Fellini’s Eternal Rome

Paganism and Christianity in the Films of Federico Fellini

Alessandro Carrera

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781350166257
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781474297622
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: History

*** Winner of the2019 Flaiano Prize in the category Italian Studies ***

In Fellini's Eternal Rome, Alessandro Carrera explores the co-existence and conflict of paganism and Christianity in the works of Federico Fellini. By combining source analysis, cultural history and jargon-free psychoanalytic film theory, Carrera introduces the reader to a new appreciation of Fellini's work.

Life-affirming Franciscanism and repressive Counter-Reformation dogmatism live side by side in Fellini's films, although he clearly tends toward the former and resents the latter. The fascination with pre-Christian Rome shines through La Dolce Vita and finds its culmination in Fellini-Satyricon, the most audacious attempt to imagine what the West would be if Christianity had never replaced classical Rome. Minimal clues point toward a careful, extremely subtle use of classical texts and motifs.

Fellini's interest in the classics culminates in Olympus, a treatment of Hesiod's Theogony for a never-realized TV miniseries on Greek mythology, here introduced for the first time to an English-speaking readership. Fellini's recurrent dream of the Mediterranean Goddess is shaped by the phantasmatic projection of paganism that Christianity created as its convenient Other. His characters long for a "maternal space" where they will be protected from mortality and left free to roam. Yet Fellini shows how such maternal space constantly fails, not because the Church has erased it, but because the utopia of unlimited enjoyment is a self-defeating fantasy.

1

Fellini, Dante and the Gaze of Medusa

Beaming up Fellini

Before La dolce vita became Fellini’s trademark title, it had already appeared three times in Dante’s Paradiso: ‘all those souls grace the Empyrean; / and each of them has gentle life’ (IV, 34–35); ‘through … experience / of this sweet life and of its opposite’ (XX, 47–48); ‘and their land is this sweet life’ (XXV, 93).¹ If Suetonius’ reports about Virgil’s answer to the critics who accused him of plagiarizing Homer (‘it is easier to filch Hercules’s club than a line from Homer’) are true,² we understand why it took no less than Fellini to challenge Dante’s copyright on ‘dolce’. The word occurs eighty-four times in the Divine Comedy if we do not count ‘dolcezza’ and ‘dolcemente’, plus Dante’s early poems and the definition of ‘dolce stil novo’ that he gave to both his poetry and the poetry of his closest associates.

The idea of directing a film based on the Divine Comedy always intrigued Fellini. Many producers in Italy, US and Japan would have been happy to embark on the project, regardless of the cost and Fellini’s idiosyncratic studio habits. Apparently, he was working on the treatment of a one-hour Inferno for Italian state TV shortly before he died. In previous years, however, he had always baulked at the idea, even when fearless producers were dreaming of a holy trinity of directors comprising Fellini (Inferno), Bergman (Purgatorio) and Bresson (Paradiso). Akira Kurosawa’s name was also thrown in for Purgatorio and Paradiso, but it was understood that Inferno would be Fellini’s. As was always the case with him, he gave many – and sometimes conflicting – accounts of his resistance to get serious about filming Dante. As a rule, Fellini’s interviews and statements were not meant to share information. They combined storytelling, made-up anecdotes, a continuation of his dreams, verbal films replacing those he could not or would not take on. Fellini’s Divine Comedy takes its place among his recurring dreams together with Fellini’s Iliad (which was rumoured too) and Fellini’s Don Quixote (he wanted Jacques Tati as Quixote, but he could not think of anyone for the role of Sancho Panza).

Other sources have it that the US network CBS tried to have Fellini interested in Inferno around 1980 or 1981, but the marketing department informed him that there could be no naked bodies. Appalled at the idea of shooting souls wearing underwear, he dropped the idea.³ However, in one of his conversations with Charlotte Chandler, Fellini said that he wanted less emphasis on Virgil and the orgiastic nature of Inferno and more on Paradiso and Beatrice, whose ‘purity’ was important to him. He had Hieronymus Bosch in mind as a visual reference, but, he added, ‘the producers wanted only bare tits and naked asses. I could never trivialize Dante by making something commercially sensational out of his work.’⁴

Different producers, evidently. It is also true that Fellini often made vague promises to adapt ‘fat’ literary classics, as his screenwriter Bernardino Zapponi used to call them, to keep producers interested in him.⁵ Fellini was more believable when he told Charlotte Chandler that he found Dante’s life even more appealing than the Divine Comedy. That would have been an interesting film to make, Fellini said, ‘including some extraordinary battle scenes which Kurosawa might admire’.

Jacqueline Risset, a poet and scholar who translated Dante into French, had several meetings with Fellini while he was working on the French edition of Intervista (1987). As she reports, Fellini claimed that the reasons he could not make the Dante film was that all his films were descents into the underworld, that the Divine Comedy is already a film and there is nothing left to add except the special effects. By establishing parallels between the director and the Divine Comedy, Risset pointed out that Fellini films, like Dante’s cantos, are usually structured around a series of encounters between the protagonist and other characters. Once the encounter is over, the two do not see each other again. Also, Dante regresses to linguistic infancy in the last cantos of Paradiso. Because words cannot describe what he sees, he often refers to the first steps in learning a language while submitting himself – as Fellini often did – to the wisdom of maternal figures. And, of course, light is the essence of Paradise as much as it is the essence of cinematic art. These are valuable insights, more or less, but the Dante-Fellini complex begs for further explorations. What he said to Risset about his experience with LSD (which he attempted only once and under medical control) is perhaps more relevant. Being under the influence of LSD had been hell, but also meant happiness, freedom, the feeling of not being separated from the external reality: ‘You are the whole creation,’ Fellini said, ‘the mystic rose, the centre of Paradise.’⁶

This instantaneous passage from Hell to Heaven mirrors Fellini’s entire oeuvre, which is made of swift transitions from comedy to tragedy, from seriousness to buffoonery, from high to low and from low to high. As Deleuze says, Fellini creates crystal images (time images) organized in a bipolar structure.

In surrounding the seed, [the crystal] passes on an acceleration, a hurrying, sometimes a hopping or fragmenting, which will constitute the opaque side of the crystal; and sometimes it gives it a limpidity which is like the test of the eternal. On one side would be written ‘Saved!’, and on the other ‘Doomed!’, in an apocalyptic landscape like the desert in Satyricon.⁷

No one can tell in advance where the garden ends and the desert begins, or vice versa. An opaque side may become limpid, or the opposite will happen. Will everything be saved, as in the finale of 8½ or everything will be doomed, as in in the ‘mechanical fragmentations’ that lead to the final dance with the automaton in Fellini’s Casanova? To quote Deleuze again, ‘It is never wholly the one or wholly the other’. And, to use a word that Fellini allegedly invented, according to Deleuze, it is a matter of ‘procadence’ (procadenza), a decadence that runs past its course into a new possibility of creation. Fellini’s images, Deleuze points out, ‘do not crack’; they keep on growing. The tracking shots are always a race, but a single character can always interfere with the cavalcade, stop it, come forward and for a moment be the sole focus. ‘A fixed shot isolates a character, takes him out of the line, and gives him, even if it is only for an instant, a chance which is in itself eternal, a virtuality which will be valid forever even if it is not actualized.’⁸

Without mentioning Dante, Deleuze outlines Dante and Fellini’s technique of organizing a narrative around the main figure, who is at the same time internal and external to the diegetic structure. A protagonist is reduced to the role of an observer as much as an observer always has the chance to become a protagonist. Sometimes Fellini himself goes from one encounter to another (Dante the author and Dante the character parallel Fellini the director and Fellini appearing in his films as himself), while at other times the task is left to the viewers. Fellini is always looking from both sides of the picture. His gaze is totalitarian; it permits no escape. Deleuze’s reference to the bipolar organization of images may very well be extended to salvation and damnation, Heaven and Hell, moralism and amoralism.

We will deal with all these subjects in later chapters but the one I want to explore at this juncture is the simultaneous, crystal-like presence of Christianity and paganism in Fellini’s films. Christianity enters Fellini’s films as a two-faced figure: the welcoming, compassionate side of Franciscanism, which extends mostly from his early collaboration with Rossellini to Nights of Cabiria, and the oppressive, scary aspect of post-Counter-Reformation demonization of sex, which is one of the major themes in 8½ and beyond. Paganism, on the other hand, appears in Fellini’s films as the unbound territory ruled by the Mediterranean Goddess and where all men are either Ulysses figures, moving from one adventure to another, or the space where both men and women are subjected to subtle, unexpected metamorphosis, as we will see in our analysis of La dolce vita and 8½. The only classic text that Fellini adapted for the screen was Gaius Petronius’ Satyricon, a choice that indicates his reluctance to engage directly with the more canonical or popularized literary works. It does not mean, however, that references to classics are absent in other films. As we will see, there are traces of Ovid in 8½, and, as noted above, in the early 1980s he even drafted a project for a TV mini-series largely based on Hesiod’s Theogony. Fellini’s engagement with the classical world is mostly mediated by the Greek and Roman (and sometimes pre-Greek) mythological corpus with which he became acquainted because it was part of every Italian’s literary education and, later, because of his interest in C.G. Jung, which he extended to the writings of Kerényi and Graves.

In Fellini, however, Christianity and paganism constitute neither an opposition nor an antagonism. An opposition may be pacified, either forcibly or ideologically (light–dark, yin–yang, male–female). Antagonism is a zero-sum game in which one of the two must win and the other will lose. In Fellini, Christianity and paganism achieve a complementarity status: wave–particle, Dionysus–Christ, Goddess–Holy Mother. When one of the two comes to the forefront, the other does not disappear. In Amarcord (1973), the tracking shot filming the coach carrying the new ‘girls’ to the city brothel stops before a shop displaying statues of the Holy Mary and, below, poor imitations of classical statues of naked women. Linear time has no meaning, paganism and Christianity are like waves ebbing and receding and always pounding on the same shore. They are not supposed to coexist, yet they do.

In Fellini’s works, paganism is not the repressed unconscious of Christianity. On the one hand, paganism is what Christianity consciously ‘projected’ out of itself. On the other hand, it is ‘the same thing’ insofar as much of what we know of paganism has been filtered through the Christian understanding and judgment of it. Fellini was not inclined to historical veracity, nor did he engage with the most thoroughly researched subjects of classical antiquity (Homer, Greek tragedy, Roman comedy, Virgil or Seneca). His ironic admiration for the peplum subgenre notwithstanding, he never dabbled in Cinecittà or Hollywood ‘recreations’. His icon of the paganism–Christianity ‘quantic’ complementarity, long before he decided to put Petronius on the screen, was the image of a helicopter carrying a statue of Jesus Christ over a broken Roman aqueduct at the beginning of La dolce vita.

In cinematic terms, Christianity and paganism coexist to the extent that they are both excessive and the screen cannot choose between them. In Fellini, there is no ‘free space’ between the images on the screen and the point of view (aesthetical, moral, political) from which the audience are supposed to watch the film. Fellini owns his images, he is the master of the master’s gaze, but the relationship of ownership that he entertains with his shots problematizes the very notion of master gaze. His camera movements share Jean Renoir’s and Roberto Rossellini’s fluidity. Yet, in terms of cinematic language, they often seem to come from nowhere: they neither obey rules nor do they create them. Because Fellini’s images ‘do not crack’, as Deleuze phrases it, and nothing stand...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Author’s Preface
• Introduction: What Is Wrong with Fellini?
• 1 Fellini, Dante and the Gaze of Medusa
• 2 Fellini and Rossellini: The ‘Trilogy of Faith’ (1946–50)
• 3 La dolce vita: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Sins
• 4 8½ or Trouble in Paradise
• 5 Fellini Satyricon I: An Archaeology of Silence
• 6 Fellini Satyricon II: ‘Seek Out the Ancient Mother’ (Aeneid III, 96)
• 7 Roma: Barbarians inside the Gates
• 8 From City of Women to The Voice of the Moon: Fall of the Goddess
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Names and Films
• Copyright