Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures

FEDERICO FELLINI

Federico Fellini, may his films run forever! Federico Fellini, may the bulb burn out in his projector, may his film run dry.

With a cry of joy you leap off a diving board, proclaiming his genius. Halfway down to what suddenly becomes an empty pool, you imitate those old newsreels, reverse sprockets and let yourself be flashed back up to stand dismayed at your cowardice, half-disillusioned but wanting to jump again.

Such are the feelings when one turns the pages of the giant book, Fellini’s Films, about a giant autobiographical maker of films. And since Fellini is at odds with himself, you share his dichotomy.

No matter what your delights or dismays with the films themselves, this tribute to the Italian genius contains 400 color and black and white stills from his fifteen and a half films, proving that he has a magician’s eye and an imagination born to be locked, if sometimes erratically, into a camera. Complementing the photographs are brief resumes of each motion picture written by Gilbert Salachas and Thomas Bodmer.

In his foreword, Georges Simenon says Fellini is the cinema, “not the commercial or the avant-garde cinema, or that of any particular technique or genre, dramatic, comic or grotesque. He is a director who, using every means at his disposal—sometimes the most unexpected—communicates to us the humanity and the obsessions that seethe within him.”

I agree with Simenon, even though it means an all-night brawl next time I visit a cinema-school’s after-screening beerbust.

For he is indeed the grandson of Melies, the French-film fantasist, son and heir of Charles Chaplin, friend of Lon Chaney. When Fellini walks at night and calls, the gargoyles on Notre Dame waken to play parts. Quasimodo comes down and in new shapes speaks lines in La Strada and Satyricon, or lies a nameless monster on the beach in La Dolce Vita, surrounded by bored sophisticates who, momentarily touched by repulsion and sadness, wander off to their dooms.

If he had been born in 1900 instead of 1920, Fellini could have conceived and directed such films as Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera, whose villainous hero Erik is first cousin to the lost Fellini souls who wander out of sunlit midnights into moonlit noons. All three characters in La Strada, the parts written for Giulietta Massina, Richard Basehart and Anthony Quinn, are borrowed from Quasimodo’s flesh, reformed, made more palatable, but still destined to run on unseen tracks to destroy or be destroyed. Under the clown’s makeup of Gelsomina, or under Erik’s Phantom of the Opera mask, is the death’s head. Chaplinesque lady or monster pursued, we weep for both as they are driven to their graves.

In Fellini’s Films, the authors put his entire cartoon-oriented, vaudeville-circus-carnival-church-Roman-sweatbath mythology on full display.

His early imagination was concussed and formed in silent theaters by rambunctious Tramps and Cabinets that birthed Caligaris. Fellini as a young man was a writer of photo-comic strips for Italian newspapers. His becoming a director reminds one of a scene in Modern Times. In it, the innocent Chaplin, picking up a red flag fallen off the rear of a truck, suddenly discovers that a mob has rounded the corner behind him. He finds himself inadvertently heading a revolutionary parade. So, one morning 27 years ago, Fellini woke to find a director missing and himself asked to fill the empty shoes.

The rest is truly a history of filmmaking sieved through his mind onto the screen, into this book.

There is more of The Gold Rush and The Circus in his films than the post World War II Italian classics Open City, Shoeshine, or The Bicycle Thief.

He would have been at home with Fatty Arbuckle, Marie Dressler, Wally Berry, Ben Turpin, Rudolph Valentino, John Barrymore or Mickey Mouse—oversized cardboard-cutout grotesques, all of them, or outright cartoons.

Fellini’s bent has always been the outrageous contained, the colossal ego in miniature surroundings, the Milquetoast hero/heroine, walking like Chaplin, cringing like Langdon, occasionally as brave as Harold Lloyd, and the wagon train surrounded in a wilderness of baroque/rococo monsters.

Chaplin, threatened by the immense avalanche of meat that was Mack Swain, was hardly different from Fellini’s clown-wife floating down Rome’s Via Veneto at midnight amidst cannibal movie-starlet piranhas and superproducer crocodiles with 40-foot-wide smiles.

To repeat: When Charles Chaplin grew old, he changed himself to Federico Fellini. The aging comedian, whose comedies had become more serious and less funny and less successful, found the right receptacle and passed his soul on to the young Italian.

Fellini as disciple, doppelganger Tramp, moves down the same road Chaplin started off on in 1912. That road extends out of silent-film America, across the world and down the boot of Italy. Somewhere along the line The Tramp becomes Fellini’s actors on an identical road in Variety Lights, I Vitelloni, La Strada, and Amarcord. Along the way The Tramp changes sex, and becomes Fellini’s wife.

This book is full of such magical pictures and magical confrontations as a small boy stunned by an encounter with a horned beast on a misty road; Cabiria onstage in a cheap theater where a fourth-rate hypnotist enchants her so she becomes beautiful and recounts a lost childhood; the appearance as if by miracle of a peacock in a town square on a snowy day in winter when the town needs that tail with all its incredible eyes to stare upon its desolation.

This book proves that Fellini is a religion unto himself. He snorts at the church’s dubious miracles and goes forth in the world to find the quiet miracles he makes his own, and ours, forever.

His imagination, perfect as well as flawed, is that of a saint, if we remember that the greatest saints were taken with fits, starts and fevers. They enjoyed prophecies, illuminations, insanities and visions on wider screens than we have since invented. Fellini, like them, seems to have wandered in his own wilderness and wakened 40 days later, temperature normal, meanwhile having changed himself and the world.

This collection of photos, then, might well be retitled the Temptations of St. Federico, or Fellini’s Gardens of Terror and Delight. The trouble is, Fellini disbelieves his sainthood but suffers his visions nevertheless. He is the novelist-author-cartoonist suffering like Job, playing carpenter as the Boy Christ.

He is the innocent child on the rim of a wilderness of city, seeing wildflowers between the tractors and the construction beams.

And instantly he is the child become disillusioned man, seeing only struts and girders, lost in that city, seeking his younger self, hoping that the boy, re-found, can show him thistle seeds on the fresh wind. Spring come again to save mankind, himself and sanity.

If Shakespeare invented Freud (and he did, he did!) then surely Fellini reinvented his younger self, his dreams, and us and ours along with it.

Here comes the rub. In recent years, not necessarily visible in this book but brutally apparent in the projected films, Fellini has been at war with himself.

He has allowed the disillusioned doubter, the middle-aged cynic (which is only a post-puberty stance prolonged to excess) to win out over the boy. Hence, many of his films have become all gargoyle and no acolyte.

Can Fellini run back on his own time track, regain that lost innocence, to some degree at least, and keep it? Or is he doomed to wander the earth like the Mastroianni character in 8½, haunted by ghosts and guilts, which will not be exorcised by trapping them on film and rerunning their terrors again and again? Where is Fellini’s catharsis, or do the old rules still apply? Nietzsche said that we have our Arts so we won’t die of Truth, but does Fellini listen or, listening, believe?

Even as the older self must contain and illuminate the young without smothering it, so the younger self must blood and energize the intellect of the full-grown man. But if that older mind is tired by cynicism, the blood is poisoned and the child that runs the gamut from heart to head and back again is hamstrung in midstride. Fellini seems almost to have doubted himself out of existence, helped by those false friends we all find surrounding us, using up the air we need to breathe. Whether he knows it or not, Fellini is mobbed-in by such friends who are the dumb enemies of true self. Mass firings are the answer. Failed imaginations and failed wills are not proper company. The sooner Fellini gets back out on that road, long as it is, sad as it is, funny as it is, the sooner his films will breathe again. He will give up waltzing with empty mechanical dolls, as does Casanova in the dire ending of Fellini’s film, and dance with himself. There could be no better, truer, livelier companion.

The road is waiting. The boy is there on the edge of the city, the best part of Fellini’s self. We can only beg the great Federico to listen and hope that the boy yells loud enough.

While we are waiting and the finale is a long way off, and many films ache to be finished and born, there is this picture book, photographed from the walls and ceilings inside Fellini’s magic-lantern head. It is Halloween and darkness. It is the New Year of Christmas. It is a true Easter and its certain death and its promise of rebirth. It is being sure you will die at midnight and wake the next morn to find that you have another chance.

It is Fellini’s Films. And it is beautiful.

This article, read by Fellini, caused him to invite R.B. to Rome.