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Home , Carla Del Poggio, Casanova 70, City of Women, Eugenio Ruspoli, Fellini Satyricon, Franco Fabrizi

October 11, 2016 (XXXIII:7) : DOLCE VITA (1960), 174 min.

La Dolca Vita was nominated for three Oscars, Best Director, Best Writing, and Best Art Direction, and won one Oscar for Best Costume Design (Piero Gherardi) in 1962. Federico Fellini won the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival in 1960.

DIRECTOR Federico Fellini WRITERS Federico Fellini, , , Brunello Rondiy PRODUCER Guiseppe Amago, Franco Magli, Angelo Rizzoli MUSIC CINEMATOGRAPHER Otellor Martelli EDITOR Leo Cattozzo La Voce della luna (1989), Ginger e Fred (1986), COSTUME DESIGN Piero Gherardi (1976), (1974), Roma 1972, (1971), 1969, Giulietta degli spiriti 1965, 8 ½ (1963)], …Marcello Rubini Notti di Cabiria 1957, and Vitelloni (1953). He was …Sylvia nominated for 11 writing and directing Oscars (including Anouk Aimée…Maddalena both for ) but won none of them. Four of his Yvonne Furneaux…Emma films received the Best Foreign Language Film award: La Magali Noël…Fanny Strada, Notti di Cabiria, 8 and Amarcord. After Federico Alain Cuny…Steiner Fellini rejected the idea of Paul Newman for the lead role, Annibale Ninchi…Marcello's father Dino De Laurentiis suggested Gérard Philipe. He thought Walter Santesso…Paparazzo Marcello Mastroianni was "too soft and goody-goody; a Valeria Ciangottini…Paola family man rather than the type who flings women onto the Audrey McDonald…Sonia bed." His death could have been a scene from one of his Polidor…Clown movies: While recovering from difficult heart surgery he Lex Barker…Robert Count choked on half a mozzarella ball. Enza Da Castro, his Ivenda Dobrzensky…Giovanni (uncredited) production secretary, and Roberto Mannoni, his production Desmond O'Grady…Steiner's Guest (uncredited) director, were with him. Da Castro called a doctor and two Prince Eugenio Ruspoli di Poggio Suasa…Don Eugenio nurses into the room and told them Fellini was choking. The Mascalchi (uncredited) doctor yelled “Heart attack! Heart attack” and began giving him heart massage. When Da Castro and Mannoni again told FEDERICO FELLINI (b. January 20, 1920 in , her he was choking, she ordered them out of the room. —d. October 31, 1993 in , Italy) is best-known as a Mannoni called Fellini’s doctor, Professor Turchetti, and told director of films he wrote, and deservedly so, but before he him to come immediately. After 15 minutes, according to started directing he co-scripted some of the great films of the Mannoni, another doctor arrived with a resuscitator and other Italian neo-realist era, among them ’s instruments, and a few minutes later Turchetti got there. But Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City 1946) and Paisà by then Fellini was dead. (, 1946). Fellini directed 24 films, some of which are Fellini—LA DOLCE VITA—2

during the next ten years. She Was considered for the role of Honey Rider in the first film Dr. No (1962), which went to Ursula Andress. Ekberg later co-starred with Andress in the Western comedy 4 for Texas (1963).

ANOUK AIMÉE (b. Françoise Sorya Dreyfus on April 27, 1932 in Paris, France) appeared in about 70 films, but only one brought her international attention—A Man and a Woman (1966). She also appeared in Prêt-à-Porter (1994) and Justine (1969).

LEX BARKER (b. May 8, 1919 in Rye, New York—d. May 11, 1973 in New York, New York) was a direct descendant of the founder of Rhode Island, Roger Williams, attended the Fessenden School and Phillips-Exeter Academy, then went to Princeton but left to become an actor, for which his high society family disowned him. Barker played five times, then became something of an international actor, playing in 50 films made in Brazil, Germany, Spain, Yugoslavia, Italy, Lebanon, and France, helped no doubt by MARCELLO MASTROIANNI (b. September 28, 1924 in his linguistic ability–he was said to speak French, Spanish, Fontana Liri, Italy—d. December 19, 1996 in Paris, France) Italian and German. He enlisted in WWII as a private and first appeared in film in Marionette (1938) and his final film mustered out as a major. about himself, Marcello Mastroianni: mi ricordo, sì, io mi ricordo (Mastroianni: I Remember, Yes I Remember 1997). DESMOND O’GRADY 1935-2014) was an Irish poet There were about 150 roles in between, 6 with Fellini and 15 perhaps most famous for the night he dove out of his Harvard with his longtime friend Sophia Loren. Some of his films window stark naked, his room afire, claiming to police that were Prêt-à-Porter (1994), A Fine Romance (1992), Ginger e the IRA was clearly responsible; the police suggested Fred (1986), Una Giornata particolare (1977), Roma smoking in bed as the more probable culprit; we have no idea (1972), Casanova '70 (1965), Matrimonio all'italiana (1964), how Desmond got into this movie. 8 ½ (1963). Told interviewers that Federico Fellini hired him for La Dolce Vita because he had a "terribly ordinary face". from World Film Directors, Vol. II. Ed. John Wakeman. Along with Dean Stockwell and Jack Lemmon, he's one of a The H.W. Wilson Company NY, 1988, entry by Derek few actors who had won twice the Best Actor prize at the Prouse Cannes Film Festival. His three Oscar nominations for Italian director and scenarist, born in Rimini, a small town on Divorce Italian Style (1961), A Special Day (1977), and Dark Italy’s Adriatic coast, son of Urbano Fellini, a traveling Eyes (1987) are the record for a performer in a foreign salesman, and the former Ida Barbiani. The four or five years language film. he spent as a boarder at a school run by priests in nearby Fano were rigorously formative. A regular punishment was to ANITA EKBERG (b. Kerstin Anita Marianne Ekberg on make the culprit kneel for half an hour on grains of maize, September 29, 1931 in Malmö, Skåne, Sweden—d. January and a wintry Sunday treat was to be marched to the beach, 11, 2015 in Rocca di Papa, Lazio, Italy) was the 1950 Miss there to kneel and gaze at the sea wile reciting a prayer. Sweden, appeared in about 60 mostly-forgettable films, some Priests were to find their ritual place in many of Fellini’s of which were Suor Omicidi (Killer Nun, 1978), Malenka films, as was the circus that he encountered for the first time (1968), (a.k.a. Bloody Girl, Fangs of the Living Dead, on a stolen day off and where he remained, entranced, until Malenka the Vampire, and Niece of the Vampire), Woman his truancy was discovered and he was returned to the school. Times Seven (1967), Boccaccio '70 (1962), Hollywood or The only aptitude Fellini showed at school was for drawing. Bust (1956), War and Peace (1956), and Abbott and Costello In his final year, he and some of his friends were frequent Go to Mars (1953). She quickly got a film contract with truants, leading the idle, aimless street life he was to recall in Howard Hughes's RKO that did not lead anywhere (but Anita . herself has said that Hughes wanted to marry her). Instead, This, at any rate, is an approximate account of she started making movies with Universal, small roles that Fellini’s childhood. He enjoys obfuscation, and his own more often than not only required her to look beautiful. After recollections vary according to whim. At some point in his five years in Hollywood, she found herself in Rome, where late teens—in 1937 or 1938—like Moraldo in I Vitelloni, Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960) meant her Fellini escaped from the hopeless limbo of Rimini. He made breakthrough. She stayed in Italy and made around 20 movies his way first to , where he worked as an illustrator Fellini—LA DOLCE VITA—3 for a comic-strip story magazine. After six months he moved short film based on Cocteau’s “La Voix Humaine: and on again to Rome, joining a Bohemian set of would-be actors needed a companion piece to make up a feature-length and writers. He began to sell stories and cartoons to the picture, Fellini wrote and acted in “Il Miracolo” (The humorous weekly Marc‘ Aurelio, and before long was hired MIracle). He played the part of a mute vagabond whom Anna as one of the writers of a radio serial based on the magazine’d Magnani, as a deluded shepherdess, takes to be St. Joseph and most popular feature, which retailed the marital by whom she becomes pregnant. The film was a succès de misadventures of Cico and scandale, outraging Catholic Pallina—Italy’s answer to opinion everywhere. Blondie and Dagwood. During the same period In 1939, tiring of this Fellini started to work with chore, Fellini joined his friend, another director, Alberto the comedian Aldo Fabrizi, on Lattuada. He collaborated with an odyssey across Italy with a Lattuada on the screenplays of vaudeville troupe. Fellini himself two notable successes: Senza earned his keep as a sketch pietà (Without Pity, 1948) and writer, scenery painter, bit Il mulino del Po (The Mill on player, and “company poet.” the Po, 1949), and then with Years later he told an interviewer on In nome della that this was “perhaps the most Legge (In the Name of the Law, important year of my life….I 1949). Back with Rossellini, he was overwhelmed by the variety worked as scriptwriter and of the country’s physical assistant director on Francesco, landscape and, too, by the giullare di Dio. After that his variety of its human landscape. It was the kind of experience chance came, with Lattuada, to codirect Luci del Varietà that few young men are fortunate enough to have—a chance (, 1950). to discover the character….of one’s country and, at the same Nowadays, Fellini is no longer certain who directed time, to discover one’s own identity.” what in the film. “I wrote the original story and the Back in Rome, Fellini began a new career as a gag screenplay and I chose the actors. And the tawdry vaudeville writer for the movies, and in 1942, when Aldo Fabrizi was routines I’d recalled from a touring troupe with Aldo Fabrizi. offered the lead role in a film comedy. Fellini supplied the I can’t remember exactly which scenes were directed by storyline, going on to a growing success as a film comedy Lattuada and which by me, but I regard the film as one of writer. Meanwhile, a new actress, , had taken mine.” Certainly the work is dense with moments and images over the role of Pallina in the radio series. Intrigued by her that bear the Fellini stamp: the old hunchback who guides the voice, Fellini began a four-month courtship that led to their camera to the advertising display outside the theatre where marriage in 1943. Her distinctive personality, puckish, Checco () is presenting his show; the vulnerable, but resilient, clearly fired Fellini’s creative vivid detail of the company’s arduous trek through the imagination, and together they were to forge a unique alliance provinces to their dubious Roman goal; the progress of in the Italian cinema. In 1944 Masina gave birth to a son who Liliana () from ambitious provincial amateur lived for only three weeks. to opulently befurred Roman soubrette; and, above all, With the liberation of Rome, Fellini and some of his Checco’s hopeless bid to possess Liliana and thereby friends opened the “Funny Face Ships,” supplying recapture his waning powers and youth. caricatures, voice recordings, and other mementos for the It is significant that in this partial directorial debut occupying Allied soldiers to send back home. One day Fellini had already enlisted several of the colleagues who Roberto Rossellini came into Fellini’s shop and invited him were to work with him with remarkable consistency to collaborate on the script of Open City (1945), a landmark throughout his future career: the cinematographer Otello in the development of neorealism and the revival of the Martelli and the screenwriters Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Italian cinema, and also the film that made Aldo Fabrizi’s Pinelli. Giulietta Masina appears as Checco’s fiancée Melina; reputation as a dramatic actor. the film seems to have been very much a family affair as Fellini’s collaboration with Rossellini continued with Carla del Poggio was Lattuada’s wife and Masina, of course, Paisan (1946), on which he served as both coscenarist and Fellini’s. assistant director. Two years later, after Rossellini had made a Fellini—LA DOLCE VITA—4

Fellini’s first solo work as director was Lo sceicco Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina), a diminutive and bianco (The White Sheik, 1953), based on a story by simple-minded peasant girl is sold by her mother to Zampanò which the latter had hoped to direct (Anthony Quinn), a street entertainer performing a strong- himself. It was inspired by the fumetti, the enormously man act who needs her as his assistant. A brutal and morose popular magazines telling romantic stories in photo-strip character, he subjects her to harsh training as they move from form. Fantasy and reality disastrously intermingle as in many town to town, and also rapes her. Nevertheless, in her of the director’s later works, but here the vein is more clownish fashion, she loves him and tries to establish a comical, sometimes even human relationship with him, farcical. Albrto Sordi plays but he always rejects her. She the absurdly vain fumetti star is befriended by a tightrope in whom a provincial bride, walker ()— honeymooning in Rome with an ambiguous Christ figure her boring husband, whom Zampanò accidentally temporarily invests her kills, causing Gelsomina to romantic dreams….Fellini’s lose her tenuous hold on subtle guidance of his actors sanity. It is only after her death is already evident, and the that Zampanò realizes the plight of the romantic young extent of his emotional wife (Brunella Bovo) emerges dependence on her. The film as both funny and ends, as it begins, on a beach, touching...Several critics have where Zampanò, in Edouard pointed out the resemblances de Laurot’s words, “is finally between this film and struck down by a cosmic terror Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, another story about a woman and realizes, in his anguish, man’s solitude in the face of who prefers illusion to bourgeois reality. Eternity.” It is a kid of redemption, earned by Gelsomina’s I Vitelloni (The Wastrels, or, in England, The Spivs, love and self-sacrifice. 1953) gained Fellini his first distribution abroad and won the ...Suzanne Budgen in her book on Fellini writes: at Venice. The term “vitelloni” lacks an exact “The tenderness that [this key work] ...shows for the equivalent in English; meaning literally “overgrown calves,” dispossessed, its great comic fancy, its preoccupation with the expression was current in circuses and circus people, the Fellini’s native Rimini to describe importance in it of the sea, and the goalless sons of middle-class perhaps above all, its air of families—idlers content to hang mystery...mark it as belonging to around bars or the fountain in the the very nerve-centre of Fellini’s square hoping to encounter an creative talent.” Arthur Knight amorous adventure….Fellini thought that was depicts his provincial scene with a neorealism on a new plane, a humor that is never rancorous, and mixture of realism and poetry. La is perfectly served by the musical Strada is Fellini’s own favorite score by Nino Rota—a composer among his films, and is regarded who was to make an invaluable by many as his masterpiece. It contribution to all of Fellini’s films received more than fifty awards, thereafter until his death in including the Silver Lion at the 1979….Acknowledging the film’s and an Oscar value as a social document, other as best foreign film. critics nonetheless see it as a step (1955), which away from the social followed, aroused curiously little preoccupations of neorealism and critical interest….Il bidone was toward the development of Fellini’s followed by a resounding success, conception of character. He himself says that he was La notti di Cabiria (The , 1956). The portraying not “the death throes of a decadent social class, but character of Cabiria, ketched by Masina in The White Sheik, a certain torpor of the soul.” reappears as the star of the show. She haunts the Roman After an eighteen-minute episode entitled “A periphery, a lonely irascible little prostitute with a grave Matrimonial Agency” in Zavattii’s neorealist production Love professional handicap—a tendency to fall in love, and with in the City (1953), Fellini embarked on a film that was to earn men whose main concern is to shove her into the Tiber or him worldwide acclaim, La Strada (The Road, 1954). over cliffs in order to acquire her modest savings….And yet, Fellini—LA DOLCE VITA—5 as Fellini says, Cabiria is in the grip of “an incoherent, narcissist and wades with her into the Trevi fountain for a intermittent force that cannot be gainsaid—the anguished kind of pagan baptism (at which the fountain ceases to flow). longing for goodness.”...Masina won the award as best Other incidents in Fellini’s ambitious fresco (its runnig time actress at Cannes, and was described in Newsweek as “the is 173 minutes) include a scene outside Rome where two best tragi-comedian since Chaplin.”...To those who found children pretend to have seen a vision of the Madonna in a Cabiria overly episodic and unstructured, André Bazin field, and where the sick and afflicted gather in hope of a replied that Fellini had introduced “a new kind of script,” miraculous cure. After that, a visit to his intellectual friend based not on dramatic causality but on the revelation of Steiner (Alain Cuny) jolts Marcello into the realization that character by an accumulation of episodes and examples: it is his own life is a spiritual vacuum. Yet Steiner eventually “the long descriptive sequences, seeming to exercise no effect shoots his two children and commits suicide. This shattering on the unfolding of the ‘action’ proper [that] constitute the event drives Marcello into even wilder debauchery, and it is truly important and revealing scenes….Fellini’s hero never he who leads the final bacchanalia. At dawn, as the revelers reaches the final crisis (which destroys him and saves him) by drift down to the beach, they catch sight of a monstrous, a progressive dramatic linking but because the circumstances mystical fish that some fishermen have hauled ashore. somehow or other affect him, Marcello glimpses an build up inside him like the innocent girl whom he had vibrant energy in a resonating noticed before in a café and body. He does not develop; he found intriguing. She calls to is transformed; overturning him, but her voice is borne finally like an iceberg whose away on the wind. center of buoyancy has shifted Some contemporary unseen.”… critics accused Fellini of The time was ripe for feigning to expose the the ebullient Fellini to embark decadence of his Roman on a more ambitious project. scene while secretly reveling The turbulent publicity that in it. This was tantamount to surrounded the making of La asking a leopard to change its Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life, spots: pointless to look to 1959) was an expression of the Fellinni for the measured, spirit of Rome at the time, sardonic approach that Erich poised to take over the mantle von Stroheim, for example, of Hollywood. The Via Veneto brought to his depiction of was becoming the Roman Sunset Strip and Hollywood Vienna in The Wedding March. Two of the mainsprings of Boulevard combined; actors whose American careers were on Fellini’s creative drive have always been his exuberance and the wane flocked to Rome in the hope of achieving a his sentiment. He consistently draws his inspiration from his professional renaissance there. surroundings, from his personal obsessions and his The ( the photographers for the scandal sheets) experiences. One gets the feelings that Marcello’s mounting buzzed like predatory wasps around the sidewalk cafés, ever spiritual crisis, which links the film’s disparate incidents alert for the eruption of a brawl or an indiscretion. The might well have been Fellini’s own, if he allowed himself, as aristocracy, in decadenza, were eager to rent their crumbling does Marcello to surrender to the frenzied life around him. In palaces as film sets—even to figure on the payroll as extras, the pathetic scene in which he is visited by his father, although La dolce vita did give them second thoughts when Marcello is made bleakly but unsentimentally aware of how they discovered that they were not necessarily to be presented far he has traveled from his simple provincial origins. in a becoming light. Fellini’s orgiastic scenes (it is their drab aftermath that The film’s opening shots are of a huge statue of evokes the director’s deepest emotional response), though Christ, suspended from a helicopter. Thie extraordinary scene wild and bizarre, are not sensual—even his whores lack this juxtaposes from the outset the film’s two worlds: the old quality. Perhaps the chief, and very considerable merit of La Christian Rome, now as lifeless as the statue; and the dolce vita nowadays is as a testimony to a particularly voyeuristic moral chaos of the modern city, Babylon on the turbulent period in the cinema’s history which changed, Tiber. Later that evening he meets a neurotic aristocratic during its heyday, the character of an ancient city. woman (Anouk Aimée) who rents the bed of a compliant The film won the Grand Prix at Cannes, championed whore to make love with Marcello. When he returns home, it by Georges Simenon and Henry Miller against stiff is to find that his mistress (Yvonne Furneaux) has attempted opposition from other jury members, and also the New York suicide. His next day’s assignment takes him to the airport to Film Critics Award. It collected the now ritual plaudits and meet a sexy American actress (Anita Ekberg), who is to star brickbats from reviewers. One critic described it as “ in a biblical epic. Marcello is captivated by this fatuous a poem in verses and stanzas making up an apocalyptic fresco Fellini—LA DOLCE VITA—6 of seven nightmarish nights and seven sobering dawns.” reveal their positive aspects to him and invest him with new Alexander Walker found it “by turns exhilarating and hope.” exhausting. It grips and it bores.” The Soviet Izvestia But the project refused to cohere. “We made months “deplored the fact that La dolce vita received only two minor of tests. was one actor I tried to get to play Oscars while West Side Story won ten major ones”—this the part. But I still went on delaying, playing for time, despite the fact that the Soviet people were not permitted to secretly hoping that the confusion in my own mind would see the film. clear. We had to have a title put on the actors’ contracts so I decided on a temporary working one, 8 ½, which was the An episode in a mammoth production entitled humber of films I’d made, counting my episode in Boccaccio Boccaccio ’70 followed in 1962. Visconti, de Sica, and ’70 as the half. Monticelli also contributed, though for reasons of length “Suddenly—and it’s amazing how sometimes the Monicelli’s episode was deleted from the film’s first showing obvious can strike you with such blinding force—I thought: at the Cannes Film Festival. Fellini’s section was entitled “Le Why not make the leading character a film director who is tentzioni del dottor Antonio.” Concerning a predatory trying to make a film and, in his debilitated state, falls a prey temptress (Anita Eckberg) who materializes from a black to awful doubts? From that moment, as if I’d found the board to provoke an aging puritan....After the lip-smacking courage to make a confession, it started to go well. But would publicity surrounding the making of La dolce vita, Fellini the problems of such a man strike audiences as unfamiliar? retreated into complete secrecy about his next film, Otto e That was the disquieting possibility. One would need to be mezzo (8 ½, 1962). Whereas, formerly, his Roman offices utterly sincere, not autobiographical in the ordinary sense, but near the Spanish Steps were a milling beehive of journalists, to tap a more profound, private, and personal outlet. Then the friends, and well-wishers presided over by Il Maestro with problems would be recognized as universal. It would be like evident enjoyment, joie de vivre, and a word for everyone, walking a tightrope and one’s only chance of success would now the order of the day was silence and the sets were closed be to stay utterly faithful to the internal ear. That’s why I to visitors. His enemies knew we had to work as often labeled Fellini a undisturbed as buggiardo, a big liar— possible.” even his wife said that he Marcello only blushed when he Mastroianni plays Guido told the truth. But his Anselmi, a famous film friends discerned in him director who goes to a a rare sincerity. I spa resort to fend off a wondered whether this nervous breakdown. He new silence concerning 8 is wrestling with a script ½ was a calculated about survivors of a publicity ploy to offset third world war the hysteria surrounding escaping to another La dolce vita. On behalf planet, but is losing faith of The Sunday Times I in the project and in went to Rome to ask him himself, and is about it. We talked in the stifling heat but merciful quiet of meanwhile besieged by demanding actors, writers, and the Roman summer when everyone else had repaired to the producers. Guido overcomes his “block” when he recognizes beach. that his real need is to make not an apocalyptic epic but an “I couldn’t talk to people about 8 ½”, Fellini uncompromisingly honest personal statement, a confession. declared, “the film wasn’t clear even to me. I had a vague The film showing how Guido arrives at this discovery is the idea of it even before La dolce vita: to try to show the film he really wanted to make: 8 ½. dimensions of a man on all his different levels; intermingling “Think what a bale of memories and associations and his past, his dreams, and his memories, his physical and all we carry about with us,” Fellini remarked to Eugene mental turmoil—all without chronology but giving the Walker. “It’s like seeing a dozen films simultaneously. impression that man is a universe unto himself. But I couldn’t There’s memory, there’s memory that’s been sorted out and resolve it and so made La dolce vita instead. Then I thought filed, what they call subconscious. There’s a kind of idealized of an end: the man must find himself at a point of complete set of sketches of the dinner party we’ll go to tomorrow night. mental and physical crisis: an awful, mature stage of doubt And there’s also what is happening around us, visible and when, devoured by his complexes, his incapacities and invisible.” All of these modes of experience are presented in impotence, he is forced to try to understand himself. Then, the film, which cuts from flashback to fantasy to current when suicide seems to be the only solution, all the characters, reality to dream, from objective to subjective, ignoring real and imagined, who had contributed to his confusion structural continuity in favor of free association. The three Fellini—LA DOLCE VITA—7 women in Guido’s life are his mistress (Sandra Milo), his Christian Metz, in another essay in the same wife (Anouk Aimée), and Claudia (Claudia Cardinale, in collection, discusses the “double mirror construction” of 8 ½. white), an unattainable vision of purity and salvation. Guido’s “It is not only a film about a director, but a film about a co-scenarist Daumier (Jean Rougeul), endlessly disapproving, director who is reflecting himself onto his film….The serves as his neorealist conscience (and gets himself hanged ordinary interplay of reflection would never have yielded in fantasy for his pains). such a wealth of echoes and relationships between Fellini and The opening sequence is typical. Guido is trapped in his character had it not been reflected by the reflecting of that his car in a soundless traffic jam. An initial impression of character himself; filmmaker and reflecting filmmaker, Guido realism is soon rendered problematic by the silence, by a is doubly close to the man who brought him to life, doubly glimpse of a bare-breasted woman in another car, and by his creator’s double. “In the penultimate sequence, all the Guido’s mounting claustrophobic panic. Suddenly he rises film’s characters, real and imaginary (except the elusive out of his car and soars above the traffic, higher and higher, Claudia), parade around the rim of a circus ring and, having until he is drifting free and organized his fantastic dance, joyful over sparkling water. Guido, holding his wife by her And then he realizes there is a hand, himself now enters the rope around his ankle. Like a circle…..this author who tethered balloon, he is dragged dreamed of making 8 ½ is down, down, into the waters now one of the characters of 8 of the unconscious. This ½….No longer is Guido at the pattern of crisis, liberation, center of the magic circle; and fall recurs throughout the now it is only the small child film, as Timothy Hyman dressed in white, and blowing points out in one of the essays his pipe, the ultimate and first in Peter Bondanella’s inspirer of the whole collection. fantasy—Guido as a child has At the end, Guido become the symbol of Fellini (told all along that he doesn’t as a child.” 8 ½ won first prize “know how to love”) rejects at the Moscow Festival, and all the exclusive claims made both an Oscar and the New on him by others, and learns to embrace all of the various York Film Critics’ Award as best foreign film. aspects of his life and his nature. Coming to terms with Giulietta degli spirti (, 1965), like himself, he is freed as an artist. For Fellini, “8 ½ is a film of 8 ½, explores and inner landscape, but this time that of a liberation—nothing more.” woman, played by Giulietta Masina. Was this, then, Masina’s Timothy Hyman writes that “8 ½ demonstrated how a 8 ½? Fellini was characteristically ambiguous: “This woman, film could be made about a Juliet, is not precisely, my wife, temperament: the events it the marriage is not precisely my dealt with were interior marriage.”...Throughout the events….In 8 ½ , Fellini film, as in 8 ½, the narrative is renounced the political or densified by her visions, social emphasis of neo- fantasies, memories, and realism, and the new relation dreams….Fellini himself said between the artist and the of the film that “the story is outer world that resulted has nothing. There is no story. since become fundamental to Actually, the picture can be much Italian cinema….the described in ten different ways. transition from neo-realism Movies have now gone past the to what might be called neo- phase of prose narrative and are symbolism.”...For Hyman, coming nearer and nearer to “it is the oscillation of light poetry. I am trying to free my and dark, the precise length work from certain of their duration, which finally shapes 8 ½ and this music of constrictions-a story with a beginning, a development, an interval is combined to maximum effect with with the actual ending. It should be more like a poem, with meter and music of Nino Rota….The syntax of the film becomes the cadence.”…. embodiment of Fellini’s doctrine that our experience is In 1967, abandoning a long-projected film called cyclic, that pleasure comes out of pain, true out of false, “The Voyage of G. Mastorna,” Fellini became seriously ill, comedy out of tragedy.” suffering what was called “a total physical collapse.” He went Fellini—LA DOLCE VITA—8 back to work the following year, directing an episode in a considerably….Fellini’s Roma (1972) is an evocation, three-part French production, Histoires extraordinaires mingling memories and fantasies, location shooting and (1968), based on stories by Edgar Allan Poe. Fellini’s elaborate studio work, of the city which has done so much to contribution, “Toby Dammit,” starred Terence Stamp as a fire his imagination….Roma had a mixed reception. Most film star whose hallucinations on a trip to Cinecittà led to his reviewers found something to praise—sequences rich in death. The most admired of the three episodes, it seemed to Felliniesque humanity—but many thought it too long and too Penelope Gilliatt “fluently comic, sober, barbed, a little diffuse. Richard Schickel said that he was tired of being fed desperate, with a droll and perfectly earnest belief in Heaven Fellini’s “visions of Rome as combination brothel, freak and damnation.” show and symbol of the decline of the West.” Dilys Powell Also in 1968 Fellini, commissioned by NBC-TV, called the film “a huge dream, an offshoot from his Satyricon, made a seldom-seen 54-minute film called A Director’s grotesque, horrible, beautiful.” She hoped that Fellini might Notebook. It includes a now find his way back to “the glimpse of what the mysterious organism, more uncompleted “Mastorna” complex than Rome—the human might have been like, being.” scenes from Fellini’s Rome, This he did with a passage cut from Nights of considerable success in his next Cabiria, Fellini’s film Amarcord (1973), which in reminiscences of his the patois of his native Rimini childhood moviegoing, and means “I remember” (a- a long concluding sequence m’arcord). We are back in the showing a collection of provincial town of I Vitelloni, bizarre characters though this account of four auditioning for his next consecutive seasons there during film, Satyricon. Joseph the Fascist 1930s was shot McBride claims that if, at mostly on vast sets constructed first glance, the Notebook in the Roman studios…..There seems to be “a disconnected are many passages that reveal grab bag of gags, skits and the director at his imaginative memorabilia, it is actually a best, such as the one where a rigorous development of the frightened but defiant old man is theme of artistic stasis interrogated and tortured by the which Fellini pursued in 8 fascisti, or the ludicrous family ½.” trip to the country with an idiot relative who climbs to the top of (1969) is an uninhibited and a tree screaming “I want a extremely loose adaptation woman” and who is eventually by himself and Bernardino reclaimed by a severe midget Zapponi of Satyricon, the nun…. satirical romance written in Earning an Oscar as best the first century a.d. by Petronius, Nero’s master of the foreign film, among many other awards, Amarcord was found revels….Fellini himself has been even more than usually uneven but rewarding, less strident, more mellow and obfuscatory in his comments on Satyricon, in some affirmative than Fellini’s other recent films. But the decline interviews pointing out similarities between pre- and post- in his reputation continued with Casanova (1976), freely Christian Rome, in others asserting that the film’s atmosphere drawn by the director and Zapponi from the memoirs of the “is not historical but that of a dream world”; claiming it as famous Venetian libertine, and featuring in the title role the autobiographical and as anything but. He has more utterly un-Italianate Donald Sutherland equipped with a consistently stressed the objectivity and detachment of the strangely heightened forehead. Fellini’s conception of film, saying “I have made no panoramas, no topography, only Casanova is as a victim of his own legend, a joyless coupler frescoes, and so the cutting is very fast. It has no real time. It with everyone from a libidinous nun to the mechanical doll is like riffling through an album. There is no psychological which seems to provide him with the greatest satisfaction…. movement in the characters.” It is also “a film made up of Three years elapsed before Prova d’orchestra (The static shots—no tracks, no camera movements whatsoever.” , 1979). “I’d like to do more little films, ...With I clowns (The Clowns), commissioned by the “ Fellini told an interviewer, “but if I go to a producer with a RAI network and first shown in Italy in 1970 as a Christmas very low-budget story, I see the lack of interest, the offering on television, the critical atmosphere warmed humiliation on his face. For him Fellini should shoot a ten- Fellini—LA DOLCE VITA—9 million-dollar film. The film doesn’t count at all, what counts flickering of their old intimacy before once more setting off is to build a business on me, the Fellini affair, and then to on their separate ways. construct an immense financial edifice. And there I am, said of Fellini in 1967 that his rooted in my film with all the problems it poses for me, and “limitation—which is also the source of his charm—is that next to me is growing this huge labyrinthine construction to he’s fundamentally very provincial. His films are a small- satisfy producers’ appetites, piranha-distributors who hope to town boy’s dream of the big city. His sophistication works make the deals of their lives.”… because it’s the creation of someone who doesn’t have it.But La città delle donne (, 1980) found he shows dangerous signs of being a superlative artist with Fellini back in the superproduction category and once again little to say.” As Joseph McBride points out, “Welles generally out of favor with the critics. “I have the feeling that undoubtedly picked up that last line from Guido’s declaration all my films are about women,” Fellini declared at the time. [in 8 ½] that he has nothing to say but he is going to say it “Women represent myth, mystery, diversity, fascination, the anyway.” And so, fortunately, is Fellini. “Does Fellini always thirst for knowledge and the search for one’s own identity...I make the same film?,” asks Aldo Tassone, “Certainly! But even see the cinema as a woman...Going to the cinema is like the language of the different chapters of this unique film is returning to the womb; you sit there, still and meditative in incessantly renewed….’It is precisely because it repeats the darkness, waiting for life to appear on the screen.” recurrent motifs that Fellini’s fantasy appears unsurpassed,’ In City of Women, the merely (and chauvinistically) Casiraghi writes very correctly.” male hero is once more played by Mastroianni, here called Professor Snàporaz. He is traveling in a train that unexpectedly stops and like a latter-day Alice, is lured through the fields to his Wonderland not by a clothed rabbit but by an exotic fellow-passenger….The film inspired a very successful Broadway musical, “Nine.” In 1983 Fellini made E la nave va (). He described his film as a dream, an evocation of the subconscious. “I want people to see it without trying to understand it.” … Fellini’s latest film, Ginger e Fred (, 1985) unites Mastroianni, once again as Fellini’s alter ego, and Giulietta Masina, Fellini’s wife, for the first time in their careers. It reveals Fellini, now in his sixties, in a mood paradoxically both more sour and more mellow. Sour in the way he portrays television as an inimical purveyor of garbage, a world run by ghouls, and Rome itself as a putrescent dump; mellow in the way that he depicts his from Conversations with Fellini. Edited by Constanzo protagonists as finally capable of affection, of fleeting Constantini. Harcourt Brace & Co., NY, 1995. tenderness, united, momentarily, against the crass world that CC: In reality television has granted you a kind of “License surrounds them. to kill,” which in Ginger and Fred and you use Amelia and Pippo are two ex-variety artists who, freely and to the full, with rage, disdain and fury. Are you long ago, were a touring team performing their mediocre satisfied with Ginger and Fred? How do you place this film in imitations of the Astaire-Rogers routines. Lovers for a time, the sphere of your filmography? Of all the films you have now they had split up in the 1950s and had never met since. Now made, which do you prefer? they are invited to make an appearance on a nostalgic TV Christmas Special, presided over by an unctuous veteran FF: It’s difficult for me to say, especially because I hardly played by , the shiftless young husband in I ever watch my films again. Every film corresponds to a Vitelloni. Amelia is now a faintly prim provincial housewife precise moment, both objectively and subjectively. in late middle age. Pippo has become a boozy, arthritic door- Personally, disregarding the approval they have obtained, to-door salesman, and at their first meeting fails to recognize trying to be passionate and detached at the same time, I he. They find themselves in an alien city, rife with vagrants would put 8 ½ first, then La Dolce Vita, Amarcord, and and junkies. The television show in which they are booked to Ginger and Fred. Ginger and Fred represents me as I am appear is an assemblage of freaks, celebrity lookalikes, a today. levitating monk, and a miracle woman who has endured for three months the agony of not watching television. When “I, Fellini” (Reprise) from I, Fellini by Charlotte Amelia and Pippo eventually perform their dance routine it is, Chandler, 1995 despite a stumble on his part and a studio blackout, strangely Our minds can shape the way a thing will be, because we act touching. For a brief moment the couple experience a according to our expectations. Fellini—LA DOLCE VITA—10

The hard thing is beginning. Whatever you want to I must keep a closed set, though I make many do in life, you must begin it. The point of departure for the exceptions and welcome good spirits, as long as there aren’t journey I must begin for each film is generally something that too many of them. But if I become conscious of one wrong really happened to me, but which person watching me, my I believe also is part of the creativity dries up. I feel it experience of others. The physically. My throat becomes audience should be able to dry. It’s insidiously say,”Oh, something like that destructive to work when there happened to me,” or “I’m glad it are long faces. didn’t happen to me.” They Understanding what should identify, sympathize, makes a thing difficult doesn’t empathize. They should be able make it less difficult, and to enter the movie and get into understanding how difficult it my shoes and the shoes of at least is can make it more difficult to some of the characters. I first try attempt. Pictures do not get to express my own emotions, easier for me to make, but what I personally feel, and then I more difficult. With each one, look for the link of truth that will I learn more of what can go be of significance to people like wrong, and I am thus more me. threatened, Its always satisfying when you can turn The picture I make is never exactly the one I started something that goes wrong into something that is even better. out to make, but that is of no importance. I am very flexible If I saw that an actor like Broderick Crawford was a little on the set. The script provides the starting point, as well as drunk on the set, I tried to make it part of the story. If offering security. After the first weeks, the picture takes on a someone has just had an argument with his wife, I try to use life of its own. The film grows as you are making it, like his upset state as part of his character. when I cannot correct relationships with a person. the problem, I incorporate it. “I try to love everything in life, not only what we usually Fellini said: consider proper, honest, charming. I always like to show “For me, the artist is someone who is called by demons both sides of a thing.” “I invented a non-existent Via and must reply to this summons. Doing so he is cast into a Veneto, enlarging and altering it with poetic license until kind of galaxy with which he has special, arcane it took on the dimensions of a large allegorical fresco.” relationships. The problem is to recognize the sounds, the colors, the signs that correspond to the voice that called “Cinema is an art of illusion and sometimes the illusion him. Once this problem is resolved, he need do nothing must show its tail.” except perform in extrasensory fashion. When I enter into this state of grace, it is not I who directs the film, but the “Certain forced vocations make the organism show film that directs me. A huge amount of sensitivity is irregularities. Obligatory chastity, like that of a nun, can always required: you have entered a city you don’t know well bring such hair to the face.” but in which you must move with the lightness of a vampire, without ideas, ideologies, preconceptions, if not “I don’t want to see my old films; they are like diseases, without everything. This is like the prologue, the atrium, the germs of my fantasy.” the anteroom of creativity; only afterward do your practical experience, your craftsmanship and “Realism is a bad word. In a sense everything is realistic. I professionalism come in; in other words, the hard work of see no line between the imaginary and the real.” making creativity materialize. An artist does not do what he wants, but what he can: this tension is what constitutes “Film is only images. You can put in whatever sound you art.” want later and change and improve it.”

“I’m not fascinated by theater; I’m fascinated by all forms “La Dolce Vita was considered scandalous–all over the of spectacle, theater, circus, cinema itself. These all world! The police wanted to take my passport away; they contain congenial elements; when I show the atmosphere wanted to kill me, to put me in prison.” of show business, I speak of myself because my life is a show. I am a man wholly devoted to spectacle; I am one “The title of [La Dolce Vita] came to have a meaning of those who tells stories to others.” exactly the opposite of what I intended. I told that story about Rome because I know Rome, but it could have “Often I mix languages to express the truth of a situation.” taken place in Bangkok. Paris, Babylon, anywhere. The Fellini—LA DOLCE VITA—11 city is an internal city. I wanted the title to signify not “Easy Life” but “The Sweetness of Life.” “We change our accounts of events continually so as not to bore ourselves.” “Ekberg came from the “It’s absolutely impossible to North, she was young and improvise. Making a movie is a as proud of her good health mathematical operation. It is as a lioness. She was no like sending a missile to the trouble at all. She remained moon. Art is a scientific in the basin for ages, operation. What we call motionless, impassive, as if improvisation is, in my case, the water didn’t cover her just having an ear and an eye to nor the cold affect her, even things that occur during the though it was March and time we are making the picture. the nights made one shiver. The history of 4 months, 5 For Mastroianni it was months of shooting is not only rather a different story. He the private story of the director had to get undressed, put on making the picture, it is also a a frogman’s suit and get story of a trip, of mutual dressed again. To combat relationships, of love, of the cold he polished off a enemies, of vanity.... If you see bottle of vodka, and when we shot the scene he was that the picture is suggesting something new, you have to completely pissed.... It took eight or nine nights. Some of be open to that kind of suggestion, because sometimes it is the owners of the surrounding houses would rent out their the picture that directs you when you work in an open and balconies and windows to the curious. At the end of each honest way. That is not improvisation, that is just being take the crowd would cheer. A show within a show. Every faithful to what you are doing.” time I look at the picture of Ekberg in the Trevi Fountain, I have the sensation of reliving those magic moments, “All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster’s those sleepless nights, surrounded by the meowing of cats autobiography. and the crowd that gathered from every corner of the city.”

COMING UP IN THE FALL 2016 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS XXXIII: Oct 18 Orson Welles Chimes at Midnight 1966… Oct 25 Sarah Elder and Leonard Kamerling The Drums of Winter 1977… Nov 1 Hal Ashby Being There 1979… Nov 8 Brian De Palma The Untouchables 1987… Nov 15 Norman Jewison Moonstruck 1987… Nov 22 The Sacrifice 1986… Nov 29 Alfonso Arau Like Water for Chocolate 1992 Dec 6 Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck The Tourist 2010

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The Buffalo Film Seminars are presented by the State University of New York at Buffalo and the Dipson Amherst Theatre, with support from the Robert and Patricia Colby Foundation and the Buffalo News.