ALWAYS KEEP YOUR CHILDHOOD INNOCENCE

 This archive was created for personal reasons, as everything is​.

 

 

I met Fellini when I was only a child; he was shooting  ​Roma​, the set was by the Colosseum, and it was night-time. All of my encounters with him occurred during my childhood, and in a sense it is fortunate it should have been so.

 

He would call me ‘la nana’, the dwarf; at which everyone laughed and I couldn’t understand why. 

He loved using nicknames for everybody, and hase fews for me too: ‘testona’ (Miss

Waterhead), ‘occhiona’ (Big Eyes) and, last but not least, the dwarf.  

But you can tell from the portrait he made of me that he regarded me as being kind of mature – in that special way of being mature that only children have. It is not wholly without embarrassment that I publish that sketch.

 

That is the kind of relationship we had: a relationship among equals – which is to say of one child with another.

He sent me presents for my birthday and Christmas, and though I didn’t really get who they were from, I did understand they were the kind of strange present one child gives another, because, like all great artists and innocents, Fellini had retained every scrap of his childhood.

 And that’s a hugely rare thing.

 

Owing to a family history that has to do with my grandmother and will be recounted elsewhere, every so often I was bundled off to be an extra in one of his films (​The Clowns,​ ​City of Women​, ​Casanova​... ) – not that I knew what a film was, but at home I’m sure they thought it just wonderful. I was not quite so amused, but I understood I should keep my doubts to myself and for years never said anything.

 

 

But I liked the dressing up, and having lunch with Fellini; and the real magic, as I remember, was the entrance, with the lifting barrier and the men in uniform who would say hello. I loved, too, being in the car with my aunt, and she loved driving, and whistling away turned the wheel first right, then left, into a place that was not the city – so where were we? A wide empty space, known as Studio Cinque (5).

It was not comfortable, and I didn’t like that; and it was full of agitated strangers, a lot of them shouting: come here, bring that over, shift this out of here, come on then, move it and the very strange thing was that it was normal that they were shouting.

 

After a time I was just plain bored, though I didn’t dare say so because I understood that everyone around me regarded this "cinema" thing like something otherworldly, and what-do-you-mean-you-don’t-like-the-other-worldly?.

 

It was only when I turned 16 that I told them I really wasn’t interested, and they all got the idea, and I was exempted. I studied art, instead, and worked as a journalist for most of my life, and have always gone to the cinema, sometimes with my aunt, who liked to pick up two movies at a time, and or the same one twice. I grew up hearing cinema talk at mealtimes, dinner after dinner, late into the night; and that was before we even had a TV. Perhaps that is why I never saw the interest.

Fellini I did find interesting, however: above all I loved his desk, chock-full of tins of coloured markers, his thick, greenish loden, which looked like it must be soggy and uncomfortable, and his hat (which he wore still as they were going out of fashion), and I loved it that he too thought it was great to drive along with my aunt, and that he too would look out of the window, like me, as if he were on a boat, and my aunt drove as if she were on a boat, and he loved my aunt too, and he too laughed when she started whistling. And I liked it that he was possessive of his coloured markers, his sheets of paper, and his paint-brushes: that he lent them to me with immense caution, just to make a friend of me, exactly as children do.

 

And I loved it that when he spoke to me he always looked at me and listened, the way adults never do. And straight in the eyes, confident and true, as only kids with no shame, and true curiosity, can be. He said once that he would have love to make a movie only with those children’s looks, misterious, silent and meaningfull, but was to an impossible task. I can understand his fascination for this profound unspoken communication.

 

It was only as a grown-up that I understood why he called me ​la nana​. And so many other things I’ve understood about myself, about life, which he already knew and had told me about when I was small, in his letters to me, in the drawings he made for me, the poems he sent me, or through his eyes, just by looking at me. But that would be a long and too private a tale.

 

We did so many things together, only some of which I remember.

I don’t take great relish in making them public; but I’ll do it here by way of presentation of this work which is to serve for study and research purposes and I hope to get finished over time.

I remember when he came to dinner with Giulietta Masina and my mother bought a tablecloth of grey linen which immediately became the Masina cloth and was never used again, or when she took me to the Orfei Circus; and I remember lots of things happening on set, seen from a height of 90 cm., and their truly scary garden in Fregene, which was the garden of Giulietta degli Spiriti, and his hands, the physical space he occupied, the absurd restaurant lunches, full of tomato sauce, yellowish tablecloths, waiters he’d make laugh, huge spoons dipping into broth, and gazes and wide eyes.

 

And then, very clearly, I remember his​ ​funeral.

 

For all those present it was memorable, something more than a funeral. It was doleful and yet had something of the angelic about it, in the silent tread, all day and all night, of people on tiptoes who had come saddened, bewildered, perhaps devastated, and it was almost as if they were the ones who had departed, and life had stolen something from them: and they all stood there listening to a trumpet sounding, an invisible sound, in an empty blue sky. It was only then, probably, that I realized my childhood friend had been the friend of so many people; though that isn’t to say I quite figured why or how, and perhaps I didn’t in fact realize: it just didn’t matter, really, and it would be years and years before I understood this silent understanding we had, this gift life had made me, would become, more plainly, a string of open questions and a short story to tell.

 

 

This archive was created for personal reasons, as everything is​.  

 

Feel transparency

This chapter, taken from Aldo Carotenuto's book "Jung e la cultura italiana" (Jung and Italian Culture), reproduces a conversation with Federico Fellini, his strange encounter with Ernst Bernhard, the founder of analytical psychology in Italy, and the productive relationship which was created and change his art and life.

(...) Fellini described to me his visit to Jung's Tower in Bollingen. 

Situated on a lakefront, that tower--apropos of which Fellini had already read the chapter dedicated to it in Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections--impressed him as being gigantic, and yet something which might have been constructed by a child, something modeled in clay. 

That air of a humble dwelling, but also in a sense a miniature theater, along with the fact that Jung had applied himself with the humility of an old actor, one who recites the roles of ancient Caucasian shepherds, according to a simple and mysterious ritual, aroused in Fellini a sentiment almost of reverence. Everything there was very congenial to him, also because--along with the attempt to reproduce something of antiquity, medieval, there was also that touch of the theatrical.
Fellini and his friends were received by the youngest of Jung's grandsons. 

The boy, who had seen Fellini's films and held him in particular esteem, led them to a small room which, they were told, was not usually shown to anyone since, as the boy admitted frankly, the thing embarrassed him considerably. 

They went up a stone staircase and opened a small door. The impression was initially one of total darkness. Then Fellini dimly perceived a very small space with two tiny Gothic windows of thick alabaster and walls painted by Jung himself--the mandala and a study of various myths. Then there was a collection of small objects, statues, an incredible bric-à-brac, and in a corner the robe of a magician (an initiate or guru).

 The young man explained to them how his grandfather had spent hours and hours there. While this place, so saturated with significance, left Fellini's friends perplexed, it inspired in him an impression of intimacy, somewhat akin to having discovered a secret vice, which in his eyes rendered Jung more human and thus greater; closer and at the same time more mysterious. 

In fact, it exuded that humanity essential to ancient rituals which have no need of an elaborate production, and there was also something of the Bantu witch doctor. If a scientist, a philosopher, a thinker, of Jung's caliber, had accepted the conditioning and limits of a ritual which--at least in our eyes--is somewhat ridiculous, then obviously he would have had his own reasons and have truly progressed beyond what usually passes for dignified behavior. This revelation of Jung as more human and at the same time more mysterious aroused in Fellini a joyful respect.

Fellini never met Jung personally. In fact, until he met Bernhard he knew little or nothing of psychoanalysis. It was Bernhard who introduced Fellini to the writings of Jung. Of course, Fellini had not read everything, also because some of Jung's writings are technically initiatory; for example, he did not finish Psychology and Alchemy, but he read Psychology and Religion, The Ego and the Unconscious, Psychological Types, Answer to Job, and above all Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

 Needless to say, meeting Bernhard was an extremely important event in the life of Fellini. 
The atmosphere of their encounter was a strange and exceptional one--which was only to be expected in an encounter of this type. Fellini was suffering from a malaise which he could only vaguely define; existential as it were, but with effects going slightly beyond neurosis. That encounter occurred in 1960-61--that is, after the filming of La Dolce Vita. He had experienced similar phenomena also as a boy, except that then he had considered the thing to be quite normal - and, basically, perhaps it was. Fellini believed that such experiences are common to everyone, but that they are forgotten, suppressed by the intellectual barrier of defense which is created. He, however, remembered. Following various periods of nervous tension, or perhaps simply because it was inevitable, at around 33 or 34 years of age, Fellini again began to experience strange phenomena, things that had no connection to daily normality. This condition was intensified by his new, somewhat magical interest in a certain type of literature. In fact, Fellini's plunging with a greedy curiosity into the reading of rare texts on initiates, prophets and conjurers only stimulated a tendency, an openness, a particular capacity for contact which he naturally possessed. Also, his profession, which involved operating in the sphere of the imagination, must have exalted that predisposition to hallucinatory experiences, that sliding into a sort of twilight zone, where sensitivity becomes perception tinged with alarm. In one sense, he was tempted to let himself go, to proceed; however, he sensed the danger involved, and he was afraid. Without that sensation of terror when confronted with these phenomena--fascinating but completely mysterious--the experience would perhaps have gone even further. Instead, he was restrained by an uncontrolled fear.

One day, when subsequent to these experiences he felt himself waver--on the one hand tempted, and on the other alarmed him--he received a visit from a colleague with whom he usually had only rare contact. He had not seen the man for some time, in fact since he had attempted unsuccessfully to obtain the means to finish a film which had come to a standstill due to lack of funds. He imagined that he might still nurture some resentment towards him for that failure. Instead, however, he had come to tell Fellini that he had in the end succeeded in finishing his documentary--in any case, this was apparently the reason--and also to express his thanks for what Fellini had tried to do. 
Then, he suddenly said: "Do you know Dr. Bernhard?" Fellini said that he didn't. And the colleague: "He is an extraordinary man. A psychoanalyst. I am extremely grateful to him. The other day, we were talking about you and La Strada. 
Why don't you phone him?"

Now, all this was absolutely coincidental; he could know nothing of what Fellini was going through. When he left the telephone number, Fellini accepted it out of politeness. However, he had not the slightest intention of using it, also because he had already had an experience with an analysis which had not been exactly a pleasant one. It had been during the filming of La Strada. He had fallen into a anxious, neurotic state to the extent that at one point, he felt as though he were being dragged under water. 
First there was the sun, light, friends, joy, work, then suddenly, everything changed. But before he realized that he had fallen into an abyss and that there would be some drastic changes if he did not succeed in finding some remedy, one or two months passed. 

During that time, the film itself also contributed to bringing back to mind episodes, remorse and anxiety. Consequently, his wife, seeing him so mysteriously troubled, perpetually on the verge of tears, suffering from insomnia, and having heard from a friend of a foreign, Freudian psychoanalyst, arranged a meeting. 

The analyst came, listened, and then said that he was very busy, which did not strike Fellini as exactly encouraging, at least from a therapeutic point of view, all the more so since Fellini really was desperate. However, an appointment was made for the following month which--as his condition, although intermittent and less acute, nevertheless continued--he decided to keep. Fellini was struck by the narrowness of the analyst's studio and when, after asking him to lie down on the couch, the analyst asked him: "How are you. Tell me, how are you?", Fellini, believing that the question was in reference to the contingent situation, answered "Slightly hemmed in, a bit suffocating... the office is so small." The analyst gave a start and blurted out: "What do you mean small?" Fellini had never imagined that someone who claimed to treat, to cure, could be so over-sensitive. Something else which struck him was the fact that immediately after the three quarters of an hour had passed, even in the middle of a discourse, the analyst announced that the session was over. 
Later on he explained how this was absolutely necessary in order to prevent the patient's forming a filial relationship which would be subsequently difficult to undo--which was true, but there are many ways to do the same thing. Above all, the things the analyst said were not his own, and Fellini had the impression of rigidity, a schema, a reference to preordained things. In the end, it seemed to him that the analyst was drawing upon useless old saws, and after the third session he stopped going.

Then, gradually, through his work and other private matters, that obscure thing, that sensation of sliding into a distressing dimension, seemed to become attenuated. However, the impression of something unsolved, something of which he understood nothing, remained. Thus we come, seven or eight years later, to the visit from the colleague who left him the telephone number of Bernhard, which Fellini did not immediately use. However, as Fellini was in the habit of carrying around scraps of paper with various notations in his pocket, one day he came across that particular one with a telephone number and nothing else. Thinking that it could be the telephone number of a woman he had met, he phoned, somewhat cautiously, unsure of who might answer. At the other end of the line, a calm, male voice: 

"Hello."
Fellini: "Is Maria there?"
"No, I'm sorry, there is no Maria here". The man had a German accent.
Fellini: "Excuse me, but who am I speaking to?"
"Professor Bernhard".
"Oh, Professor, excuse me... it's Fellini."
"Oh, yes. It's a pleasure. What can I do for you?"

There was a short silence. Then in order to overcome his embarrassment, Fellini, hurriedly: "I have to talk to you", which was in fact not true. It was simply that he did not know how to cut short a telephone call made with completely different intentions.
But he went. A man with the air of an oriental master opened the door. Everything about the house pleased Fellini; the long corridor which reminded him of the labyrinths in the fun-fair, the peaceful air which permeated the studio. The place, it seemed, breathed spirituality. They sat down, opposite each other. Bernhard smiled:

"Tell me."
And Fellini: "I have nothing to say. I have the feeling that I am with someone who inspires in me a sensation of great peace." 
Then, Bernhard: "Do you know what I do? Who I am?"
"Yes, a psychoanalyst."
Then he spoke of La Strada. 
At the end, Fellini asked if he could come back, and Bernhard: "Yes, whenever you wish."



Then, for some time, he did not telephone, also because in fact he was undecided and unwilling to once more attempt to deal with the old problem of his anxiety. One day, however, not so much due to neurotic discomfort as the desire to see Bernhard, Fellini did phone. Bernhard recognized his voice immediately and gave him an appointment for the next half hour. From then on, they saw each other regularly, every week, without fail. When Fellini spoke of para-psychological phenomena, Bernhard listened with great interest, then said smiling: "You understand that we must consider all this from a psychological point of view"--thus disappointing Fellini slightly, who instead preferred seeing the thing in a magical light. Nevertheless, Fellini gradually became convinced that Bernhard was truly the right person, the friend, the master he needed. 
Thus, a relationship of friendship and total trust was formed, to the extent that one could say that 8 1/2 and Giulietta degli spiriti were created in the wake of this encounter; that is, not as narrative necessity, so much as an existential and ideological one. Or, in any case, although the themes for these films were already formed in Fellini's mind, the encounter with Bernhard and the reading of Jung's writings shed light on an aspect of which he was previously unaware. Fellini considered his relationship with Bernhard and the introduction to Jung's works true nourishment--assuming of course that the artistic type can have a reference point other than his own unconscious. Fellini recognized that Bernhard and Jung helped him to find something which is also a defense and a control The artist is saved by his own self-therapy because, in reality, the fact that one liberates oneself from encountered or evoked phantasms constitutes a continuous self-analysis.

According to Fellini, Jung is the psychoanalyst most loved and most nurturing for the artistic type, because he is a sort of guide, at the most dangerous crossroads, who protects without suffocating, precisely due to his conceptual construction which does not constrict, but broadens. Jung does not say what you must do, he tells you what you "can" do. He indicates the way, he does not accompany you to the established final goal, because there are no goals, but instead he encourages you to continue on, which in itself is already a heroic commitment. 
Consequently, in certain spheres, he is less popular, less understood and meets with more resistance justified by his apparent mysticism, by his apparently irrational aspects. Even today, despite the fact that his personages, figures, ideas, thought, become indispensable to survival, he is looked upon with suspicion and people speak above all of Freud. Freud is more protective, in the sense that he makes reference is to a kind of general code, adapted to all. 

But, returning to our encounter; Fellini recalled a dream he had--shortly before Bernhard's death--in which in fact Bernhard died. In the dream, when he knocked at the door of his beloved master to present his condolences, a youth of a mournful, languid aspect opened the door and led Fellini down the familiar corridor. They entered the studio where Bernhard was lying on the floor, dead, wrapped up like a mummy. The dream continued with the vision of the cadaver disappearing and Fellini's having the impression of his wrists being tightly clutched by the hands of Bernhard. The sensation was that this presence signified that Bernhard was not really dead, that although invisible he continued to make his presence felt. Fellini woke up disturbed and was undecided whether or not to describe the dream to Bernhard. He phoned to hear how he was and went to the studio shortly afterwards. Once there, perhaps impulsively, he described the dream. Bernhard was not disturbed; however, he became very serious and made no comment. 

Time passed, Fellini once more took up his film activity, and the two even went out to dinner together once or twice. Fellini was filming Giulietta degli spiriti and wanted Bernhard to see it; he mentioned this to Bernhard who accepted with pleasure.

One day, while working on the film, there was a phone call from a friend who informed him of the death of Bernhard. 
He broke off his work and rushed to Bernhard's home. The person who opened the door was the youth of the dream. When he saw him he experienced a powerful emotion. The youth led him down the corridor and then discreetly retired, leaving Fellini alone with Bernhard's body. Fellini thought that he was about to experience the second part of the dream and was vaguely alarmed, to the extent that he childishly asked Bernhard to remain still and not take him by the wrists. Subsequently, Bernhard appeared again in his dreams, but always in a pleasant, waggish way, a surprising presence. Doubtless, their relationship remained one of the most important elements in Fellini's life. Bernhard was like a father to him, in the true sense of the word, without changing anything--leaving intact Fellini's protracted adolescence, his playful sense--which allowed him to become detached, to see himself, without rejecting anything. And this is a great and miraculous thing. We have the impression that Fellini conserved a reassuring memory of Bernhard, the impression of having glimpsed another dimension, as it were. The dimension of an extraordinary man, one who although a scientist himself, referred to that other great Swiss magician with reverence. 

Certainly, Bernhard was truly fond of Fellini. He was amused and very curious about his activity, and he respected him. He was also very attentive as regards the particular perceptive capacity of Fellini. And in fact, they met during that period that Fellini acquired certain friends, including the two persons with whom he succeeded in creating an all enveloping, mediumistic situation. Fellini could recount truly surprising things, but he preferred to be taken at his word, without having to go into unnecessary detail.
Regularly, he described to Bernhard the things that happened, and he had to admit that Bernhard understood immediately that it was all authentic, all the more so since the persons who intervened knew nothing either of Fellini or the others involved. Bernhard wanted Fellini to write the description of those sessions, in which there was something of that vaguely moralistic aspect with which Catholicism re-acquired through mediums is often imbued, but also revealing aspects of a surprising lucidity and the impression of another presence, inside us and beyond. The things that were said, information, dates, episodes, belonged to the objective presence of a thought that was not and could not have been theirs. Then, that contact with certain persons and certain rituals, which however had nothing of the funereal or sinister, aroused Fellini's old capacity for extrasensory perception. This occurred in a less aggressive way than in the past, because meanwhile there had been the intervention of analytical psychology which had in some way corrected the angle. 

Fellini spoke of this with Bernhard, who encouraged him to remain unafraid: "When you feel these transparencies which are created in reality, remain firm, calm." It was one of those times when Bernhard said much more than he might have in his strictly analytical role. 
Fellini's impression of him was of someone extremely knowledgeable, who had experienced peculiar things and who spoke only when absolutely necessary. 

In fact, Bernhard gave him suggestions which quickly proved very effective--all this, calmly, with a smile. How can the significance Bernhard had for Fellini be expressed? Perhaps in the words of Fellini himself: "My relationship with him resulted in a kind of fecundation which although it has continued after his death, that death did however represent an interruption, because he was the master, the person waiting for me at certain points of arrival, at certain laps. Now, his memory accompanies me, but it is still a loss. Yes, I can only say that, it is a loss".

Translated from the Italian by Joan Tambureno This text is the result of a pleasant conversation between Aldo Carotenuto and Federico Fellini which took place in August of 1976.  

It is a translation from Aldo Carotenuto's, Jung e la cultura italiana (Rome: Astrolabio-Ubaldini, 1977). 

Once we where

Realism is a bad word. 
In a sense everything is realistic.
I see no line between the imaginery and the real

Nella foto tutti giovani e geni. In basso ci sta uno spazio vuoto, predisposto come un fumetto, per scrivere pensieri o sentimenti, oltre ai pulsanti per condividere questo post con chi vi sta simpatico: se lascerete un messaggio farete sapere che anche voi siete passati da qui. Proteggete il lavoro dei poeti, delle donne, condivide la conoscenza. 

Bruegel e marketing

How Fellini made his modernist masterpiece

As 8 1/2 returns to our screens, Ian Thomson explores how a period of creative limbo spawned one of the greatest, dreamiest films ever made

Ian Thomson

Italy’s highest-paid heart-throb, Mastroianni as Guido Anselmi, a film director in ‘creative limbo’

Ian Thomson

11 April 2015

9:00 AM

Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita was a box-office triumph in Italy in 1960. It made $1.5 million at the box office in three months — more than Gone With the Wind had. ‘It was the making of me,’ said Fellini. It was also the making of Marcello Mastroianni as the screen idol with a curiously impotent sex appeal. No other film captured so memorably the flashbulb glitz of Italy’s postwar ‘economic miracle’ and its consumer boom of Fiat 500s and Gaggia espresso machines. Unsurprisingly, the Vatican objected to the scene where Mastroianni makes love to the Swedish diva Anita Ekberg (who died earlier this year at the age of 83) in the waters of the Trevi fountain. Sixties Rome became a fantasy of the erotic ‘sweet life’ thanks in part to that scene.

After La Dolce Vita, Fellini found himself at a creative loss and hung a sign above his desk: ‘NOW WHAT?’ Sophia Loren’s movie-mogul husband, Carlo Ponti, persuaded him to contribute to Boccaccio ’70, a collection of lewd short films inspired by the medieval Decameron, but it was a critical failure. At the end of 1961, still in ‘creative limbo’, Fellini began work on 8½, his eighth and a half film; it was to be a signpost in his development as a magician-director.

Again, Mastroianni was the lead actor, but 8½ is a very different film from La Dolce Vita. In gleeful narrative disarray, it returns to British cinemas this month in a version restored from the original negatives. Watching it the other day at the BFI, I felt I might levitate out of my seat as the movie scissors giddily backwards and forwards in time, with dreamlike sequences from Fellini’s Rimini childhood morphing into stylised fantasy sequences from 1940s Hollywood.

Daringly, Fellini disavowed the gritty actuality of Italian neorealism (Bicycle Thieves; Rome, Open City) to conjure what he called an ‘intoxicating, lucid dreaminess’. In the unforgettable opening sequence, Mastroianni floats up into the sky above an exhaust-filled traffic jam before he plummets Icarus-like down towards a beach. The implied sexual anxiety of the flying dream is a motif throughout the film.

On one level, 8½ is a film about film-making. Mastroianni, in the role of the successful movie director Guido Anselmi, contemplates a costly science-fiction film about a rocket ship’s ascent from earth following a thermonuclear disaster. The project appears to be stymied, however, and now Anselmi has liver troubles. A casualty of the ‘sweet life’, he has retired to a fashionable spa town in Tuscany to take stock and reflect on his domestic and artistic difficulties. In his black suit and wide-brimmed black hat he is dressed very much as Fellini was in those years and is clearly intended to be the director’s cinematic alter ego.

While Anselmi struggles with his script, his mistress Carla arrives amid a swirl of film assistants, executive producers, costume designers and hangers-on. They importune Anselmi to push on with his film, but he wants only to sleep. Played by Sandra Milo (‘the Italian Judy Holliday’), his mistress Carla is a cheerfully vulgar and buxom woman; Fellini had ordered Milo to put on five kilos for the film. ‘I feel like a Strasbourg goose,’ she complained, but she got her revenge 20 years later when her autobiographical novel Caro Federico (1982) portrayed Fellini as a bed-hopping roué. (Fellini claimed he never read the book. ‘I don’t even want to smell it.’) Among the film’s bewildering array of other characters is the playboy producer Mario Mezzabotta and his alarmingly feral girlfriend Gloria Morin, stylised versions of Ponti and Loren.

Trouble brews for Anselmi when his long-suffering wife Luisa (played by the gamine Anouk Aimée) turns up for the day to pour scorn on his marital infidelities. (‘No affairs since you left? Poor Guido,’ she taunts.) To top it all, an annoying French intellectual berates Anselmi for his ‘squalid catalogue of mistakes’ as a director. Only in the dream world is there a reprieve from the carping. In the film’s most intoxicating flashback, the boy Guido is bathed by his grandmother in a huge wine vat and then carried to bed in soft warm blankets. Fellini’s camerawork is endlessly beguiling and fluid here. Elsewhere, a voluptuous vixen dances a carnal rhumba on a seashore in front of a group of excited schoolboys, until priests arrive to break up the impropriety. Critics speculated that Fellini himself was eight and a half — otto e mezzo — at the time of his first sexual experience.

At the time, the film’s modernist self-reflexivity was compared to Luigi Pirandello’s ground-breaking 1921 play Six Characters in Search of an Author. Pirandellian reflections on the role of art and illusion in life certainly intrigued Fellini. In the year of the film’s release, 1963, a group of avant-garde Italian writers and critics (among them a young Umberto Eco) founded the Gruppo 63 movement, which aimed to reject ‘conservatism’ in the arts and champion the subversive theatricalities of Pirandello, Proust, James Joyce and others. Yet Fellini was conspicuous among modernists for his refusal to be glum (still less prolix, pedantic or patronising). As well as being funny, 8½ is an affecting meditation on marital relations and love.

In the justly famous finale, Mastroianni calls up everyone who has appeared earlier in 8½ and, like a circus ringmaster, directs them through a loudhailer. Eighty smiling and contentedly chatting characters pour down the staircase of the spaceship’s giant launch pad towards him. (The science-fiction set was said to have been inspired by Bruegel’s The Tower of Babel.) Nino Rota’s swirling big-top score affirms the sense of a closing circus procession and reconciliation. At last, Anselmi has found the strength to undertake his film project. For all its surface frivolity, 8½ is one of the great cinematic expressions of artistic achievement in the face of feared impotence, and it remains a favourite with directors such as Wes Anderson and Jonathan Glazer.

Not everyone in Italy liked 8½ on its release. The novelist Dino Buzzati (‘the Italian Kafka’) spoke of the self-indulgent ‘masturbation of a genius’. Meanwhile Fellini, a master yarn-spinner, did his best to obscure the circumstances of the film’s birth. When journalists complained that he gave wildly different versions of its inception, he protested, ‘What’s wrong with that? All of you got an exclusive story.’

Laurence Olivier was considered for the part of Guido Anselmi, but Fellini feared that the English actor would make a hash of the gloriously comic harem scene, where the director brings all the women in his life to heel with the aid of a whip. (Among the women is a sexily deep-voiced Danish air hostess.) Mastroianni, Italy’s highest-paid heart-throb, acts the harem boss with his accustomed humour and amused self-deprecation. Of course the women pander to his every childish desire. Nothing was ever done in half measures in Fellini’s Italy.

A world without love

"All my films turn upon this idea - there is an effort to show a world without love, characters full of selfishness, people exploiting one another, and, in the midst of it all, there is always - and especially in the films with Giulietta - 

a little creature who wants to give love  and who lives for love." 

I pulsanti per condividere questo pezzetto del puzzle sono in basso, e ci sta anche uno spazio vuoto, predisposto come un fumetto, se uno volesse scrivere i suoi pensieri o sentimenti: se lascerete un messaggio farete sapere che anche voi siete passati da qui. E se quello che c'e' scritto vi riguarda in qualche modo, allora, non si sa mai cosa potrebbe accadere. 

Does a vocation exist without desire?

When I saw the equestrian circus for the first time as a child, I felt the same emotion that I think a child who wants to become a priest can feel in the moment of soul elevation. I saw a kind of annunciation. The clowns seemed to me, the first time that I saw them, the ambassadors of a life I could not refuse. When they came to meet me with their sneers, with their masks, with that fracasone noisy and scary.

it seemed to me that they were referring unequivocally to something that was waiting for me. It was like Saint Paul in Damascus; I at the equestrian circus had the revelation of my life, of my work. How it was then."

Image by Carlotta Mismetti Capua, from Amarcord. 

 

Still, Rimini

“Cinecittà is the real place, from many points of view,” said Paolo Fabbri, a Rimini-born professor of semiotics (and a former director of the currently closed Fellini Foundation), referring to the gigantic Cinecittà movie studios near Rome. “Fellini’s imagination was really directed by dreams.”


@nytimesbooks Fellini and Rimini, still. Here the full article.

Can you find if it is beautiful?.

"Nino couldn't make music all day, an initiatory, priestly aspect, he spent two hours, but the real hours in which he came into contact were at sunset, and I also went to his house in the evening. Nino doesn't have films. I’ve never seen him. I sometimes checked on him, but even before the light in the room went out, like babies or angels, he slept. Even when there was a reverberation in the room, Nino slept. He woke up at times and said “what a beautiful tree, where did you find it?"

È malato di cuore lei?

• Giornalista: La prima domanda sarebbe: che cosa vuole esprimere con questa sua nuova opera?
  Regista: Il mio intimo, profondo, arcaico cattolicesimo.
  Giornalista: [tra sé, scrivendo su un taccuino] ...arcaico cattolicesimo. [rivolgendosi nuovamente al regista] E che cosa ne pensa della società italiana?
  Regista: Il popolo più analfabeta, la borghesia più ignorante d'Europa.
  Giornalista: Ah! E che ne pensa della morte?
  Regista: Come marxista è un fatto che non prendo in considerazione.
  Giornalista: Quarta ed ultima domanda: qual è la sua opinione sul nostro grande regista Federico Fellini?
  Regista: Egli danza... egli danza!
• Regista: Lei non ha capito niente perché è un uomo medio. È così?
  Giornalista: Be', sì.
  Regista: Ma lei non sa cos'è un uomo medio? È un mostro, un pericoloso delinquente, conformista, colonialista, razzista, schiavista, qualunquista. [il giornalista inizia a ridere mentre scrive] È malato di cuore lei?
  Giornalista: No, no, facendo le corna.
  Regista: Peccato perché se mi crepava qui davanti sarebbe stato un buon elemento per il lancio del film. Tanto lei non esiste... Il capitale non considera esistente la manodopera se non quando serve la produzione, e il produttore del mio film è anche il padrone del suo giornale. Addio!
• Quando sarai nel regno dei cieli, ricordami al padre tuo. (Giovanni Stracci) 

Dialogo comico, pubblicato qui in forma di video in un altro luogo, e tratto da Ro.Go.Pa.G., film di fantascienza del 1963, film ad episodi di quattro registi internazionali, Pasolini, Rossellini, Gregoretti e Godard. L'elenco degli attori e comparse fa impressione, alcuni li elenco qui, con il link inglese dell'edizione internazionale: Orson Welles, Franco Citti, Adriana Asti,  Emanuele Di Bari, Adriana Moneta, la Betti. Infatti Pier Paolo Pasolini per l'episodio de La ricotta venne condannato per vilipendio della religione e poi amnistiato; la pellicola tornò così sugli schermi con un nuovo titolo imposto. Fu scelto Laviamoci il cervello, un titolo che, ebbene, ormai, non ricorda nessuno e che non suonava bene, in italiano (let's have a brainwash era il titolo inglese). Della censura, o del brainwash, come avviene invece oggi, ad oltre 50 anni da questo celeberrimo episodio, nel paese piu' ignorante d'Europa, in una Europa pacificata ma ridotta nelle dimensioni di potere mondiale, e nel bel mezzo della globalizzazione e della desertificazione e della digitalizzazione, non ne parla quasi nessuno, non nel mondo delle arti almeno. Anche questo a 20 anni dalla morte di Fellini pare un fatto alquanto surreale. Nella fotografia il poster vintage. Questo archivio funziona per libere associazioni, cercate da soli, lasciate un messaggio, proteggete la conoscenza.