By Rituparna Chatterjee • Mar 16th, 2008 • Filed under: Great Director, Highlights, Movies, featured, people

Rituparna Chatterjee explores the genius of Federico Fellini and the unique world he created in his films

When Shakespeare wrote, “All the world’s a stage,” I’m sure he didn’t expect a man called Federico Fellini to interpret it four centuries later as “All the world’s a circus”. One of the greatest filmmakers of all times, Fellini pretty much saw the world as a circus, at least in his films. La Dolce Vita reveals the circus of the rich and the paparazzi, 8 ½ explores the circus of filmmaking, E La Nave Va shows the circus of opera, aristocracy and journalism, La Strada depicts the circus behind a circus while Fellini Satyricon is a circus in itself. And honestly, you can’t blame him. Isn’t life a circus full of impromptu performances anyway? Fellini’s greatest fascinations, since childhood, were the circus and vaudeville artists.

A law school dropout, Fellini was first a nomadic caricature artist, then a writer-cum-cartoonist for Marc’ Aurelio (Italy’s leading humour publication of the time), then a crime reporter. Finally, he kicked off his film career as a gag writer for famous actor Aldo Fabrizi, followed by several other stints in the film industry. Only in 1945 did Fellini get his golden break – a chance to collaborate with Roberto Rossellini (the father of Italian neorealism) on Rome Open City, the film that kicked off a cinematic revolution called Italian Neorealism.

Neorealistic filmmaking dealt with the socio-economic, spiritual, emotional and psychological condition of the working class society in post World War II-Italy. Stylistically, it had documentary-like visuals, dubbed sound, was shot on location, used non-actors and abandoned all artifice in acting, plot, editing, narrative or dialogue. What segregates Fellini’s neorealism from that of Rossellini or Vittorio De Seca is Fellini’s greater focus on the character than on society at large. Typical neorealistic characters are pawns in the hands of historic, social, economic and political circumstances. But Fellini’s characters are victims of their own choices and subjectivity. And it is this subjectivity – socio-economic, spiritual, emotional and psychological –that shines out in Fellini’s neorealistic films – Luci del varieta (Variety Lights), Lo Sceicco Bianco (The White Sheik), I Vitelloni, Le Notti de Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria) etc.

Take his most famous neorealistic film La Strada (The Road) for instance. Gelsomina (Fellini’s wife Giuletta Masena) is sold by her poverty-stricken mother to the beastly Zampano (Anthony Quinn), a circus artist. He cruelly oppresses the child-like and lovable Gelsomina yet, she falls in love with him. Later, The Fool (Richard Basehart) falls in love with her but she chooses to live with her oppressor instead. Years after watching De Seca’s Bicycle Thieves, what really stays with you is the touching story. But what really stays years later with you is La Strada’s Chaplinesque tragic female clown, or the brutal Zampano. Contemporary filmmaker Martin Scorsese claims that Zampano has inspired several of his self-destructive characters.

Fellini’s obsession for characters’ eccentricities and absurdist clownish humour only grew with time. And so did his trait for imaginative autobiographical cinema. A fine example would be the idiosyncratic characters from his own childhood in Amarcord (I Remember) – the insane Teo atop a tree crying out “I need a woman” or Volpina, the town prostitute or the enormous-chested tobacconist lady.

Even as neorealism died a natural death in the early 1950s, Fellini swiftly evolved into magic realism. “I make a film in the same manner in which I live a dream,” Fellini once said of himself. That perfectly explains the famous surreal opening sequence of the autobiographical 8½. Filmmaker Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) flies out of a claustrophobic traffic jam but is pulled back to his car by a rope tied around his ankle. 8½ is full of such cinematic illusions that blur the lines between reality and illusion. Ditto with E La Nave Va (And The Ship Sails On) – a visual treat – wherein Fellini shows opera’s remoteness from reality. Serbian refugees are given asylum on a luxury ship (signifying the start of WWI) and its passengers sing in chorus to protest against surrendering the refugees to an Austrian battleship. Fellini Satyricon, based on the ancient Roman novelist Titus Petronius’ Satyricon, is arguably his most surreal and quirky film with highly disturbing visuals and acoustics. Fellini called it “a science fiction of the past.” Superficially, it is a sensuous celebration of a fictional pagan pre-Christ Rome, but it is actually a metaphor for the present world.

Fellini’s uniqueness perhaps lies in the fact that he never attended film school or film clubs and preferred Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy over Eisenstein and Griffith. Or that he preferred popular art forms like the circus, mime, cartoons and caricatures to opera. And of course, due to his great love for clowns! In 1970, Fellini made a documentary The Clowns. He called his wife Masena, the ultimate clown and his greatest inspiration for his cinema. If Fellini ever acted in any of his circusey films, I guess he’d have played the clown.

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