Il Poeta Federico Fellini Film Studies , Week 8 (Spring 2012)

Il PoetaFederico Fellini

Film Studies, Week 8 (Spring 2012)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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

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“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?

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“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 non-ordinary reality-with all that it can teach us-seems beyond the capabilities of every practicing adult, with the possible exception of Federico Fellini---Garry Trudeau”

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Cine-Mendacity

Cine-Mendacity

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Cine-Mendacity

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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

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“Federico only blushes when he tells the truth.”—Giuletta Masina

Cine-Mendacity

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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

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“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 221-22)

Cine-Mendacity

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Fellini the Autobiographer

Fellini the Autobiographer

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“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

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“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

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"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

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“The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography” (Walter 36).--Federico Fellini

Fellini the Autobiographer

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“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

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Fellini’s Creative-Life

Fellini’s Creative Life

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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).

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“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).

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“[Fellini] creates the way he sees" (Hughes 157). --Dadaist/Surrealist Hans Richter

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“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 documentaryFellini: I’m a Born Liar

Fellini’s Creative Life

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“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).

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Fellini-Grotesque

Fellini-Grotesque

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Fellini-Grotesque

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Fellini-Grotesque

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.

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“Fellini is the patron saint of the freaks of Rome.”--Theologian Harvey Cox

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Fellini-Grotesque

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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 DictionaryFellini-Grotesque

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Fellini-Grotesque

“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.

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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

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The "grotesque" body depicted in pre-Renaissance 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

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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

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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

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Fellini-Grotesque

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 . . .

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Fellini-Grotesque

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:

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Fellini-Grotesque

“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.”

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“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

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“[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

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“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

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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.”

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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:

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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.”

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There is a nature that is grotesque withinThe boulevards of the generals. Why shouldWe say that it man’s interior worldOr seeing the spent, unconscious shapes of night,Pretend they are shapes of another consciousness?The grotesque is not a visitation. It isNot apparition but appearance, partOf that simplified geography, in whichThe sun comes up like news from Africa. --Wallace Stevens, “A Word with Jose Rodriguez-Feo”

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• 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)

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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.

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Variety Lights (1950)

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The White Sheik (1951)

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I Vitelloni (1953)

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Amore in città (Love in the City) (1953)—contributed “Un'agenzia matrimoniale” ("A Marriage Agency”)

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La Strada (1954)

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Il Bidone (1955)

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The Nights of Cabiria (1957)

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“Cabiria: The Voyage to the

End of Neorealism”

Andre Bazin

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La Dolce Vita (1960)

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8 1/2 (1963)

“The death of cinema as a public spectacle”—Richard Schickel

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Juliet of the Spirits (1965)

Fellini’s First Color Film

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Fellini-Satyricon (1969)

“You should take your friends to see Satyricon to see if they are in fact your friends.”—Federico Fellini

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Fellini Does Acid

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Spirits of the Dead(1969)—contributed “Toby Dammit”

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The Clowns (1971)

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Fellini’s Two Clowns Theory

White Clown: overbearing, pompous, rational, bossy, a moralisticAuguste Clown: impetuous, emotion-driven, a screw-up, a sinner

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Sigmund Freud C. G. Jung

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Adolf Hitler Benito Mussolini

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Oliver Hardy (right)Stan Laurel (left)

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Dick Cheney George W. Bush

Fellini’s Two Clowns Theory

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Fellini’s Two Clowns TheoryWhite (l)/Auguste (r)

Bud Abbott | Lou CostelloMoe | Curly (from the Three Stooges)Dan Rowan | Dick MartinDick Smothers | Tom SmothersDean Martin | Jerry LewisJohnny Carson | Ed McMahonRicky Ricardo | Lucy RicardoGracie Burns | George BurnsJerry Seinfeld | George CostanzaRen | StimpyMarge Simpson | Homer SimpsonHillary Clinton | Bill ClintonLeft Brain | Right BrainStephen Colbert | Jon Stewart

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Fellini's Roma (1972)

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Amarcord (1974)

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Though there's many a charming townAnd the world abounds with beauty.At evening when the sun goes downAnd finds you in some far-off placeSitting at a stranger's hearth,The Borgo [Rimini] in your heart will seemThe loveliest place on earth.Oh, how will you will live, so far from home? (Amarcord 141)

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Fellini's Casanova (1976)

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Orchestra Rehearsal (1979)

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City of Women (1980)

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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

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Fellini’s Movies

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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 describeto 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

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"true friends" guide,dawns of angelic exercise,the tour of la strada,vouching "Buena seral"--

the mother's pedagogy,like a peacock's benedictionAuguste reconnoiterings,grotesque sagas

of confessed misogyny,prodigal from wrapping sheetsand afraid of being happy,ascend trees wanting woman--

her glance of shy epiphany Fellini’s Movies

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"there the treasures are"little hands of springin seminars of weatherthe photogenic seasons

Nothing to say

6/25/78

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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.

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Giulietta Masina

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Marcello Mastroianni

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Marcello Mastroianni

And the Ship Sails On (1984)

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Ginger and Fred (1986)

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Intervista (1987)

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The Voice of the Moon (1989)

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Fellini Receives an Honorary Oscar

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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 leafAbove the table spins its constant spin,So that we look at it with pleasure, look At it spinning its eccentric measure. PerhapsThe man-hero is not the exceptional monster,But he that of repetition is most master.--Wallace Stevens, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

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