Il Poeta
Federico Fellini
Film Studies
Film Studies, Week 8 (Spring 2012)
Film Studies
Film Studies
Film Studies
Everything and Nothing by Jorge Luis Borges
There was no one in him: behind his face (even
the poor paintings of the epoch show it to be
unlike any other) and behind his words (which
were copious, fantastic, and agitated) there was
nothing but a bit of cold, a dream not dreamed by
anyone. At first he thought that everyone was like
himself. But the dismay shown by a comrade to
whom he mentioned the vacuity revealed his
error to him and made him realize forever that an
individual should not differ from the species. At
one time it occurred to him that he might find a
remedy for his difficulty in books, and so he
learned the “small Latin and less Greek,” of
which a contemporary spoke.
Film Studies
Later, he considered he might find what he sought in
carrying out one of the elemental rites of humanity,
and so he let himself be initiated by Anne Hathaway in
the long siesta hour of an afternoon in June. In his
twenties he went to London. Instinctively, he had
already trained himself in the habit of pretending he
was someone, so it would not be discovered that he
was no one. In London, he found the profession to
which he had been predestined, that of actor:
someone who, on a stage, plays at being someone
else, before a concourse of people who pretend to
take him for that other one. His histrionic work taught
him a singular satisfaction, perhaps the first he had
ever known. And yet, once the last line of verse had
been acclaimed and the last dead man dragged off
stage, he tasted the hateful taste of unreality. He
would leave off being Ferrex or Tamburlaine and
become no one again.
Film Studies
Thus beset, he took to imagining other heroes and
other tragic tales. And so, while his body complied
with its bodily destiny in London bawdyhouses and
taverns, the soul inhabiting that body was Caesar
unheeding the augur’s warnings, and Juliet
detesting the lark, and Macbeth talking on the
heath with the witches who are also the Fates. No
one was ever so many men as that man: like the
Egyptian Proteus he was able to exhaust all the
possibilities of being. From time to time he left, in
some obscure corner of his work, a confession he
was sure would never be deciphered: Richard
states that in his one person he plays many parts,
and Iago curiously says “I am not what I am.” The
fundamental oneness of existing, dreaming, and
acting inspired in him several famous passages.
Film Studies
He persisted in this directed hallucination for
twenty years. But one morning he was
overcome by a surfeit and horror of being all
those kings who die by the sword and all those
unfortunate lovers who converge, diverge, and
melodiously expire. That same day he settled
on the sale of his theater. Before a week was
out he had gone back to his native village,
where he recuperated the trees and the river of
his boyhood, without relating them at all to
trees and rivers--illustrious with mythological
allusion and Latin phrase--which his Muse had
celebrated. He had to be someone; he became
a retired impresario who has made his fortune
and who is interested in making loans, in
lawsuits, and in petty usury.
Film Studies
It was in character, then, in this character that
he dictated the arid last will and testament we
know, from which he deliberately excluded any
note of pathos or trace of literature. Friends
from London used to visit him in his retreat, and
for them he would once more play the part of
the poet.
History adds that before or after his death he
found himself facing God and said: I, who have
been so many men in vain, want to be one
man, myself alone. From out of a whirlwind the
voice of God replied: I dreamed the world the
way you dreamed your work my Shakespeare;
one of the forms of my dream was you, who,
like me, are many and no one.
Film Studies
“the suspicion--the extreme test of his topicality,
the total congruence of the director and his
time--that Fellini, a man who has exhausted
himself and his life in images, doesn't exist.”
--Liliana Betti on Federico Fellini
Film Studies
“When you work with
Federico you only learn to
discover that there’s
nothing to discover.”—Lina
Wertmuller, assistant
director on 8 ½ and director
of Seven Beauties, Swept
Away, Which Way is Up?
Film Studies
“A flight of fantasy, whether in dreams or
daydreams, is no mere sleight of mind. But
only children will accept it as being equally as
profound as the arbitrary awareness we are
taught to regard as reality, and hence, only
they are nurtured by it. Later, of course, many
of us comprehend our self-imposed poverty
and try to double back, but the bread crumbs
are always missing and our failures are
immense. A true belief in the validity of nonordinary reality-with all that it can teach usseems beyond the capabilities of every
practicing adult, with the possible exception
of Federico Fellini---Garry Trudeau”
Film Studies
Film Studies
Film Studies
Film Studies
Film Studies
Film Studies
Film Studies
Film Studies
Film Studies
Film Studies
Film Studies
Film Studies
Film Studies
Film Studies
Film Studies
Film Studies
Film Studies
Film Studies
Film Studies
Film Studies
Film Studies
Film Studies
Film Studies
Cine-Mendacity
Cine-Mendacity
Film Studies
Cine-Mendacity
Film Studies
Fellini himself once even proclaimed the need for
a “cine-mendacity” to replace “cinema-verite”
because “a lie is always more interesting than the
truth” (Playboy 58).
Cine-Mendacity
Film Studies
“Federico only blushes when he tells the truth.”—
Giuletta Masina
Cine-Mendacity
Film Studies
David Thomson, to cite an extreme example,
has ruthlessly assaulted Fellini (in his Biographical
Dictionary of Film) as an "obsessional vacuous
poseur . . . a half-baked, play-acting pessimist,
with no capacity for tragedy," whose films are a
"doodling in chaos."
Cine-Mendacity
Film Studies
“Fellini is not honest, he is not
dishonest, he is just Fellini. . . . he has
no limits; he's just like quicksilver--all
over the place. I have never seen
anybody like that before. . . . He is
enormously intuitive; he is creative;
he is an enormous force. He is
burning inside with such heat.
Collapsing . . . . The heat from his
creative mind, it melts him. . . . He is
rich.”—Ingmar Bergman (Simon 22122)
Cine-Mendacity
Film Studies
Fellini the
Autobiographer
Fellini the Autobiographer
Film Studies
“Making a film is something quite other . . . than a simple
professional fact. It's a way of realizing myself and giving
my life a meaning. That's why, when you ask me which of
my films I prefer, I'm stuck. I don't know what to say. I don't
consider my films as professional facts; if I did so, I might
be able to look at them objectively enough to say this
one seems more of a success than that. But as it is, I find
getting such a detached position absolutely impossible.
The way I want to speak about a film is, not to say what
I'm expressing in it, but the stages of my life I pass through
making it. I have just the same difficulty as I would if
somebody asked me "Which do you prefer, your military
career, or your marriage, your first love, or meeting your
first friend?" They are all facts of my life. I like it all, it's my
life and consequently I can't choose.” (Burgeon 91)
Fellini the Autobiographer
Film Studies
“My work can't be anything other than a
testimony of what I am looking for in life. It is a
mirror of my searching . . . for myself freed. In this
respect, I think, there is no cleavage or
difference of content or style in all my films.
From first to last, I have struggled to free myself
from the past, from the education laid upon me
as a child” ("Interview," Playboy 58).
Fellini the Autobiographer
Film Studies
"If I set out to make a movie about a fillet of
sole, it would turn out to be about me" (Costello
36).
Fellini the Autobiographer
Film Studies
“The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography”
(Walter 36).
--Federico Fellini
Fellini the Autobiographer
Film Studies
“At bottom, I am always making the same film. I
am telling the story of characters in search of
themselves, in search of a more authentic
source of life, of conduct, of behavior, that will
more closely relate to the true roots of their
individuality” (Kast 182-83).
Fellini the Autobiographer
Film Studies
Fellini’s Creative-Life
Fellini’s Creative Life
Film Studies
For the "real," he has explained, is not what we assume it
to be; “it is neither an enclosure nor a panorama that has
just a single surface. A landscape, for example, has
several textures, and the deepest, the one that can be
revealed only by poetry, is no less real. It is said that what I
wish to show behind the epiderm of things and people is
the unreal. It is called my taste for the mysterious. I shall
readily accept this description if you will use a capital "M."
For me the mysterious is man, the long irrational lines of his
spiritual life, love, salvation. . . . For me, the key to the
mystery--which is to say, God--is to be found at the center
of the successive layers of reality . . .” (Murray 35).
Fellini’s Creative Life
Fellini’s Creative
Life
Film Studies
“For me the only real artist is the visionary because he
bears witness to his own reality. A visionary--Van Gogh,
for instance--is a profound realist. That wheat field with
the black sun is his; only he saw it. There can't be
greater realism” (Samuels 226).
Fellini’s Creative
Life
Film Studies
Film Studies
“[Fellini] creates the way he sees" (Hughes 157).
--Dadaist/Surrealist Hans Richter
Fellini’s Creative Life
Film Studies
“My films happen because I sign a contract. I get an
advance I don’t want to repay so I have to make the
film. I’ll say it again; you may think I’m being
facetitious, but it’s absolutely true. I don’t believe in
total creative freedom. A creator, if he is given total
creative freedom, would tend, I think, to do nothing at
all. The greatest danger for an artist is total freedom, to
be able to wait for inspiration, that whole romantic
discourse. Psychologically, the artist is an offender. He
has a childish need to offend, and to be able to offend,
you need parents, a headmaster, a high priest, the
police. . . . I need opposition, someone who annoys me,
someone who opposes me, to work up the energy that I
need to fight for what I’m doing. I need an enemy.”
Federico Fellini in Damian Pettigrew’s documentary
Fellini: I’m a Born Liar
Fellini’s Creative Life
Film Studies
“One day I met an angel who stretched out his hand to
me. I followed him, but after a short time I left him and
went back. He stopped and waited at the same place
for me. I see him again in difficult moments and he
says to me, ‘Wait, wait,’ just as I do to everyone. I am
afraid that when I call him one day, I shall not find him.
It is the angel who has always awakened me from my
spiritual torpor. When I was a boy, he was the
incarnation of an imaginary world, and then he
became the symbol of a vital moral need” (quoted in
Murray 75).
Fellini’s Creative Life
Film Studies
Fellini-Grotesque
Fellini-Grotesque
Film Studies
Fellini-Grotesque
Film Studies
Fellini-Grotesque
Film Studies
When infamous critic Leslie
Fiedler turns to the subject
of the grotesque in his
Freaks: Myths and Images of
the Secret Self, it is, of
course, Fellini he thinks of.
Fellini-Grotesque
Film Studies
“Fellini is the patron saint of the freaks of Rome.”
--Theologian Harvey Cox
Fellini-Grotesque
Film Studies
Fellini-Grotesque
Film Studies
Grotesque
•Ludicrous from incongruity; fantastically absurd.
•In a wider sense, of designs or forms:
Characterized by distortion or unnatural
combinations; fantastically extravagant; bizarre.
•A work of art in this style. Chiefly pl., figures or
designs in grotesque; in popular language, figures
or designs characterized by comic distortion or
exaggeration.
--Oxford English Dictionary
Fellini-Grotesque
Film Studies
“For the hard of hearing you
shout, for the blind you draw
large and startling figures.”—
Flannery O’Connor on the
reason behind her use of the
grotesque.
Fellini-Grotesque
Film Studies
In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin shows
that in the past four hundred years a
preoccupation with politeness, taste, manners,
and rational, institutional values has eclipsed an
earlier, pre-modern fascination with the
"grotesque body," imposing a "bodily canon" on
expression and on perception itself. This earlier
wonder at the "earthy"--created and sustained
by folkloric imagination--is readily apparent,
according to Bakhtin, as the shaping force
behind the exuberant but thoroughly grotesque
genius of the French priest Rabelais, author of
Gargantua and Pantagruel.
Fellini-Grotesque
Film Studies
The "grotesque" body depicted in preRenaissance art in general and Gargantua and
Pantagruel in particular is one which, according
to Bakhtin, unashamedly "fecundates and is
fecundated, that gives birth and is born,
devours and is devoured, drinks, defecates, is
sick and dying.”
Fellini-Grotesque
Film Studies
The "bodily canon," however, asserts instead
that human beings exist outside the hierarchy of
the cosmos. It stresses that we are finished
products, defined characters, and in its
reductionism attempts to seal off the bodily
processes of organic life from any interchange
with the external world.
Fellini-Grotesque
Film Studies
The bodily canon therefore seeks to:
1.close all orifices;
2.stop all mergers of the body with the external
world;
3.hide all signs of inner life processes and bodily
functions (hence, for example, prohibitions
against farting or belching in public);
4.ignore all evidence of fecundation and
pregnancy;
5.eliminate protrusions;
6.present an image of a completed, rational,
individual body.
Fellini-Grotesque
Film Studies
On the way into the seminar room to defend my doctoral
dissertation, a skeptical member of my committee, with whom I had
previously talked about doing a dissertation on Native American
literature, sarcastically asked how my impossibly interdisciplinary
diss had managed to avoid any comparisons between Fellini and
Native American culture. "Now that you mention it," I responded,
pulling out of my backpack a book I had just checked out from the
library . . .
Fellini-Grotesque
Film Studies
Jamake Highwater's Ritual of the Wind:
North American Indian Ceremonies,
Music, and Dances. I showed him a
passage in which Highwater, considering
the “contrariness” of American Indian
sacred clowns, known for their
scatological and obscene parodies of
tribal holy men, naturally thinks of Fellini
when he seeks to explain the revulsion
missionaries experienced confronting the
clowns’ behavior:
Fellini-Grotesque
Film Studies
“The shock techniques of Dadaism and the late films of
Federico Fellini, have a great deal in common with the
contrariness of sacred clowns, especially those of the
Southwest.”
Fellini-Grotesque
Film Studies
“When I introduce rather odd characters into
my films, people say I’m exaggerating, that I’m
“doing a Fellini.” But it’s just the opposite; in
comparison with what happens to me all the
time, I feel I’m softening things, moderating
reality to a remarkable degree” (Strich 52).
Fellini-Grotesque
Film Studies
“[The ideal] imposes impossible standards and
unattainable aspirations that can only impede the
spontaneous growth of a normal human being, and may
conceivably destroy him. You must have experienced this
yourself. There arrives a moment in life when you discover
that what you've been told at home, at school, or in
church is simply not true. You discover that it binds your
authentic self, your instinct, your true growth. And this
opens up a schism, creates a conflict that must
eventually be resolved or succumbed to. In all forms of
neurosis there is this clash between certain forms of
idealization in a moral sense and a contrary aesthetic
form. “—Federico Fellini, Playboy Interview
Fellini-Grotesque
Film Studies
“For me there’s no difference between a scent
and a stink. Perhaps if we’d been taught that a
stink is nice and scent nasty, the world would
see things in a different light. God knows why
there’s all this fuss about a bit of shit! It’s a
human product, just as much as our thoughts
are!”-- Eau de Cologne in Amarcord: Portrait of
a Town (36)
Fellini-Grotesque
Film Studies
Fellini-Grotesque
Fellini-Grotesque
Film Studies
In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Marco Polo
regales Kublai Khan with the story--one of five
in the book designated as tales of “Cities & the
Sky”--of Perinthia, a metropolis which, from its
very inception, had been intended as a
utopia, its ordering cosmologically inspired.
In Perinthia, we learn, all aspects of the city are
laid out according to the highest wisdom of
astrology and astronomy. Buildings, for
example, are cited in such a way as to receive
“the proper influence of the favoring
constellations.” The astronomers who oversaw
Perinthia’s development from the ground up
guaranteed the city that it would, without
question, “reflect the harmony of the
firmament.”
Fellini-Grotesque
Film Studies
Reality, of course, turns out to be anything
but ideal. For, Marco Polo informs us,
In Perinthia’s streets and squares today
you encounter cripples, dwarfs,
hunchbacks, obese men, bearded
women. But the worse cannot be seen:
guttural howls are heard from cellars
and lofts, where families hide children
with three heads or six legs. (144)
Such grotesques bring the
astronomer/architects of Perinthea to an
intellectual impasse, one that crops up all
through Calvino’s splendid fictions/thought
experiments:
Film Studies
Fellini-Grotesque
Either they must admit that all their
calculations were wrong and their
figures are unable to describe the
heavens, or else they must reveal that
the order of the gods is reflected
exactly in the city of monsters. (145)
In the grotesque cinematic world of
Federico Fellini--Calvino’s contemporary,
countryman, and close friend--clearly the
second alternative seems the only viable
one, and yet Fellini does not embrace it
out of deductive necessity. Filmed on
location in Perinthia, his movies celebrate
the revelation that “the order of gods is
reflected exactly in the city of monsters.”
They bring us “news from Africa.”
Film Studies
There is a nature that is grotesque within
The boulevards of the generals. Why should
We say that it man’s interior world
Or seeing the spent, unconscious shapes of night,
Pretend they are shapes of another consciousness?
The grotesque is not a visitation. It is
Not apparition but appearance, part
Of that simplified geography, in which
The sun comes up like news from Africa.
--Wallace Stevens, “A Word with Jose RodriguezFeo”
Fellini-Grotesque
Film Studies
•Variety Lights (1950)
•The White Sheik (1951)
•I Vitelloni (1953)
•Love in the City (1953)
•La Strada (1954)
•Il Bidone (1955)
•The Nights of Cabiria
(1957)
•La Dolce Vita (1960)
•8 1/2 (1963)
•Juliet of the Spirits (1965)
•Spirits of the Dead (1969)
•Fellini-Satyricon (1969)
•The Clowns (1971)
•Fellini's Roma (1972)
•Amarcord (1974)
•Fellini's Casanova (1976)
•Orchestra Rehearsal (1979)
•City of Women (1980)
•And the Ship Sails On
(1984)
•Ginger and Fred (1986)
•Intervista (1987)
•The Voice of the Moon
(1989)
Film Studies
The Jungian psychologist James Hillman has
suggested that artists be thought of as obsessional
neurotics--like Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare’s play,
perpetually washing and washing her hands—”Out, out
damn spot”—fixated on a particular sign or symbol. Or,
they are like the veteran who has lost a limb in battle
and returns again and again to the scene of his loss.
The artist obsesses over a decisive moment or theme
or symbol, following a repetition compulsion until he or
she gets it right—finds a way to make sense of it via
story or image.
Film Studies
1
Variety Lights (1950)
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
2
The White Sheik (1951)
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
3
I Vitelloni (1953)
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
3.5
Amore in città (Love in
the City) (1953)—
contributed
“Un'agenzia
matrimoniale” ("A
Marriage Agency”)
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
4.5
La Strada (1954)
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
5.5
Il Bidone (1955)
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
6.5
The Nights of Cabiria (1957)
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
“Cabiria: The
Voyage to the
End of
Neorealism”
Andre Bazin
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
7.5
La Dolce Vita (1960)
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
8.5
8 1/2 (1963)
“The death of cinema as a
public spectacle”—Richard
Schickel
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
Juliet of the Spirits (1965)
Fellini’s First Color Film
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
Fellini-Satyricon (1969)
“You should take your
friends to see Satyricon
to see if they are in fact
your friends.”—Federico
Fellini
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
Fellini Does Acid
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
Spirits of the Dead(1969)—
contributed “Toby Dammit”
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
The Clowns (1971)
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
Fellini’s Two Clowns Theory
White Clown: overbearing, pompous, rational,
bossy, a moralistic
Auguste Clown: impetuous, emotion-driven, a
screw-up, a sinner
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
Sigmund Freud
C. G. Jung
Fellini’s Two Clowns Theory
Film Studies
Adolf Hitler
Benito Mussolini
Fellini’s Two Clowns Theory
Film Studies
Oliver Hardy (right) Stan Laurel (left)
Fellini’s Two Clowns Theory
Film Studies
Dick Cheney
George W. Bush
Fellini’s Two Clowns Theory
Fellini’s Two Clowns Theory
White (l)/Auguste (r)
Bud Abbott | Lou Costello
Moe | Curly (from the Three Stooges)
Dan Rowan | Dick Martin
Dick Smothers | Tom Smothers
Dean Martin | Jerry Lewis
Johnny Carson | Ed McMahon
Ricky Ricardo | Lucy Ricardo
Gracie Burns | George Burns
Jerry Seinfeld | George Costanza
Ren | Stimpy
Marge Simpson | Homer Simpson
Hillary Clinton | Bill Clinton
Left Brain | Right Brain
Stephen Colbert | Jon Stewart
Film Studies
Film Studies
Fellini's Roma (1972)
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
Amarcord (1974)
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
Though there's many a charming town
And the world abounds with beauty.
At evening when the sun goes down
And finds you in some far-off place
Sitting at a stranger's hearth,
The Borgo [Rimini] in your heart will seem
The loveliest place on earth.
Oh, how will you will live, so far from home?
(Amarcord 141)
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
Fellini's Casanova (1976)
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
Orchestra Rehearsal (1979)
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
City of Women (1980)
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
About the time I completed my doctoral dissertation
To Discover That There’s Nothing to Discover:
Imagination, the “Open,” and the Movies of
Federico Fellini
in the summer of 1978, I wrote Fellini to inquire whether I
might visit him in Rome and, perhaps, interview him. (My
wife of six months worked for Delta Airlines and we
could fly to Italy for next to nothing.)
Fellini responded—a scan of the letter is on the next
slide--and invited me to the set of City of Women
(1980), but he would not, alas, have time for an
interview.
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
I gave Fellini a copy of this poem on the set of City of Women in
November 1979 at Cinecitta Studios in Rome. I also gave him a copy
of The Doonesbury Chronicles. He took out his glasses there on the
set, read the poem, and then touched me on the cheek in a classic
Italian gesture of gratitude.
_______________________________________________
FELLINIESQUE
Consummation of the poet
then the passage winds describe
to breadcrumbs in his iris,
ambit of quicksilver re-memberings,
the center-ring agreements,
inventions of the sesame (Ass Nisi Masa)r
"where the eyes move" in amarcord's serenade
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
"true friends" guide,
dawns of angelic exercise,
the tour of la strada,
vouching "Buena seral"-the mother's pedagogy,
like a peacock's benediction
Auguste reconnoiterings,
grotesque sagas
of confessed misogyny,
prodigal from wrapping sheets
and afraid of being happy,
ascend trees wanting woman-her glance of shy epiphany
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
"there the treasures are"
little hands of spring
in seminars of weather
the photogenic seasons
Nothing to say
6/25/78
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
On the set that day we met Giulietta Masina, Fellini’s
wife (to our greeting she replied, in perfect English, “I
am so sorry. I don’t speak English”).
On the way to be seated before filming commenced,
Joyce bumped into someone. When we turned to look
back we saw that it was Marcello Mastroianni.
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
Fellini’s Movies
Giulietta Masina
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
Marcello
MarcelloMastroianni
Mastroianni
Film Studies
And the Ship Sails On (1984)
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
Ginger and Fred (1986)
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
Intervista (1987)
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
The Voice of the Moon (1989)
Fellini’s Movies
Film Studies
Fellini Receives
an Honorary
Oscar
Film Studies
And round and round, the merely going round,
Until merely going round is a final good,
The way wine comes at a table in a wood.
And we enjoy like men, the way a leaf
Above the table spins its constant spin,
So that we look at it with pleasure, look
At it spinning its eccentric measure. Perhaps
The man-hero is not the exceptional monster,
But he that of repetition is most master.
--Wallace Stevens, Notes Toward a Supreme
Fiction