Southern Cross Review Nr. 26 - May 2003
���������������������������� Federico Fellini � Author of Cinema
�� Gaither Stewart
Federico Fellini�s favorite interview
technique was to explain while denying he was explaining, or not explaining
anything while claiming he was explaining all. The symbolist poet - film
director Fellini was a mixture of denial and irony, wile and innocence. Half -
truths and half - falsehoods, interwoven with deceptive under-statements, were
his terrain.�
In one of Fellini�s rare interviews with a small group of
journalists toward the end of his life the film author resorted to his whole
bag of tricks: �For forty years I�ve been trying to explain something I can�t
explain. I hear only questions I can�t answer. Usually only a character, or a
shadow of a memory, or even a form of expression, has offered me a saving hand.
But I myself am impotent and defenseless.
�The truth is, with my camera I have only sketched a series
of scribblings, traced out images, profiles, and pornographic designs that
usually no one asked me to explain.�
It was difficult to ask him what this scene or that sequence
or those words meant. Few journalists ever risked it. The reality is that
watching a Fellini film was like walking along the narrow edge of an abyss
during an earthquake. You grasp for meanings.
Fellini�s explanations were always useless as a means to
understanding his cinema�because by nature he was a liar. He had to be.
Whatever information or interpretation about one film or the other was wrested,
wrenched or wrung from its symbolist author was necessarily a lie. One of the
few truths he ever uttered in an interview was his admission that day I was
present in his famous Studio number 5 in Rome�s Cinecitt� studios: �I�m always
autobiographical, even if I�m telling the story of the life of a fish.�
But everyone present knew that already.
That day in his studio, toward the end of his life, the Maestro -
as film director Federico Fellini [ Rimini, 1920 � Rome, 1993] was
popularly called - was trying not to answer a question or to explain anything
about his old -� always new, Oscar
winning film, AMARCORD [1973]. Set in his native Rimini, the seaside resort on
the Adriatic Sea, the film AMARCORD�the word means �I remember� in his native
dialect and had to be explained also to the Italian public�was in a sense
Fellini�s spiritual return home after the many years of his Rome films.
Fellini�s explanation of the significance of that poetry was
this: �AMARCORD is a kind of consonance, a harmony that intrigues, that
seduces, like the alluring name of an aperitif. I only wanted to portray a real
Italian province.�
For Fellini the dreamer, the wanderer and follower of
circuses, the observer of life, and caricaturist, the town of Rimini on the
Adriatic Sea was the point of departure and a subtle point of reference for all
his cinematographic works�for his �scribblings, images, profiles, and
pornographic designs,� as he falsely modestly defined his films. The seashore
resort of Rimini was the base of his autobiography, the base of all the
Felliniana.
�� ��
Fellini lovers recall with delight the image of the Rimini
boys dancing on the wide steps of the great seashore hotel on a dark winter�s
night. Much more than the thousands of discos along its coastline, that image
marks indelibly the town of Rimini. The Grand Hotel today stands there almost
silently, an elegant symbol of times past, which is what Fellini�s cinema, his
poetry, is all about: �memories,� he liked to say.
At the exclusive north end of Myrtle Beach - like Rimini, a
monument to the Rimini Belle �poque, the Grand Hotel in Fellini�s time
expressed the province�s search for the beautiful world far away. Rome was far
away. Europe was distant. Once a meeting place for the European aristocracy,
the Grand became a hotel for politicians, artists, and writers, where in its
Belle Epoch atmosphere waiters still today speak French to distinguished
English guests.
I dwell on Rimini and the Grand Hotel because it conditioned
the boy and the youth, Federico. It conditioned Fellini�s art, his view of
life. His cinema is rich in images of the epoch symbolized by the Grand Hotel,
where the famous film director always stayed on his frequent visits. The
manager of the Grand once told me that Fellini changed personalities in Rimini,
in contrast to his boisterous Rome image: �Here he is a quiet guest, a simple
man, with no pretensions, no scandals.�
For the boy Federico, the Grand Hotel was a ray of light
from the world beyond the railroad tracks, in contrast to the boredom of the
provinces so isolated in those days. Later, all of his principle film
characters were to be immersed in a desolate interior solitude.
�We were fourteen furious boys who couldn�t bear any
restrictions,� Fellini reluctantly recalled in the Cinecitt� interview.
�Nothing was sacred. We teased the workers, we broke into the monastery at dawn
to wake up the monks by squirting water on the cell doors. At night we
tormented couples hidden behind the boats on the beach. Once we stole the clock
from the Hotel Kursal. [That episode was used in Fellini�s first major film, I
VITELLONI, 1953].
Just across the rail tracks from the Grand lies the 2,300
year old town of Rimini�the streets and piazzas of Fellini�s cinema. It�s a
Roman town with amphitheater and Augustus� Triumphant Arch of 27 B.C. But
superimposed on the antiquity is Fellini�s Medieval - Renaissance town where
Brunelleschi worked and where stands the Liceo Classico made famous by
Fellini�s films. The narrow strip of land between the sea and the north - south
railroad tracks was a beacon to Rimini youth, a place where in the night they
felt physically the passing of great express trains and ocean liners. The
contrast between the provincial town on one side of the tracks and the wide
world on the other became the center of Fellini�s art.
The scene in AMARCORD of the boys of the provinces dancing
together the old - fashioned dance, slowly and silently, on the steps of the
Grand Hotel, and the passing in the night fog of the mysterious ship, the REX,
underlines the contrast. It is the reality of their yearning and the symbolism
of the REX in the night�in the distance, intangible and evanescent.
Is Fellini�s art cinema, plastic art, or symbolist poetry?
The answer, I believe, is all three.
While AMARCORD was his return home, Fellini lovers will
appreciate that I VITELLONI marked Fellini�s spiritual departure from his
hometown to Rome. The word of the title meaning �fat calves� refers to the sons
of provincial bourgeois families who didn�t work and lived off their fathers.
In the latter film, the Maestro
claimed he depicted the reality of life in the Rimini of that period. So to
speak! For reality for Fellini was a relative term. The film that won the
Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival that year was an artistic adieu to
Rimini, which liberated him to set out for other worlds. To Rome, his adopted
city.�
Yet, Federico Fellini was no Thomas Wolfe. He departed but
had no difficulty returning. His friend, Alberto Moravia, wrote that,
�Fellini�s cinema had Rome as its protagonist rather than as its background and
setting.� For Moravia, one of Italy�s major writers and an ardent film critic,
Fellini�s Rome is �a city of imagination, composed of corporeal and Baroque
fantasy, a place to give vent to a certain sentiment of life.�
Moravia noted however that �when Fellini speaks of his
native Rimini he becomes sober and delicate.�
���� During the intervening years between his
physical departure - escape from Rimini and the provinces in 1939�recorded in I
VITELLONI and filmed in Rimini�and his spiritual return there in 1973 with his
film masterpiece, AMARCORD, Fellini never really deserted the complex town -
image on the Adriatic Sea. The Rimini images created by the Roman - Medieval
vestiges on one hand and the typical provinces and the world of tourism on the
other, remained in his blood.
Therefore, the mature Fellini, the artist and magical
recorder of people and things, searching for outlets for his world of fantasy
within his autobiography, found Rimini again with such ease and delicacy.
In no other western country more than in Italy is more apt
the expression, �No one is a prophet in his own country.� Especially in the
case of Federico Fellini, who was less admired and less understood in realistic
Italy than abroad. Many Italians today say frankly, �I never liked Fellini. I
don�t understand him.�
Though that is blasphemy among cinema lovers in France or
the United States, also many cinema critics and festival juries never
understood his art�though they recognized it as the work of genius. Therefore
all his Oscars! Because of his genius of expressive ambiguity the Maestro so influenced his contemporaries
and the subsequent generation of filmmakers that today, to be called
�Fellinian�, is the highest accolade. Perhaps no other filmmaker ever won more
awards and received more acclamation and recognition in his own time for works
so few people could comprehend.
Fellini himself�liar, master of understatement and denial,
weaver of dreams and fantasy�said about his own films, �I don�t understand them
either. I don�t seem capable of even suggesting an interpretation.�
Ennio Flaiano, the film critic and sometime Fellini
collaborator, viewed Fellini�s work as�
�a search for himself��rare but not unheard of among film makers. �His
themes are the conflict between life and dream, the incommunicability among
human beings, and rejected love. His merit is that he presents the sum total of
good and evil, of fall and redemption.�
These should not be understood as simply hollow words. If
one keeps Flaiano�s diagnosis in mind�life and dream, incommunicability,
unreturned love, good and evil, and redemption of man�and if one recalls one is
dealing with a symbolist poet and weaver of dreams and not just another film
director, one can comfortably walk into Blockbuster and take home confidently 8
�� [Otto e Mezzo], put it in the video,
and sit down and appreciate Fellini�s most difficult film.
The most Fellini himself ever admitted about his vast
work�The White Sheik, I Vitelloni, La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, La Dolce Vita,
Satyricon, Giulietta of the Spirits, Casanova, Amarcord, Ginger and Fred, The
Interview, and all the others�was this: �I put myself in front of a mirror only
in 8 �. The rest is memories.�
Unfortunately, his own story of the autobiography of a fish
belied that admission, too.
Gaither
Stewart
Rome
November,
2001
Gaither
Stewart is a journalist who currently makes his home in Italy. A regular
contributor of both essays and fiction to Southern Cross Review, Gaither has
also authored several novels published by SCR E-Books
Email: [email protected]
