What you remember about a film by Federico Fellini are the images. 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). 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). A helicopter, bound for the Vatican, whirls over Roman ruins, dangling a large statue of Christ; bikinied girls wave to its pilot from a terrace (La Dolce Vita, 1960). A magician leads a movie director’s characters in a dance (8 1/2, 1963). A knot of wanderers gathers on a marsh to devour a dead plutocrat; a ship waits; suddenly the figures become frozen in an antique fresco, already shattered by time (Fellini Satyricon, 1969). A “touched” uncle climbs a tree and bellows, over and over, “I want a woman!” (Amarcord, 1974).
The scenes are rarely integral to their films’ plots — but, then, Fellini’s films never have much plot for scenes to be integral to. Even in the early pictures, where his co-writers were attempting traditional stories, Fellini seemed more concerned with peopling a scene. 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? His long-estranged daughter does need money to start a professional life, but to get that money, he’s just swindled a crippled girl. Is he redeemed or not? All we are left with is the image of his dying on a hillside. In the 1950 Variety Lights, a star-struck girl follows a shabby actors’ troupe that has come to her village. 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. The manager is left behind. It is not clear whether he has learned any lesson, but the film’s vaudeville characters remain — 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.
Federico Fellini (1920-1993) grew up in the small resort town of Rimini in Italy on the Adriatic. At twelve years old, he ran away from boarding school to join a circus. (It is hardly a surprise that Fellini adored circuses; if he hadn’t known them, he would have had to invent them.) As 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. 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.
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. 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 always remembered his early dreams of women, the priests in his boarding school, the farmhouse of his grandparents, and his traveling-salesman father. 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.
Fellini directed twenty-four films, from the 1950 Variety Lights to the 1989 Voice of the Moon, and wrote the script for many more. 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, 8 1/2 in 1964, and Amarcord in 1975, and bestowed an honorary Oscar on him in 1993.
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. But Rossellini also showed Fellini the “neo-realism” of Italian cinema after World War II, which offered detailed observation of social behavior.
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. Rossellini’s Open City and Paisan were filmed on this principle. And yet, the impact of the Italian films remains more operatic than the seemingly similar cinema verite of the French “New Wave” cinema of the 1960s. 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.” 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.
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. . . . 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. . . . They indoctrinate their characters, they show a way, and this means that they have a definite idea, which I have not. . . . The only thing I might offer my characters, who are always very much oppressed with sorrows and misfortunes, is my sympathy. 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.”
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.” Cabiria is a young, naive streetwalker who searches for love and fulfillment in every man she meets but who finds only indifference or betrayal. 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. And the palpable love that Fellini shows for his character in Nights of Cabiria shines through all his films.
That’s how he could use actors off the streets of Rome, for he wasn’t interested in his characters’ inner development. From the many actors in Ciao, Federico!, a film about Fellini’s making of Satyricon, we discover, “He’s thirsty for people. To know them feeds him.” “He doesn’t know how to say no, so he says yes to everybody.” “He loves only memories.” 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. In one interruption, a passerby yells at Fellini, “No more of your fat whores!” But Fellini always loved his fat whores — precisely because they express the fabulous, the grotesque, and the freaky in all humanity.
Thus Fellini ignored the usual structure of fiction: plot, character development, and conclusive finish. 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; then the film itself leads you elsewhere. Some scenes, some characters don’t belong to the story anymore.”
And Fellini was always willing to desert what story he had for another look at his scenes and characters. At the conclusion of Intervista — a movie filled with the fake sets of real moviemaking — Fellini says, “We’ve wrapped this one, too. Now we all go home.” The camera pans over debris blowing on an empty studio lot. Dogs wander around an empty building. But then, Fellini suddenly adds,
Ecco. The film should end here. But I hear the word of an old producer of mine. “What? Without the faintest hope? Or ray of sunshine. Give me a ray of sunshine at the end of each film,” he would beg. “A ray of sunshine.” Well let’s try.
A spotlight shines on the floor of the deserted set. And the familiar music by Nino Rota starts up — a haunting tune played by brasses that invokes the circus and outdoor processions. (Indeed, one can conjure up the atmosphere of a Fellini film just by hearing the characteristic music by Rota.)
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. Yet Fellini’s stated ambition “to restore fantasy to the cinema” firmly centers on human lives and human dreams. The characteristic emotion evoked by Fellini’s films is nostalgia — a bittersweet longing for things, persons, or situations of the past. But the past in Fellini is ever present. We do not experience catharsis in Fellini’s films, but rather a heightened emotional interest in his people. This is the kind of feeling one ordinarily invests only in the things of the past.
The essence of nostalgia is that we have an emotional investment in the mysterious charge of life. Fellini’s films recapture the emotionally powered mystery of childhood and transfer it to the present. We come to notice what we had long since stopped noticing; the familiar becomes unfamiliar, as if seen for the first time. Thus, although Fellini’s films are crowded, they don’t present “crowd scenes.” What his crowds are doing is as important as what the lead characters are doing. His scenes are often full of people only peripherally related to each other, but living together — living in each other’s pockets. Indeed, La Dolce Vita and Amarcord are less the stories of lead characters than stories of whole towns through which the lead character walks. 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 carnivalesque throngs to knots of bored locals. 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).
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’s typical trick for evoking nostalgia is to set up the domestic as it “really is” and then to refuse to deliver an answer. He sneers at no one; we are all fools rather than knaves and deserve the indulgence of the director. “They’re all a bunch of clowns,” says a disappointed actress whose scene has been cut in Intervista. Fellini’s love for all his characters projects not foolish naivete but profound acceptance. A characteristic scene in Intervista has Italian Fascists, Native Americans, and Italian Victorian girls all in the same train, riding toward a film set. All the knaves are fools; and the past is always present.
The director’s job in Intervista is, comically and significantly, to make a movie called “Kafka in America.” He makes us realize again that the past is in the present; past and present interpenetrate and are indistinguishable. Fellini’s exquisitely crafted cinema becomes a metaphor for human consciousness itself, where the past is always present. Fellini makes us believe that nostalgia is the definitive human emotion.
Margaret Boerner teaches English at Villanova University.
