Bondanella,
The Films of Federico Fellini
We’ve just
come back from a three-day holiday in Le
Marche, a rugged, mountainous province on the Adriatic Coast of Italy. The reason for the trip was a 60th
birthday party for a good friend from the UK.
It was a non-stop party for 14 that had Felliniesque moments—more on
that in a sec. We flew into Bologna and
then headed to an agriturismo called La Tavola Marche, tucked into the
Apennines near the small town of Piobbico.
While this is not meant to be an advertisement, I have to say that La Tavola Marche is an exceptionally
beautiful venue hosted by an American couple who couldn’t be friendlier and who
offer cooking lessons in their 500-year-old stone farmhouse. Plus they have six I'm-going-to-roll-over-on-my-back-now-so-you-can-scratch-my-tummy cats. I'm always a little skeptical of cooking schools, but all of the
seasoned cooks in our group said they came away with either a new technique or a nuanced understanding
of an ingredient, or both.
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| From the Website |
Here is the link to the agriturismo: https://www.latavolamarche.com/ And here are a few photos of the rolling,
pastoral landscape that envelopes it.
As part of
the celebrations, our birthday friends organized a cruise on the Adriatic that
departed from Fano, a lovely beach town, where we had gelato at The Green Bar (below). My choice was pistacchio gorgonzola, and it was to die for. (Thank you, D!)
Our day trip culminated in a soirée at La Tavola Marche featuring
a brass band from the adjacent town of Apecchio.
The band is a fifth generation affair that
started in 1920. They are rehearsed but
not polished, rustic but not unsophisticated, and nothing but extremely enthusiastic. Here’s a taste of what they sound like:
I don’t
know about you, but the klezmer-y wailing of the clarinets and the circus marching
fanfare of the brass took me back to a Nino Rota soundtrack straight out of a
Fellini movie. And that’s how things got
Felliniesque.
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| 8 1/2 |
As so often
happens in real life, there were a lot of unexpected coincidences, starting with
1920, the date the band from Apecchio came into being. Fellini was also born in 1920, in Rimini, a
seaside resort on the Adriatic, not unlike and not far from Fano, the town from
which we set sail (motored, actually). Fellini
went to boarding school in Fano. According
to one of his biographers:
He
grew up in a middle class family, attending school run by a group of nuns. He later attended a Catholic boarding school
in a nearby town, Fano, where, in a childhood escapade, he ran away to join a
traveling circus for a day, a brief evasion into the world of imagination. At school, Fellini showed a special talent
for drawing and art history and spent summer vacations in his family’s country
house where he regularly watched passing gypsy caravans journeying on their way
to other regions.
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| I Vitelloni |
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| I Notti di Cabiria |
It
is not memory that dominates my films. To say that my films are
autobiographical is an overly facile liquidation, a hasty classification. It
seems to me that I have invented almost everything: childhood, character, nostalgia, dreams,
memories, for the pleasure of being able to recount them.
There was another Fellini coincidence--The Law. To please his
parents, Fellini enrolled in law school in 1939 at the University of Rome. According to a biographer, "there is no
record of his ever having attended a class." Quickly finding that law offered no place for
his active imagination, he dropped out and turned to drawing satirical caricatures,
cartoon strips like the one above, and writing radio plays for a station in Rome. The radio gig allowed him to avoid the draft
and to meet his future wife, Giulietta Masina, who was the voice of one of his
radio play characters. I can sympathize with Fellini’s lack of
enthusiasm for the legal profession. In the
summer of 1995, languid in the law, I binge watched 22 of his films screened at a two-week Fellini
festival at The Castro in San
Francisco. The films typically began at
7:00 pm, which meant I had to duck out of my law job in the East Bay “a little early”
to hustle over to San Francisco in time for the screening. The choice between watching Fellini’s
imagination at play and my lack of imagination at work wasn’t a close call.
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| Cassanova |
Then there is
the Bologna and Planes Reference. Fellini was a bit dodgy
about all things draft during the Mussolini days. After holding a series of jobs that deferred
his inscription, he conclusively avoided serving thanks to an Allied bombing raid
over Bologna that destroyed all of his medical records. Creative destruction!
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| Giulietta degli Spiriti |
Fellini and
Masina married shortly thereafter and then events took a tragic turn. Masina got pregnant within a few months but fell down the stairs and suffered a miscarriage. She gave birth to a son, Pierfederico, in 1945,
but he died of encephalitis at the age of one month. These tragedies had a profound effect on
Fellini’s personal life and his work.
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| La Strada |
Which takes
us to shrinks, LSD, and virtual reality.
Again from Wiki:
During
the last three weeks of shooting La
Strada in 1954, Fellini experienced the first signs of severe clinical
depression. Aided by his wife, he undertook a brief period
of therapy with Freudian psychoanalyst Emilio Servadio. Increasingly attracted to parapsychology,
Fellini met the Turin magician Gustavo Rol in 1963. Rol, a former banker,
introduced him to the world of Spiritism and séances. In 1964, Fellini took LSD under the
supervision of his psychoanalyst. For years reserved about what actually
occurred that Sunday afternoon, he admitted in 1992 that,
“Objects
and their functions no longer had any significance. All I perceived was
perception itself, the hell of forms and figures devoid of human emotion and
detached from the reality of my unreal environment. I was an instrument in a
virtual world that constantly renewed its own meaningless image in a living
world that was itself perceived outside of nature. And since the appearance of
things was no longer definitive but limitless, this paradisaical awareness freed
me from the reality external to myself. The fire and the rose, as it were,
became one.”
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| Amarcord |
“The fire
and the rose, as it were, became one.” Pretty heady stuff! But what better metaphor to illustrate Fellini's conceit that his films are poetry rather than prose, circular rather than linear? He first outlined this view in a 1965
interview in The New Yorker:
I
am trying to free my work from certain constrictions – a story with a beginning,
a development, an ending. It should be more like a poem with meter and cadence.
Commenting in Tutto Fellini, the book produced
by Cinecitta’ International on the occasion of Fellini’s death in 1993, and which I bought at The Castro Fellini film festival, Oliver
Stone called the director’s films “open-ended, mysterious, ambiguous, a puzzle." Poetic, he might have added. Stone continues:
Fellini
deconstructed reality. The concept of
impressionism, a subjective camera, was a silent movie technique we lost track
of in narrative talking films and which Fellini rediscovered. With Fellini sound is never an issue. What is important is not so much what people
say as the sumptuousness, the elegance of his films. He creates a child’s world, a clown’s world
where we are all vulnerable, we are all children and everyone’s a bit of a
clown…His films took away the stodginess of modern life, enhancing it with
beauty, with a glow.
Much like the Felliniesque birthday party for 14 in Le Marche: extravagant, fanciful, even baroque. Where, to paraphrase Stone, knowing the choice between laughter and tears, we chose laughter and put a frame around comedy and joy. No doubt Fellini would have applauded our choice and Nino Rota would have accompanied our revels with one of his unmistakable tunes.
Thanks, Steve, for the videos!
Keep it
real!
Marilyn
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