The Cinema Magician

TULLIO KEZICH’S Federico Fellini: His Life and Work is the first fully successful critical biography of the great artist. But at 464 pages, it is so ample in critical scope and brimful of irresistible information as to make one despair of doing it justice in a mere review.

Kezich is the film critic for the distinguished Corriere Della Sera, and was for over 40 years a close friend of Fellini’s. Also a playwright and scenarist, he is no run-of-the-mill journalist: Though he knows in which restaurant and with whom Fellini ate what meal, he does not clobber you with unnecessary detail or allow friendship to cloud his judgment. He places the man and artist into the context of the annals of cinema, as well as of Italian politics and world history. His close-ups are as good as his panoramic shots, and except for there being no music by Nino Rota, reading the book feels very nearly like a Fellini film.

Indeed, it is hard to tell with Fellini whether his art imitated his life, or vice versa.

Fellini the director did not spring full-fledged from his youthful brow. Federico was born in 1920 in the sleepy little Adriatic town of Rimini. His provincial father, Urbano, had a wholesale business, mostly in coffee and cheese, and was handsome and gregarious. His mother, Ida, a city girl rejected by her family for marrying beneath her station, became pious and withdrawn. Despite their differences, they stayed together; to them, Federico may have owed his divided personality.

The youth, his somewhat younger brother, and their friends indulged in escapades worthy of the vitelloni that figure so prominently in Fellini’s cinema. A vitellone is literally an overgrown calf; figuratively, a big baby or layabout. Curiously or not, Fellini was never to show interest in politics or soccer, the most traditional topics of Italian society. Nor did he ever don a swimsuit or take a still photograph. Even more oddly, growing up he rarely saw movies.

Too clever and talented to be long stuck in Rimini, and perhaps spurred on by a traveling circus (clowns were to be a lifelong passion), he duly went to Rome to be, as Kezich writes, “swallowed up as if by a starving, protective and dangerous mother.” With his gift for drawing, particularly caricatures and comic strips, he landed a job with the comic magazine Marc’Aurelio, drawing and, later, writing comic sketches. This led to other journals and to the radio. Before very long, Federico was also a gag writer for others, including film directors. But at this time, he never dreamed of becoming one himself.

Kezich evokes vividly the young man’s Roman adventures, one of them leading him toward a young actress who appeared in one of his radio sketches, Giulietta Masina. Living with her extraordinary aunt Giulia, Giulietta had experimented unsuccessfully with other arts until settling on acting. Her elfin charm and sound values attracted the young man “worn out by the carousel of furnished rooms and boarding houses.” Marriage to Giulietta, beginning in her aunt’s comfortable apartment, also meant dodging the wartime draft. It was to endure 50 years–until death–and though, Kezich observes, Federico “doesn’t give up flirting with other women, he does it with the security that Giulietta is beside him.”

Lured into screenwriting, Fellini worked on many important movies, such as Roberto Rossellini’s Open City and Paisan, and films of the no-less-important Pietro Germi. He became coscenarist with such leading practitioners as Alberto Lattuada, Brunello Rondi, Ennio Flaiano–later on, Bernardino Zapponi and Tonino Guerra–and his steadiest partner-to-be, Tullio Pinelli. Lattuada, also a director, pushed him into directing a few scenes of his Variety Lights. Between reticence and self-contradiction, however, Fellini managed to obfuscate any clear identification with himself in his films.

And what a life he had! To cite but one incident, take Fellini’s narrow escape from the Nazis. Forced onto a truck during a mass roundup, he spots a Wehrmacht officer and, madly shouting “Fritz! Fritz!” jumps off the truck to embrace him. Apologizing to the befuddled fellow with a hand gesture, he runs off to hide on a side street, collapsing on the curb very near the house where, coincidentally, he was to spend his last years.

To survive in the lean postwar era Fellini draws portraits of GIs in cafes. He is bribed by Rossellini to play the fake St. Joseph in The Miracle with a million-lire check, which Roberto takes back a half-hour later. But he buys Federico the first of his many fancy cars.

Fellini hated the theater, except variété, the European vaudeville, at which he often hung out. Already while working on Variety Lights, he declared that cinema called for clear ideas, hard work, and the ability not to care about anybody else. As Kezich observes, he was gradually turning into “a real movie animal capable of the most Machiavellian behavior.”

Making his first film, the enchanting The White Sheik, he doesn’t improvise (as many believe) but knows what he wants and how to get it, though he incorporates ideas that come to him during shooting. Albeit totally unmusical, he meets the wonderful composer Nino Rota and forms a close partnership with him. Until his death after Orchestra Rehearsal, Rota provides Fellini with arguably the finest film scores ever composed, the one for Sheik no exception.

Next comes Fellini’s loveliest film, I Vitelloni, into which he smuggles Alberto Sordi (his White Sheik) against the producer’s wishes. Sordi and a bunch of young actors are sensational in the film. Unfairly, it garners only a Silver Lion at the Venice Festival.

A sequel to it, Moraldo in the City, swiftly banged out by Fellini, Pinelli, and Flaiano, does not get made. Kezich is uniquely informative and insightful about such unrealized projects in which great efforts were invested. Most important among them was The Voyage of G. Mastorna, on which the director vainly worked almost his whole life. Other such miscarriages include an early one for Sophia Loren and a late one with script by Carlos Castaneda. The huge obstacles that even a star director encounters, and sometimes actually hurdles, increase one’s admiration for Fellini, even if his methods and treatment of coworkers (his wife included) were often less than admirable. Still, what reactions he had to endure! The shattering La Strada was called by critics old, fake, insincere, literary, unrealistic, pathological, and childish.

But praise by intellectuals (of whom Fellini was always wary) can also be a problem. We read: “[Pier Paolo] Pasolini and Alberto Moravia, each with his own personal take on [La Dolce Vita], manage to provoke more worry for the director than reassure him. He doesn’t like the label ‘neo-decadent’ and is totally perplexed by the comparison drawn between him and the poet Giovanni Pascoli. He thought he was doing something completely different and much more basic–a made-up magazine, a magazine film.”

Meanwhile, Kezich also keeps amusing track of Fellini’s principal love affairs, some of which, more or less transformed, end up in the movies. They were not quite as numerous as gossip or Federico would have it. Asked during production of La Dolce Vita if he had an affair with Anita Ekberg, he replied, “You should certainly please tell everyone that I have.”

Absorbing, too, are the accounts of how Fellini and Pasolini haunted Rome’s disreputable quarters and palled around with prostitutes (who adored Fellini) for The Nights of Cabiria and of Fellini’s conflicts with major actors (he hated working with stars). But he himself became a star by and by, and his sets turned into tourist attractions.

In his belief that cinema should reinvent rather than imitate reality, he had his set designer create the Via Veneto in the studio, and claimed that it was better than the real thing. He became impervious to personal attacks–often physical–as when he and his frequent star, Marcello Mastroianni, after being jostled and spat at, adjourned for “a lunch of risotto with saffron at Biffi Scala,” and talked about other things.

Dreams were ever more important to Fellini, and he kept a Dream Book, including even such nightmares as when he is forced to have mortifying sex with an ugly woman. Much of 8 1/2 is made up of dreams and dreamlike fantasies. Kezich locates the reason for its being “one of the most admired and praised works in the history of cinema [in] that it teaches bravery and (with difficulty, effort, pain, and joy) how to say ‘I.'”

Reluctantly, Fellini gets some psychotherapy; sanguinely, he gets involved with a magician and magic. This surfaces in a film dedicated to his wife, Juliet of the Spirits, which brings about the end of several friendships and collaborations. But what would have been a noteworthy collaboration with Ingmar Bergman (the directors admired each other) falls through because of an American producer’s insolvency. Producers, censorship, the Church–what battles Fellini has with them.

Apropos of the autobiographical Amarcord, Kezich remarks: “Fellini is incapable of hating anyone, even the Fascists . . . depicting them as clowns only slightly more sinister than the rest of the clowns.” Federico is, of course, a joker himself: He does not read Casanova for his film about him, or Petronius for what becomes Fellini Satyricon.

The later films are lesser works, but at Kezich’s hand, make for no less riveting reading. With Rota’s death, the scores, too, lose a good deal, and Fellini’s control slackens: “After the first few weeks, I’m not directing the movie anymore; the movie is directing me”–though he does not see this as a drawback. He enjoys “the simple task of doing it. . . . It would all be meaningful even if the movie were never printed, edited, seen. If the camera had no film. If there weren’t even a camera.”

The method changes. “I can’t work the way I used to, with a screenplay and dialogue. Now I just want an outline, and then I improvise while I’m shooting.” Illnesses of various kinds afflict him. Even so, in the last films, as in The Voice of the Moon, Fellini fans “can find solace in that the maestro, though weary and disconsolate, is still there, immersed in the task of finding an answer to the amorphous chaos of existence.”

“Toward the end of his life,” Kezich writes, “the shadow of the great film Fellini never made [Mastorna] weighs heavier on him.” Unwell, he cannot make the trip to Hollywood for a Lifetime Achievement Award. Three bank commercials he does make are attended only by some 20 people at the Venice Festival. He now does much more reading, and even some painting.

Fellini dies on October 31, 1993, the day after his golden wedding anniversary. Giulietta, also ailing, dies five months later. “There isn’t a newspaper in the world that describes [his passing] as anything other than a loss for humanity,” writes Kezich. Especially ironic–or prophetic–is one headline: “FOR FELLINI, THIS IS THE START OF A GREAT FUTURE.”

Ingmar Bergman spoke to me in the early 1970s of his love for Fellini. “The heat from his creative mind melts him,” he said. “He suffers physically from it. One day when he can manage the heat . . . he will make pictures you have never seen in your life.” Actually, as Kezich confirms, he had already made those films.

My only reservation about Federico Fellini concerns the poor translation by Minna Proctor and Viviana Mazza. There is much that is ungrammatical, un-English, or simply grotesque. We read about “Madre Cabrini,” of being “speared on by neurosis,” of “Ciro and Serse” (for Cyrus and Circe), the “Commission of Ten” (for Committee), “a square with a dome [for cathedral] like the one in Koln [for Cologne].” And such things as “hung” for hanged, “off of,” and “thusly.” Most peculiarly, we get “trespassing” for dying; in French, trépasser does mean to die, but there is nothing like that in either English or Italian.

Luckily, mistranslations like these, and many more, cannot obscure the book’s quality. This biography testifies to the promised great future’s permanent present.

John Simon writes about theater for Bloomberg News.