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La Strada
4-5 minutes

Now, as probably fifty years ago, Federico Fellini’s La Strada ("The Road") is a
film that creeps up on you. While watching it, especially for the first time, it
seems a quite simple, direct, fable-like movie. But it refuses to leave one’s mind
afterwards, where it grows in resonance and significance.

Circus life has become a tricky area for contemporary filmmakers. It is hard to
transcend the corny clichés of melodrama under the big top, the heavy-handed
symbolism of trapeze artists and musclemen, the tired pathos of itinerant
performers. Both Wim Wenders (jinxing himself after Wings of Desire [1987] with
Faraway, So Close! [1993]) and Sergei Bodorov Jr (Bear’s Kiss, 2002) fell foul of
this trap.

Already in 1954, Fellini felt the need to tweak this basic material. The travelling
circus he begins with and essentially concentrates on is comprised of only two
people: the strong man Zampano (Anthony Quinn) and his assistant, Gelsomina
(Giulietta Masina). Later they become part of a troupe, but even then the
environment is minimal and rather tawdry, significant only for introducing a
troubling third party into the drama: The Fool (Richard Baseheart).

Fifty years ago, La Strada would not have been referred to as a study of abuse. But
that is exactly what it is. Gelsomina is bought, raped and bullied by her master,
the brutal and callous Zampano. She tries to resist and flee, but finally
recognises that she is bound to him – hopelessly and masochistically, but also
because of a certain kind of love. After all, she surmises as she slips into
madness and depression, who else is there in the world for Zampano but her?

In a breathtaking narrative twist announcing the final part of the film, Fellini
swings the story around to focus on Zampano. We have already seen him weaken in the
face of Gelsomina’s sadness, and even forego his sexual demands on her. But
eventually he will have to squarely confront the beast within himself – and when he
does, La Strada immortalises a particular kind of male pathos that has fed
subsequent masterpieces including Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
and Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980).

La Strada is usually seen within cinema histories as the film that marks the end of
Italian neo-realism (as practiced by Rossellini, De Sica and others), and the start
of a more subjective, fantasy-driven Magic Realism. Certainly, there is no denying
the power of Fellini’s subtle lyrical effects here – still a long way from the
delirious, baroque excesses of his later films like Juliet of the Spirits (1965).
Some of the loveliest moments of La Strada occur when seemingly ordinary, everyday
images are quietly invaded and transformed by some element that wanders in – like a
lost child or a stray animal.

Yet there is also a connection, clearer today, between Fellini’s breakthrough here
and another kind of modern cinema in Italy – the militantly fragmented style of
Pier Paolo Pasolini, in which any two shots, gestures or faces rarely flow and
harmonise in a conventional way.

The immense, childlike charm of Masina – hers is surely one of the greatest, most
iconic performances in all cinema – tends to paper over the strange and
disconcerting use that Fellini makes of her in the movie. The constant cutaways to
her ever-changing expression often overwhelm whatever scene she is observing,
dissolving the action into a succession of pointillistic instants. This robs the
film of a certain classical poise, but also opens up a virtually infinite, second-
by-second richness that Fellini bequeathed to far-flung successors including Emir
Kusturica and Kira Muratova.

In terms of its content, La Strada’s disquieting, pre-feminist offering of an

innocent child-woman who suffers so that others (men, mainly) may discover
compassion and insight anticipates the career of Lars von Trier (particularly his
Golden Heart trilogy spanning Breaking the Waves [1996] and Dancer in the Dark
[2000]). But it profits us little to score facile ideological points against
Fellini. La Strada is classic for its time, and for all time.

MORE Fellini: Amarcord, La Dolce Vita

© Adrian Martin November 2004

filmcritic.com.au
La Dolce Vita
5-6 minutes

Fellini's La Dolce Vita had a warm reception when it was re-released – in glorious
TotalScope – at the close of the '80s. Its new-found cult potential is obvious. In
an age of obsessive retro style which is especially consumed by a fantasy of '60s
cool, this film has it all: the sunglasses, jazz and rock, cars, clothes.

But like another successful re-release from the same period, Godard's À bout de
souffle (1960), La Dolce Vita strikes a deeper note of familiarity with
contemporary audiences. Although people often seem to think that postmodernism is
the great, incomprehensible artistic/intellectual fad of the '80s and '90s, I can
think of no better primer in the postmodern sensibility than this film by Fellini.

Early '60s cinema – in Italy and Poland, as well as the French Nouvelle Vague –
indeed previewed many cultural currents to come. For instance, the cry of a poet in
La Dolce Vita – "the great thing is to burn, and not to freeze" – irresistibly
anticipates, by around twenty years, born-again punk rocker Neil Young's slogan:
"It's better to burn out than to fade away".

What La Dolce Vita most resembles, however, is Brett Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero
and other late-'80s novels of its ilk. In both cultural moments, we have the
portrait of a bored, overstimulated middle class, rejecting the moral code of its
elders, but able to replace it with only a soft, alienated cruise into oblivion. In
both the '60s and '80s, society runs on media hype, instant and empty celebrity,
and incessant, dizzying social mobility. And where the soundtrack of Metropolitan
Hell in an apocalyptic '80s movie like Herzog's Where the Green Ants Dream (1984)
is "My Baby Does the Hanky Panky", in Fellini's 1960 it's a sweating, Italian
singer in a black skivvy belting out, in broken English, Little Richard's "I'm
Ready-Ready-Ready to Rock'n'Roll".

The Mad Western World depicted by Fellini already enacts, down to the last detail,
the hyper-eclectic "zero degree of contemporary culture" described twenty-one years
later by philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in his essay "Reply to the Question:
What is the Postmodern?":

You listen to some reggae, you go see a Western, you eat at McDonald's at
midday and then you go to an ethnic restaurant at night. You wear some Parisian
perfume in Tokyo and dress in retro-style when you're in Hong Kong. Knowledge is
the stuff of TV quiz shows (.) Making kitsch art really appeals to the disorder
which reigns within the 'taste' of an amateur. (1)
But the most striking point of commonality between La Dolce Vita and Less Than Zero
is that both, finally, are rather nostalgic – and quietly but surely moralistic
(as, indeed, is Lyotard). Both Fellini and Ellis present the fragments or ruins of
a broken world, and dream wistfully of a time when the pieces were once all
together. A case in point: sex may be everywhere in La Dolce Vita, but it certainly
doesn't seem like much fun.

Yet, as Sam Rohdie has pointed out, all Fellini's films run on a rich paradox. He
flagrantly condemns the illusions, corruptions and empty dreams of the modern
world, yet his own style boundlessly celebrates artifice, fantasy and a merry loss
of meaning. Corruption has a bittersweet taste – ultimately more sweet than bitter.
But by the time of Ginger and Fred (1986), this tension which is at the heart of
Fellini's best films has gone rather slack, and the thundering anti-modernity
moralism has well and truly trumped the let's-party spirit.

La Dolce Vita is a film stuffed with engaging paradoxes like these. It is long and
sometimes trying but, as Geoffrey Nowell-Smith once commented: "[A]s a film about
the difficulties of living, of making sense of living, and of making a narrative as
way of making sense of living, it has a certain depth and even grandeur." (2) It is
certainly a highpoint of the great, canonical art-film tradition as we came to know
it until the World Cinema revolutions of the '90s.

MORE Fellini: Amarcord, Juliet of the Spirits, La Strada

© Adrian Martin April 1991

NOTES

1. Critique no. 419, April 1981. back

2. Monthly Film Bulletin, no. 645, October 1987.