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Political Fellini: Journey to the End of Italy by Andrea Minuz (review)

2018; Volume: 48; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/flm.2018.0023

1548-9922

Bernard F. Dick,

Italian Literature and Culture

Reviewed by: Political Fellini: Journey to the End of Italy by Andrea Minuz Bernard F. Dick Political Fellini: Journey to the End of Italy Andrea Minuz, Trans. Marcus Perryman New York: Berghahn, 2015, 196 pages By the "political" in his title, Andrea Minuz does not mean "ideological." Fellini was neither a DeSica nor a Passolini. He hated Communism and, as Minuz suggests in an appendix in which he quotes from correspondence between the director and the Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti, Fellini was sympathetic to the Catholic and centrist Christian Democracy Party, of which Andreotti was head. Fellini, as Minuz argues, was a mythmaker, who created an Italian identity out of ancient rituals, mostly Catholic in origin, that never disappeared but left their traces in such scenes as the procession in Nights of Cabiria (1957) and its transmogrification in Roma (1972), the Madonna sighting in La Dolce Vita (1960), and the school play about martyrdom in Juliet of the Spirits (1965). Minuz' monograph, brief as it is, challenges the reader to think of Fellini's films as a reflection of the unresolved tension between past and present, illusion and reality, history and myth, and innocence and experience. La strada (1954) is pre-commedia dell'arte with its zanni (Gelsomina and the Fool, Giuletta Massina and Richard Basehart) and strongman (Zampanò, Anthony Quinn). There is something primitive about the film, as if Fellini were trying to revisit the roots of popular Italian comedy, showing what it might have been like before the itinerant players become commedia dell'arte stock characters like Pierrot and Columbine. Set in the present, La strada weaves a mythic spell, as if the past has intruded upon the present with all of its primordial power. Central to understanding Fellini, Minuz claims, is the myth of Pinocchio. The puppet that looks like a boy but needs the Blue Fairy to give him flesh and blood is an amoral liar, who easily falls into bad company and causes distress to his creator, Geppetto. In short, Pinocchio is the Fellini male. Think of the characters in I Vitetlloni (1953), Guido in 8½ (1963), Marcello in La Dolce Vita (1960), the schoolboys in Amarcord (1973)--and Fellini himself, the Catholic bad boy who could never have been Fellini without Catholicism. But Catholicism is not the only -ism that Fellini explores in his films. Mussolini envisioned a new Italy, a throwback to the days of the Roman Empire that would reflect the synthesis of Fascism and Catholicism; he believed that a people used to accepting revealed truth and mysteries, papal infallibility, and adherence to dogma would be the perfect subjects for a fascist state. Fellini's formative years were spent under Fascism, and he knew it could not be relegated to a footnote in Italian history. The two strains merge in Amarcord, which depicts a young boy's coming of age under Fascism. Part real, part dream, Amarcord illustrated the connection between the two -isms by implying that each prevents the young from reaching maturity by stunting their growth through rituals of obedience. No matter how Fellini felt about Catholicism, its rituals haunt his films, as they do James Joyce's works. It is not so much a question of "once a Catholic" as once a mythmaker, whose fascinations with rituals remain after his faith may have wavered. For the record, before Fellini died in 1993, he was given the last rites, and Cardinal Achille Silvistrini officiated at the funeral service at which he gave an "all is forgiven" eulogy (La Dolce Vita was considered blasphemous in some circles) and described Fellini's body of work as poetry. That it was. We all have favorite Fellini moments. Mine is the end of La Dolce Vita, when Marcello looks out across the water at the young girl, unable to comprehend what she is saying. But experience can never understand innocence, once it has been lost. [End Page 95] Political Fellini is intended for the specialist, but there is much in it for anyone seeking to understand the role history can play in the development of an artist, especially one who never forgot what it was like to grow up Catholic under Fascism. Lastly...