957, Nights of Cabiria in 1958, 8V2 in 1964, and Amarcord in 1975, and bestowed an honorary Oscar on him in 1993...
...The characteristic emotion evoked by Felli-ni's films is nostalgia—a bittersweet longing for things, persons, or situations of the past...
...Federico Fellini (1920-1993) grew up in the small resort town of Rimini in Italy on the Adriatic...
...A ray of sunshine...
...I might, in a word, say: "Listen, I could not explain what is wrong, but I sympathize with you and sing a serenade for you...
...La Strada is unusually plot-driven for a Fellini film, and yet even here one meets the fabulous crowd that typifies Fellini's work, ranging from carni-valesque throngs to knots of bored locals...
...Amarcord, 1974...
...A helicopter, bound for the Vatican, whirls over Roman ruins, dangling a large statue of Christ...
...But Fellini always loved his fat whores—precisely because they express the fabulous, the grotesque, and the freaky in all humanity...
...In one interruption, a passerby yells at Fellini, "No more of your fat whores...
...Fellini's love for all his characters projects not foolish naiveté but profound acceptance...
...Without the faintest hope...
...In the 1950 Variety Lights, a star-struck girl follows a shabby actors' troupe that has come to her village...
...Margaret Boerner teaches English at Villanova University...
...But then, Fellini suddenly adds, Ecco...
...the familiar becomes unfamiliar, as if seen for the first time...
...Why—in Il Bidone (The Swindle), the 1955 film with Broderick Crawford as an aging swindler who gets his just deserts—does Crawford keep back money from his gang...
...A prostitute is hypnotized and responds to the suggestion that "Oscar" loves her with a "pure and simple love" by breaking into a dance (Nights of Cabiria, 1957...
...She uses the troupe's older, married manager to the top, and we last see her climbing onto a train in a sumptuous fur coat...
...Perhaps the mystery that Fellini spots in a crowd is a special instance of "magic realism"—but instead of supernatural happenings in quotidian life, we get intense yearning in the daily round...
...Fellini directed twenty-four films, from the 1950 Variety Lights to the 1989 Voice of the Moon, and wrote the script for many more...
...He always remembered his early dreams of women, the priests in his boarding school, the farmhouse of his grandparents, and his traveling-salesman father...
...That's how he could use actors off the streets of Rome, for he wasn't interested in his characters' inner development...
...As Fellini later observed, what Rossellini taught him was "humility": "that it was possible to look at somebody or something, to consider a situation or some characters in an extremely simple way, and to try to relate what had been actually seen...
...Fellini makes us believe that nostalgia is the definitive human emotion...
...The film should end here...
...And yet, the impact of the Italian films remains more operatic than the seemingly similar cinéma vérité of the French "New Wave" cinema of the 1960s...
...After working for the director Roberto Rossellini, Fellini began making his own films, at first without much financial backing—which partly explains his propensity to film in the open squares of Rome and the roads and fields of Italy's coast, where an expensive set did not have to be constructed and expensive lighting was not necessary...
...It is not clear whether he has learned any lesson, but the film's vaudeville characters re-main—the image of them and the intimacy with which Fellini looks at his characters are what linger in the viewer's mind, far more than the banal plot...
...But the past in Fellini is ever present...
...and the past is always present...
...Cabiria is a young, naive streetwalker who searches for love and fulfillment in every man she meets but who finds only indifference or betrayal...
...A knot of wanderers gathers on a marsh to devour a dead plutocrat...
...But Rossellini also showed Fellini the "neo-realism" of Italian cinema after World War II, which offered detailed observation of social behavior...
...But Fellini early on came to the conclusion that since the camera determines what is not seen as well as what is seen, there is never a simple recording of what is "really" out there...
...And the familiar music by Nino Rota starts up—a haunting tune played by brasses that invokes the circus and outdoor processions...
...A spotlight shines on the floor of the deserted set...
...But I hear the word of an old producer of mine...
...We come to notice what we had long since stopped noticing...
...At seventeen, just before World War II, he left Rimini for Rome, where he sold cartoons to newspapers and wrote comic sketches for music-hall performers...
...Even in the early pictures, where his co-writers were attempting traditional stories, Fellini seemed more concerned with peopling a scene...
...They indoctrinate their characters, they show a way, and this means that they have a definite idea, which I have not...
...Yet Fellini's stated ambition "to restore fantasy to the cinema" firmly centers on human lives and human dreams...
...a ship waits...
...Now we all go home...
...The image of a shining spot on a dusty floor seems to reveal an essential falseness at the core of Fellini's films and, perhaps, of all moviemaking...
...A characteristic scene in Intervista has Italian Fascists, Native Americans, and Italian Victorian girls all in the same train, riding toward a film set...
...And Fellini was always willing to desert what story he had for another look at his scenes and characters...
...Nonetheless, neo-realism represented an answer to the lies of Mussolini's Fascist regime, and Fellini refused to adhere to a party line, saying I have been reproached by some leftist journalists for having, in the face of reality, an evasive, shunning attitude, for not suggesting any aim or definite solution...
...In Fellini's eyes, individuals in a mass of humanity always carry the magic of fable—whether it is whores plying their trade, families out for an evening meal at a restaurant in the piazza, or even the buzzing paparazzi (a word Fellini coined in La Dolce Vita...
...Rosselli-ni's Open City and Paisan were filmed on this principle...
...At the conclusion of Intervista—a movie filled with the fake sets of real moviemak-ing—Fellini says, "We've wrapped this one, too...
...Fellini's films recapture the emotionally powered mystery of childhood and transfer it to the present...
...Indeed, La Dolce Vita and Amarcord are less the stories of lead characters than stories of whole towns through which the lead character walks...
...He doesn't know how to say no, so he says yes to everybody...
...His career gradually prospered and he could afford to use well-known stars for his leads, but he continued to use unschooled Romans ("natural actors") to people his films—a trademark touch for which he was sometimes criticized...
...To know them feeds him...
...The director's job in Intervista is, comically and significantly, to make a movie called "Kafka in America...
...At age twenty-three, Fellini married Giulietta Masina, the future star of La Strada, Juliet of the Spirits, and Ginger and Fred, and he was still married to her when he died fifty years later...
...A magician leads a movie director's characters in a dance (8V2, 1963...
...His scenes are often full of people only peripherally related to each other, but living together—living in each other's pockets...
...suddenly the figures become frozen in an antique fresco, already shattered by time (Fellini Satyricon, 1969...
...The manager is left behind...
...The essence of nostalgia is that we have an emotional investment in the mysterious charge of life...
...I performed an act of humility and told myself: It is quite true that [such directors as] Zavattini and Vittorio De Sica suggest subscribing to a certain political party...
...Intervista, his valentine to Rome's film studios, takes the form of a constantly interrupted interview of Fellini by a pair of young Japanese film intellectuals who want him to say something profound...
...then the film itself leads you elsewhere...
...Fellini's exquisitely crafted cinema becomes a metaphor for human consciousness itself, where the past is always present...
...Well let's try...
...bikinied girls wave to its pilot from a terrace (La Dolce Vita, 1960...
...Or ray of sunshine...
...Rossellini schooled Fellini in the old-fashioned method of Italian films—a lot like silent pictures, with an emphasis on visual effects and dialogue dubbed in later...
...if he hadn't known them, he would have had to invent them...
...He loves only memories...
...And the palpable love that Fellini shows for his character in Nights of Cabiria shines through all his films...
...Give me a ray of sunshine at the end of each film," he would beg...
...The only thing I might offer my characters, who are always very much oppressed with sorrows and misfortunes, is my sympathy...
...All we are left with is the image of his dying on a hillside...
...The camera pans over debris blowing on an empty studio lot...
...From the many actors in Ciao, Federico!, a film about Fellini's making of Satyri-con, we discover, "He's thirsty for people...
...In Nights of Cabiria, for example, Fellini conceived Cabiria as a woman who lives "like a rat in terrible surroundings, being crushed by reality all the time, but going innocently and having this mysterious faith through life...
...Dogs wander around an empty building...
...Thus Fellini ignored the usual structure of fiction: plot, character development, and conclusive finish...
...we are all fools rather than knaves and deserve the indulgence of the director...
...A clown walks a high wire above a village square and sits down in the middle to eat a plate of spaghetti (La Strada, 1954...
...This is the kind of feeling one ordinarily invests only in the things of the past...
...They're all a bunch of clowns," says a disappointed actress whose scene has been cut in Intervista...
...At the end, after she has been swindled out of everything, and while young, prosperous revelers dance around her on scooters, Cabiria gives us a look of rueful hope—as though to say both that she will always be bamboozled and yet will never lose hope...
...It is hardly a surprise that Fellini adored circuses...
...His long-estranged daughter does need money to start a professional life, but to get that money, he's just swindled a crippled girl...
Vol. 5 • November 1999 • No. 11
