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MLR, 98.4, 2003 1011 Federico Fellini: Contemporary Perspectives. Ed. by Frank Burke and Marguerite R. Waller. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2002. xxxii + 239 pp. ?42 (pbk ?15). ISBN 0-8020-0696-5 (pbk 0-8020-7647-5). Fellini's influence upon contemporary film directors remains considerable, despite an uneven cinematic output. He was arguably at his best while he drew on his early experiences of provincial and urban life, and incorporated the acerbic, observational humour of co-writers Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano into his screenplays. By con? trast, the second half of Fellini's career is characterized by a whimsical excess caused by his estrangement from Pinelli and Flaiano, and also by his rather stagnant, cosseted existence as an established director. This paucity of fresh life experiences prompted him to cannibalize existing literary works or recycle his own dreams and fantasies, some of which were decades old, into film projects. Consequently, most overviews of Fellini's filmography reveal that for every Dolce vita there is usually a Casanova lurking offscreen. Whether this collection of essays, together with Marguerite Waller's thoughtful introduction, will have 'a significant impact on filmstudies', as its introductory pages proclaim, is questionable. Similarly, the assertion that the volume employs 'a range of recent critical approaches' (p. i) is also debatable, given that the semiotic, psychoanalytical , feminist, and deconstructionist perspectives adopted by most of the contributors are past the firstflush of youth and approaching middle age. Although there is a whiff of the seventies about this anthology, Waller justifiably highlights the lack of critical material on Fellini written during this theoretically productive decade, and in a sense the application of these perspectives to Fellini's work within this volume fillsa discernible gap within scholarly writing on Italian film. Using a semiotic approach, Frank Burke focuses primarily on the final, postmod? ern phase of Fellini's career, when his work consistently transformed the real and the representable into pure sign. Burke convincingly argues that certain effects in Casanova, such as the (in)famous 'garbage bag sea', exemplify the director's attempts to erase referentsaltogether, but is generous in his interpretation ofthe self-indulgent Intervista as 'codified' and 'parodic' in the way it constructs meaning through recycling Fellini's past films and experiences, and by exhibiting his film-making routine. Christopher Sharratt highlights Toby Dammit as a pivotal moment in Fellini's ceuvre, a film which marked a transition towards 'artificial cinema' and artifice, and which, together with the self-consciousness of later films, formed a basis for the director's critique of the 'formulaic, mind-deadening, mass production of art, the culture industry 's resuscitation and reformulation of bankrupt styles and conventions in its constant search for new forms and satisfactions' (p. 123). On a related theme, Millicent Marcus contributes a valuable discussion of Fellini's portrayal of television in Ginger e Fred, the medium constituting another source of signs that endlessly reflect other signs without any trace of a referent. Marcus also argues that beyond its surface attack on the brutalizing effectof commercial television upon the world of cinema, the film also contains an implicit indictment of cinema itself as a medium of simulation and self-referentiality. Through an analysis of Fellini's scepticism towards intellectuals, and towards lan? guage as a communication tool, William Van Watson's Lacan-influenced essay posi? tions Fellini's work in the realm ofthe visual imaginary rather than within the verbal symbolic, and interprets the director's keenness on studio filming as an example of a desire to reincorporate reality into the Imaginary Order, within a 'studio-womb'. Yet, as sometimes occurs with psychoanalytically oriented work, biographical detail?not in the formofunreliable quotations from Fellini himself, which several contributors to this volume use unquestioningly, but in terms of corroborated accounts from friends and family?can prove equally illuminating. It is well documented that Fellini's 1012 Reviews provincial upbringing made for an ambivalent attitude towards Rome's intellectuals; similarly,aftera frustratingspell of location filmingon a beach forLo sceicco bianco, he subsequently preferred to reinvent reality on his own terms in the studios of Cinecitta. Virginia Picchietti's study of Lo sceicco bianco explores the paradox that emerges when...
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AMARCORD ["I Remember"] is Fellini's most ingratiating film so far--the return to scenes of his childhood near Rimini on Italy's Adriatic coast seems to have mellowed him. His fascisti are Verdi caricatures who can be deflated by a phonograph blaring out the Internationale from the bell tower in the town's main square as Mussolini begins a speech; the worst they do to the perpetrator is give him a humiliating dose of castor oil. The strangest and most wonderful things happen in the city of Amarcord, but they are all good things: A great ocean liner sails by the coast at night, lit up like it was sailing out of an electric forest; the whole population of the town piles into its boats and waits for the ship to pass, falling asleep for hours. Nature is strange but always benevolent, from the "puffballs" that, blown about everywhere, announce the end of winter, to the summer rain that comes down for just half a moment and then is gone just as suddenly, and, most of all, the snow, amazing as it is to all children, to whose eyes small drifts seem five feet high. Even death, when it comes, is a jewelled coach with cut crystal windows, followed by a procession in which everyone is included.
This inclusiveness knows no bounds. Everyone lives together in Amarcord, from the town drunk to the bizarre count in his palazzo. There is the sense of an ending whenever--because of death or marriage to an outsider--anyone leaves the town. Everyone gathers at funerals and marriages to see them off; every evening, they take their stroll along the town's main street, nodding to everyone else. The city Fellini used for filming had some things in it that were obviously postwar--Amarcord is set in the thirties--but he didn't need to change or cover up any of them. The sense of community he creates is so overwhelming that it assimilates everything into a harmonious whole, like the way gothic and romanesque arches are set into the fabric of the town's renaissance church--contributing to the structure, absorbed into the design, yet retaining their own shape for those who care to see.
There is a bad side to life in Amarcord: fascism and especially the Church, with its laughable confessionals and pathetic attempts at education. But the schoolchildren Fellini focuses on aren't warped or victimized by the Church--they exploit it, puncture it almost effortlessly, without retribution. Even the ordinary cruetly of children to other children (such as the very fat or the very small) never goes beyond the verbal stage. Sometimes, particularly in the opening scene of the bonfire with which the town welcomes the spring, there is a hint of menace, but these hints are always resolved into a joke. Fellini shows us only one side of the dionysiac, and only avoids getting sappy as a Christmas card by making his all-encompassing benevolence bittersweet. The director's old persona as the Hitchcock or Resnais or Welles who set out to terrify or bewilder or impress his audience is replaced by kindly old Father Christmas figures like Fellini and Jean Renoir, who do nothing more than wave their wands over the world and turn evil into good.
AS IN HIS most recent film, Fellini Roma, Fellini occasionally has members of the cast step out from the tapestry to address his audience, like Anna Magnani as she reaches the door to her apartment and bids us all good night. In Amarcord Fellini plays around further with this device; along with the exquisite diction of the Italian actors and the rhythm and beauty and strangeness (to the English ear) of what they are saying, this lends a theatrical, almost ritualistic quality to the film. These characters, though, are faintly ridiculous. By stepping out of the community to address us, they forfeit the strength in numbers that protects everyone else and show themselves to be somehow anti-social. One of these characters is a poet who sips Campari on the steps of the seaside Grand Hotel just outside of town, watching the Nazis make out with the local girls; another an antiquarian who stands in the midst of the snow covered square to inform us that this is the town's largest snowfall "since the ice age," although there have also been large snows in 1694 and 1888, the last one occuring on the 13th of July. He gets hit on the head with a snowball. Fellini makes fun of these characters; in Roma, it was Anna Magnani who had the last laugh. Now the director is in control again. If his impotence was exposed by confrontation with a city of Rome's complexity, his omnipotence is only too intrusive as he conquers a town the size of Rimini.
Amarcord has no plot. Like Roma, it is a "portrait" of a city, with no particular story to tell. But because the emphasis is on the simplicity of the city rather than its complications, Amarcord seems much more structured and homogeneous than Roma. It's also less daring. Fellini takes no chances, and it's his holding back that's responsible for the lack of any sequence as creative as the transforming of the traffic jam in Roma from urban ugliness to post-industrial beauty, a change much more convincing than anything in Amarcord. In Roma it was the way of seeing that made something beautiful; in Amarcord, it is the thing itself. A peacock flies onto a snowdrift and opens its fan. In a dense early morning fog a young boy wanders through a grove of trees which have assumed eerie, deformed shapes. The child's way of seeing, like his way of judging the height of the snow, is objectified instead of being shown as a consequence of perception. It's a beautiful world, Fellini seems to be saying, a good world; and the way he chooses to convince us is to show a non-stop catalogue of its beauties and consolations.
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