Of Memories and Clowns: 3 Films by Fellini 1970-1973
Laurel Gildersleeve
June 13, 2009
In 1961 while preparing for production on 8 ½ (1963), Federico Fellini met and befriended a Roman Jungian Psychoanalyst Dr. Ernest Bernhard (1). Through his meetings and later friendship with Bernhard, Fellini learned to unlock the symbols buried in his dreams, memories, and childhood experiences. For a man that made a career out of exploring his dreams, the theories of Carl Jung were a revelation. He speaks of this discovery to Biographer Charlotte Chandler, "I don´t know if my discovery of Jung affected my work, but I know it affected me, and I think what affects me and becomes part of me has to become part of my work." (2)
The affect can consequently be seen in 8 ½, which marks a break from Fellini´s preoccupation with the inner conflict of religion, spirituality and human love, and begins an examination of self as we are invited directly into Guido´s psyche. Fellini was attempting to reach "an agreement with the self without fears and without hopes." (3). The search for balance and true self is at the root of Jung´s teachings. The most direct reference comes in a scene where a telepathic entertainer reads Guido´s mind. She recites a chant he´s thinking of: ASA NISI MASA. Everyone is stumped as Guido leaves without explanation. The scene fades to a flashback of Guido´s (Fellini´s?) childhood in which a young girl recites the chant, pig Latin for ANIMA – Jung´s word for the soul (4).
Perhaps it was this revelation of dreams and childhood memories that led to three later successive films by Fellini, I Clowns (The Clowns) (1970), Roma (1972) and Amarcord (1973). All delve into subjects of myth, memory, and archetypes of particular concern for Fellini while mixing history, fantasy, and autobiography.
According to Jung, the shadow archetype represents our life instincts for survival, reproduction and death. The fool or trickster is considered to be a shadow archetype. An essay by Jungian Analyst Dr. Deon van Zyl explains the clown as a benevolent form of the fool who is more aware of his trickster aspect. We laugh for health, but cruelty is often part of our comedy. It demonstrates a need to displace our own shadow urges to be cruel. The clown is cruel, or suffers cruelty for us (5).
Fellini developed a fascination with clowns at the age of seven when his family took him to see an Italian circus in his seaside town of Rimini. He was shocked by the clowns who he thought must be animals or ghosts and left the circus in fear. The next day, he encountered one of the clowns at a large fountain. His fear dissipated into fascination. From then on, Fellini had dreams of running away with the circus and becoming a clown. He later said of these urges,
"I didn´t know yet that my future would be in the circus- the circus of the cinema." (6).
This childhood memory opens the first sequence of I Clowns. The grotesque clowns he saw reminded him of the cartoonish townspeople of Rimini. Looking back at the terrifying event, the grown Fellini asks in a voice- over, "Where are these clowns of my youth? The audience is gone, the theatres have all turned into runways." We are brought to the present with Fellini the director and a fake documentary crew of actors. He and his ´crew´ set out to interview aging clowns, circus owners, and historians. The interviewee´s recollections of spectacular shows are restaged inside Cinecitta and set to a brass and accordion heavy score by Nino Rota.
A recurring subject in the film is the discussion of the two characters of the circus clown, the white clown and Auguste. The white clown is elegant, intelligent, vain and proper. The Auguste is a buffoon, dirty, clumsy, and rude. The two clowns represent to Fellini the struggle between the proud cult of reason and the freedom of instinct, the yin and yang in all of us. (7).
The film closes with a mock clown funeral inside a ring with the crew staging a portion of the show. Fellini is off to the side of the ring being interviewed by a critic who asks him what he ´means to say´ with the film. As Fellini opens his mouth, a bucket falls on top of his head, a slapstick articulation of his non-commitment to place meaning in his films, as well as his intention to find the audience for the circus comedy he feels has died. As one of the clowns leaves the set, he recalls a funeral act he regularly performed with his clown partner. In the performance, his partner had died, the former looked sadly for him, then played a melancholy tune on a trumpet. His partner appeared on the other side of the ring, the two played the soft song together and danced out of the ring. "Why is this situation so moving?" Fellini says of the ending, "Because the two figures embody a myth which lies in the depths of each one of us: the reconciliation of opposites, the unity of being." (7).
In February 1969, following the release of Satyricon and preparing for production on I Clowns, Fellini sent a letter to his producer about an idea he´d been ´caressing´ for a portrait of Rome and described a vision of "an ancient palace bathed in fog, massive gas stations of the auto strada, and the highway itself, a ring of Saturn which seems to unroll without end, a long stretched ribbon for the trucks, slow as elephants. In the fog all forms change perpetually; seen from the distance, a truck looks like a church." (8). These images encompass Fellini´s most prominent dreams and preoccupations, the ancient, the modern, the circus the religious, and Rome.
This vision is realized in a traffic jam scene in the early part of Roma. A tracking shot along the highway encounters an apocalyptic storm past soliciting prostitutes, hitchhiking hippies, cursing soccer fans, a white horse running between cars, fires, industrial waste, and an overturned dairy truck with bloody carcasses of cows spilling out. Police in riot gear surround communist protestors, and the faces of Romans look out, trapped in their cars, stagnated on the highway. The camera pulls back to reveal the Coliseum, half shrouded in darkness, half lit, looming over the scene. The Weekend-esque traffic jam illustrates Roma´s theme, the clash of the old and new, the modern and myth, and their confrontation in 1970´s Rome.
Roma has been called Fellini´s stream of consciousness film. The structure is similar to
I Clowns; past recollections are contrasted with present day observations with a heavy dose of fantasy. Peter Bondanella describes the film as a bundle of Baroque metaphors, extravagant fantasies, self-indulgent autobiographical reflections with little or no relevance to the times (9).
The characters in the flashbacks are loud and grotesque. Over dinner they repeat a Roman phrase, "All that we eat, we shit!" The prostitutes are auctioned loudly like cattle as they shove their breasts at the gawking men. These serve as portraits of the Augustes of Fellni´s past Rome contrasted with the present day white clowns, the young ideologists, hippies, and students who now dwell there.
A scene of a subway excavation gives the crew the chance to dig into the history of Rome. They follow a construction supervisor who jokes that the first call for a Roman Subway came in 1871, but "Roman bureaucracy is even more unpredictable than Roman soil." The construction crew drills into a wall to investigate a hollow spot behind it. As the drill pushes through an elderly member of the film crew begins to fall ill, his legs go weak and he falls against a wall for support. Behind the wall is a preserved 2,000 year old Roman house. Here, Fellini shows that underneath modern Rome there is still a living ancient Rome. The film and construction crew wander around columns and mosaics to stare at towering frescoes depicting household scenes. A dirty gust of wind blows through the hole and the pollution brought in from the air destroys them. Like the funeral of the clowns, this scene communicates the demise of the old Rome under the new as it grows weak and deteriorates with the pollution of the modern day.
A scene introducing an aging Princess Domatilla takes us to a reception for a cardinal. The Princess laments the transition of ancient to modern, old to young, mourning the end of a life in a ´city, which is no longer home´. As she mourns the loss of the friendship to the church, a surrealistic ecclesiastical fashion show commences. Models in holy garb fly across the runway for the audience of cardinals, nuns, priests and bourgeoisie. The models grow continually older until a float of skeletons parades past. A gigantic gleaming throne carrying the pope comes on stage. He sits, pale and motionless as a chorus of voices fills the soundtrack and the guests stand in a theater of mass, holding out their haute gloved hands, begging him to come back and save them.
Back at a public courtyard in evening, hippies lay about singing and playing guitars amongst people eating dinner. At one of the tables the crew ´runs into´ Gore Vidal who recites the sentiment of the director saying that Rome is the ideal place to wait for the end of the world. The Eternal City of illusions that more than anywhere else in the world continues to reinvent herself. Behind him, a swarm of police commence onto the crowd of youth and begin to beat and club them. Chaos ensues as some try to stop the brutality, while well-dressed diners look on, lazily chewing their pasta. If the old myths of Rome are being destroyed, perhaps new ones are coming to take their place.
The film ends with a black-jacketed motorcycle gang riding through the city at night, passing most of the major Roman monuments. The bikers are like Jungian shadow figures, messengers of death. They may also represent Fellini´s modern version of the ancient invading barbarian hordes (10).
With Amarcord ("I remember" in Romagnolo dialect) Fellini takes a break from the obsessive mourning of his past, to a fantasy of it. Spawned from autobiographical sections of I Clowns and Roma, Amarcord explores regional roots of fascism as experienced by a typical Italian family over the course of a year. Despite the setting of the story in a small seaside town, similar to Rimini, Fellini claims no direct autobiographical ties to the story. He was reluctant to portray his own hometown to spare any protest from residents who may have felt that they recognized themselves in it and for good reason. The villagers are crass and immature. They refuse to adopt moral responsibility or outgrow childish sexual fantasies. (11).
The Central family, the Biondis are composed of a bossy father, a doting high strung wife, her good-for-nothing brother, a sexually charged grandfather, and two boys. The elder, Titta, is the closest thing to a central character in the film, the main character being life itself.
The film is cyclical and moves in time with the rhythm of the seasons, the most meaningful sequence of life. It works as a cinematic parallel to Ecclesiastes III. Fellini hoped to use this cadence as a break from traditional structure to bring his work into the realm of poetry (12). In the opening sequence, thistledown "fluff balls" fall from the sky, marking the beginning of spring, annual rebirth. That evening, the villagers embrace their pagan roots with a public bonfire and burning of the rag doll ´witch of winter´. They become drunk, jump over smaller fires, threaten to burn and grope each other. Fellini emphasizes the archetypical nature of the scene by introducing the town prostitute, Volpina, the beauty, Gradisca, and the village idiot, Giudizio. Guidizido deposits the doll at the top of the pyre. One of the men removes his ladder, trapping him as he hops in fear of being burned. He is in no real danger and the villagers are only guilty of ´harmless´ sadistic humor. Writer Edward Murray suggests the scene represents more than the symbolic death of winter. With its hints at a ritualistic initiation through fire, it also symbolizes the death of the boy or juvenile (represented by Guidizo) and his rebirth as a man (13). This theme of adolescent difficulty is maintained through Titta and his friends´ sexual and identity frustrations as they move through their age of transcendence.
The entire town comes together on four occasions, in each season. The first is the bonfire; the second is a gathering in the open water of the sea to catch a glimpse of the Rex, Mussolini´s ocean liner as it passes in the middle of the night. The third is another fascist occasion on April 21 (the anniversary of the founding of Rome) when the federale come to town, and last, Gradisca´s marriage. The marriage closes the film as a shower of thistledown falls on the wedding party.
Fellini uses Italian Fascism to represent a state of arrested psychological development and said the gatherings of the townspeople as such gave him an opportunity to show their stupidity. As they paddle and swim out to sea, waiting for the Rex, one of the residents admits to the camera that he doesn´t know what they´re going to see. In April, the residents march and jump with glee along side the politicians. Gradisca and the other women swoon and faint moaning for the Duce. Although we´ve come to know the dangers of this mass behavior, Fellini´s comical approach to his characters provide the healing power of laughter so that we may forgive them.
The film was rapidly picked up for international distribution after winning an Oscar for best foreign film. It was to be Fellini´s last commercial success. Giovanni Grazzini, an Italian film critic wrote of Amarcord as a film of a more mature, more refined director whose "autobiographical content shows greater insight into historical fact and the reality of a generation. Almost all of Amarcord is a macabre dance against a cheerful background." (14).
Could it be that with the help of his pal Carl Jung Fellini had achieved some form of catharsis from that first horrible vision of a clown that would fill his dreams and haunt his psyche? Fellini always saw himself as an artist who delighted in embracing the irrational. He had a level of pride in the way he maintained a direct connection between his imagination and his art, without what he called the interference of the pseudo-rational screen (15). With these three films, did Fellini sort out the clutter that was also the driving force of his imagination? Was Fellini´s memory tapped, had his imagination been drained by the mourning of clowns, Rome, youth, the past? Like his beloved clowns and city, was he unable to move into the modern once he had made peace with the ancient?
David Cook refers to Amarcord as a muted elegy for the director´s youth that provided him with the breathing space before he undertook his next film, Casanova, (1976) (16). This further implicates the films as a cathartic exhalation of breath Fellini had been holding since age seven. Yet, he claims not to be a ´therapeutic artist´, rather someone concerned with exploring the experience of life we all share:
"My films don´t suggest solutions or methods, they don´t put forward ideologies. All I do is bear witness to what happens to me. If through my films – that is, recognizing themselves in them, people come to an equal awareness of themselves, then they have achieved the state of clear- sighted detachment from themselves, which is essential in making new choices, in bringing about changes. If you really want me to turn teacher, then condense it with these words: be what you are, that is, discover yourself, in order to love life. To me, life is beautiful, for all its tragedy and suffering. I like it, I enjoy it, and I am moved by it. And I do my best to share this way of feeling with others." (18).
WORKS CITED: Memories, Archetypes, and Clowns: 3 Films by Fellini, 1970-1973
Chandler, Charlotte. I, Fellni. NY: Random House, 1995.
Baxter, John. Fellini: The Biography. NY: St. Martin´s Press, 1993.
http://cgjungmontreal.googlepages.com/essaysbyjungians
"The clown archetype: Reflections on the age-old wisdom within the fool´s humor."
By Deon van Zyl, Ph.D. Unpublished essay.
Fava, Claudio G. and Vigano, Aldo. The Films of Federico Fellini, Citadel Press: NY, 1990.
Grazzini´s review, published 12/19/73
Corriere della Sera : newspaper
Fellini, Federico. Fellini on Fellini: (trans. Isabel Quigley). London: Eyre Methuen Ltd. 1974.
Ketcham, Charles B. Federico Fellini: The Search for a New Mythology. NY: Paulist Press, 1976.
Bondanella, Peter. The Films of Federico Fellini. Cambridge: University Press, 2002.
Bondanella, Peter. Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present. NY: Continuum, 1983.
Murray, Edward. Fellini the Artist. NY: Frederick Ungar, 1976.
Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film, Fourth Ed. NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004.
The affect can consequently be seen in 8 ½, which marks a break from Fellini´s preoccupation with the inner conflict of religion, spirituality and human love, and begins an examination of self as we are invited directly into Guido´s psyche. Fellini was attempting to reach "an agreement with the self without fears and without hopes." (3). The search for balance and true self is at the root of Jung´s teachings. The most direct reference comes in a scene where a telepathic entertainer reads Guido´s mind. She recites a chant he´s thinking of: ASA NISI MASA. Everyone is stumped as Guido leaves without explanation. The scene fades to a flashback of Guido´s (Fellini´s?) childhood in which a young girl recites the chant, pig Latin for ANIMA – Jung´s word for the soul (4).
Perhaps it was this revelation of dreams and childhood memories that led to three later successive films by Fellini, I Clowns (The Clowns) (1970), Roma (1972) and Amarcord (1973). All delve into subjects of myth, memory, and archetypes of particular concern for Fellini while mixing history, fantasy, and autobiography.
According to Jung, the shadow archetype represents our life instincts for survival, reproduction and death. The fool or trickster is considered to be a shadow archetype. An essay by Jungian Analyst Dr. Deon van Zyl explains the clown as a benevolent form of the fool who is more aware of his trickster aspect. We laugh for health, but cruelty is often part of our comedy. It demonstrates a need to displace our own shadow urges to be cruel. The clown is cruel, or suffers cruelty for us (5).
Fellini developed a fascination with clowns at the age of seven when his family took him to see an Italian circus in his seaside town of Rimini. He was shocked by the clowns who he thought must be animals or ghosts and left the circus in fear. The next day, he encountered one of the clowns at a large fountain. His fear dissipated into fascination. From then on, Fellini had dreams of running away with the circus and becoming a clown. He later said of these urges,
"I didn´t know yet that my future would be in the circus- the circus of the cinema." (6).
This childhood memory opens the first sequence of I Clowns. The grotesque clowns he saw reminded him of the cartoonish townspeople of Rimini. Looking back at the terrifying event, the grown Fellini asks in a voice- over, "Where are these clowns of my youth? The audience is gone, the theatres have all turned into runways." We are brought to the present with Fellini the director and a fake documentary crew of actors. He and his ´crew´ set out to interview aging clowns, circus owners, and historians. The interviewee´s recollections of spectacular shows are restaged inside Cinecitta and set to a brass and accordion heavy score by Nino Rota.
A recurring subject in the film is the discussion of the two characters of the circus clown, the white clown and Auguste. The white clown is elegant, intelligent, vain and proper. The Auguste is a buffoon, dirty, clumsy, and rude. The two clowns represent to Fellini the struggle between the proud cult of reason and the freedom of instinct, the yin and yang in all of us. (7).
The film closes with a mock clown funeral inside a ring with the crew staging a portion of the show. Fellini is off to the side of the ring being interviewed by a critic who asks him what he ´means to say´ with the film. As Fellini opens his mouth, a bucket falls on top of his head, a slapstick articulation of his non-commitment to place meaning in his films, as well as his intention to find the audience for the circus comedy he feels has died. As one of the clowns leaves the set, he recalls a funeral act he regularly performed with his clown partner. In the performance, his partner had died, the former looked sadly for him, then played a melancholy tune on a trumpet. His partner appeared on the other side of the ring, the two played the soft song together and danced out of the ring. "Why is this situation so moving?" Fellini says of the ending, "Because the two figures embody a myth which lies in the depths of each one of us: the reconciliation of opposites, the unity of being." (7).
In February 1969, following the release of Satyricon and preparing for production on I Clowns, Fellini sent a letter to his producer about an idea he´d been ´caressing´ for a portrait of Rome and described a vision of "an ancient palace bathed in fog, massive gas stations of the auto strada, and the highway itself, a ring of Saturn which seems to unroll without end, a long stretched ribbon for the trucks, slow as elephants. In the fog all forms change perpetually; seen from the distance, a truck looks like a church." (8). These images encompass Fellini´s most prominent dreams and preoccupations, the ancient, the modern, the circus the religious, and Rome.
This vision is realized in a traffic jam scene in the early part of Roma. A tracking shot along the highway encounters an apocalyptic storm past soliciting prostitutes, hitchhiking hippies, cursing soccer fans, a white horse running between cars, fires, industrial waste, and an overturned dairy truck with bloody carcasses of cows spilling out. Police in riot gear surround communist protestors, and the faces of Romans look out, trapped in their cars, stagnated on the highway. The camera pulls back to reveal the Coliseum, half shrouded in darkness, half lit, looming over the scene. The Weekend-esque traffic jam illustrates Roma´s theme, the clash of the old and new, the modern and myth, and their confrontation in 1970´s Rome.
Roma has been called Fellini´s stream of consciousness film. The structure is similar to
I Clowns; past recollections are contrasted with present day observations with a heavy dose of fantasy. Peter Bondanella describes the film as a bundle of Baroque metaphors, extravagant fantasies, self-indulgent autobiographical reflections with little or no relevance to the times (9).
The characters in the flashbacks are loud and grotesque. Over dinner they repeat a Roman phrase, "All that we eat, we shit!" The prostitutes are auctioned loudly like cattle as they shove their breasts at the gawking men. These serve as portraits of the Augustes of Fellni´s past Rome contrasted with the present day white clowns, the young ideologists, hippies, and students who now dwell there.
A scene of a subway excavation gives the crew the chance to dig into the history of Rome. They follow a construction supervisor who jokes that the first call for a Roman Subway came in 1871, but "Roman bureaucracy is even more unpredictable than Roman soil." The construction crew drills into a wall to investigate a hollow spot behind it. As the drill pushes through an elderly member of the film crew begins to fall ill, his legs go weak and he falls against a wall for support. Behind the wall is a preserved 2,000 year old Roman house. Here, Fellini shows that underneath modern Rome there is still a living ancient Rome. The film and construction crew wander around columns and mosaics to stare at towering frescoes depicting household scenes. A dirty gust of wind blows through the hole and the pollution brought in from the air destroys them. Like the funeral of the clowns, this scene communicates the demise of the old Rome under the new as it grows weak and deteriorates with the pollution of the modern day.
A scene introducing an aging Princess Domatilla takes us to a reception for a cardinal. The Princess laments the transition of ancient to modern, old to young, mourning the end of a life in a ´city, which is no longer home´. As she mourns the loss of the friendship to the church, a surrealistic ecclesiastical fashion show commences. Models in holy garb fly across the runway for the audience of cardinals, nuns, priests and bourgeoisie. The models grow continually older until a float of skeletons parades past. A gigantic gleaming throne carrying the pope comes on stage. He sits, pale and motionless as a chorus of voices fills the soundtrack and the guests stand in a theater of mass, holding out their haute gloved hands, begging him to come back and save them.
Back at a public courtyard in evening, hippies lay about singing and playing guitars amongst people eating dinner. At one of the tables the crew ´runs into´ Gore Vidal who recites the sentiment of the director saying that Rome is the ideal place to wait for the end of the world. The Eternal City of illusions that more than anywhere else in the world continues to reinvent herself. Behind him, a swarm of police commence onto the crowd of youth and begin to beat and club them. Chaos ensues as some try to stop the brutality, while well-dressed diners look on, lazily chewing their pasta. If the old myths of Rome are being destroyed, perhaps new ones are coming to take their place.
The film ends with a black-jacketed motorcycle gang riding through the city at night, passing most of the major Roman monuments. The bikers are like Jungian shadow figures, messengers of death. They may also represent Fellini´s modern version of the ancient invading barbarian hordes (10).
With Amarcord ("I remember" in Romagnolo dialect) Fellini takes a break from the obsessive mourning of his past, to a fantasy of it. Spawned from autobiographical sections of I Clowns and Roma, Amarcord explores regional roots of fascism as experienced by a typical Italian family over the course of a year. Despite the setting of the story in a small seaside town, similar to Rimini, Fellini claims no direct autobiographical ties to the story. He was reluctant to portray his own hometown to spare any protest from residents who may have felt that they recognized themselves in it and for good reason. The villagers are crass and immature. They refuse to adopt moral responsibility or outgrow childish sexual fantasies. (11).
The Central family, the Biondis are composed of a bossy father, a doting high strung wife, her good-for-nothing brother, a sexually charged grandfather, and two boys. The elder, Titta, is the closest thing to a central character in the film, the main character being life itself.
The film is cyclical and moves in time with the rhythm of the seasons, the most meaningful sequence of life. It works as a cinematic parallel to Ecclesiastes III. Fellini hoped to use this cadence as a break from traditional structure to bring his work into the realm of poetry (12). In the opening sequence, thistledown "fluff balls" fall from the sky, marking the beginning of spring, annual rebirth. That evening, the villagers embrace their pagan roots with a public bonfire and burning of the rag doll ´witch of winter´. They become drunk, jump over smaller fires, threaten to burn and grope each other. Fellini emphasizes the archetypical nature of the scene by introducing the town prostitute, Volpina, the beauty, Gradisca, and the village idiot, Giudizio. Guidizido deposits the doll at the top of the pyre. One of the men removes his ladder, trapping him as he hops in fear of being burned. He is in no real danger and the villagers are only guilty of ´harmless´ sadistic humor. Writer Edward Murray suggests the scene represents more than the symbolic death of winter. With its hints at a ritualistic initiation through fire, it also symbolizes the death of the boy or juvenile (represented by Guidizo) and his rebirth as a man (13). This theme of adolescent difficulty is maintained through Titta and his friends´ sexual and identity frustrations as they move through their age of transcendence.
The entire town comes together on four occasions, in each season. The first is the bonfire; the second is a gathering in the open water of the sea to catch a glimpse of the Rex, Mussolini´s ocean liner as it passes in the middle of the night. The third is another fascist occasion on April 21 (the anniversary of the founding of Rome) when the federale come to town, and last, Gradisca´s marriage. The marriage closes the film as a shower of thistledown falls on the wedding party.
Fellini uses Italian Fascism to represent a state of arrested psychological development and said the gatherings of the townspeople as such gave him an opportunity to show their stupidity. As they paddle and swim out to sea, waiting for the Rex, one of the residents admits to the camera that he doesn´t know what they´re going to see. In April, the residents march and jump with glee along side the politicians. Gradisca and the other women swoon and faint moaning for the Duce. Although we´ve come to know the dangers of this mass behavior, Fellini´s comical approach to his characters provide the healing power of laughter so that we may forgive them.
The film was rapidly picked up for international distribution after winning an Oscar for best foreign film. It was to be Fellini´s last commercial success. Giovanni Grazzini, an Italian film critic wrote of Amarcord as a film of a more mature, more refined director whose "autobiographical content shows greater insight into historical fact and the reality of a generation. Almost all of Amarcord is a macabre dance against a cheerful background." (14).
Could it be that with the help of his pal Carl Jung Fellini had achieved some form of catharsis from that first horrible vision of a clown that would fill his dreams and haunt his psyche? Fellini always saw himself as an artist who delighted in embracing the irrational. He had a level of pride in the way he maintained a direct connection between his imagination and his art, without what he called the interference of the pseudo-rational screen (15). With these three films, did Fellini sort out the clutter that was also the driving force of his imagination? Was Fellini´s memory tapped, had his imagination been drained by the mourning of clowns, Rome, youth, the past? Like his beloved clowns and city, was he unable to move into the modern once he had made peace with the ancient?
David Cook refers to Amarcord as a muted elegy for the director´s youth that provided him with the breathing space before he undertook his next film, Casanova, (1976) (16). This further implicates the films as a cathartic exhalation of breath Fellini had been holding since age seven. Yet, he claims not to be a ´therapeutic artist´, rather someone concerned with exploring the experience of life we all share:
"My films don´t suggest solutions or methods, they don´t put forward ideologies. All I do is bear witness to what happens to me. If through my films – that is, recognizing themselves in them, people come to an equal awareness of themselves, then they have achieved the state of clear- sighted detachment from themselves, which is essential in making new choices, in bringing about changes. If you really want me to turn teacher, then condense it with these words: be what you are, that is, discover yourself, in order to love life. To me, life is beautiful, for all its tragedy and suffering. I like it, I enjoy it, and I am moved by it. And I do my best to share this way of feeling with others." (18).
WORKS CITED: Memories, Archetypes, and Clowns: 3 Films by Fellini, 1970-1973
Chandler, Charlotte. I, Fellni. NY: Random House, 1995.
Baxter, John. Fellini: The Biography. NY: St. Martin´s Press, 1993.
http://cgjungmontreal.googlepages.com/essaysbyjungians
"The clown archetype: Reflections on the age-old wisdom within the fool´s humor."
By Deon van Zyl, Ph.D. Unpublished essay.
Fava, Claudio G. and Vigano, Aldo. The Films of Federico Fellini, Citadel Press: NY, 1990.
Grazzini´s review, published 12/19/73
Corriere della Sera : newspaper
Fellini, Federico. Fellini on Fellini: (trans. Isabel Quigley). London: Eyre Methuen Ltd. 1974.
Ketcham, Charles B. Federico Fellini: The Search for a New Mythology. NY: Paulist Press, 1976.
Bondanella, Peter. The Films of Federico Fellini. Cambridge: University Press, 2002.
Bondanella, Peter. Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present. NY: Continuum, 1983.
Murray, Edward. Fellini the Artist. NY: Frederick Ungar, 1976.
Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film, Fourth Ed. NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004.
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