Do the Fellini Dance!

I genuinely feel a strong sympathy with Fellini, especially when it comes to the childlike wonder with which he perceives the world. He often depicts men entrapped in a rigid community of systems and matter; yet he maneuvers the camera to draw out the complexity of human thought and the multiplicity of emotions.

He sees human interaction as a kind of dance, various personalities interweaving to construct the multi-dimensional bond of social relations. The film 8 1/2 follows one man as he oscillates between various levels of consciousness and reality, and in the process promenades with a wide array of beings, each with unique attributes that adorn their character. Watching that film is as though flipping through one’s address book, recalling lucid memories from each inscribed name, and somehow realizing that throughout your life you have constructed a magnificent and intricate web of living sensations. And no one could have illustrated this as skillfully as Fellini in his final scene of 8 1/2, in which this conceptual network comes to a musical, dancing reality. The final scene is an ode to humanity, Fellini’s most sincere desire to embrace people just as they are for the beauty and ingenuity of their being.

The degree of Fellini’s interest in something is often measured by how long it remains on screen. That is why a large portion of his films captures the human physique, facial and bodily expressions. Fellini’s fervid awe for expressivity is almost like that of a newborn infant, which stares mesmerized at the subtle gestures of the human face. Thus, it is not surprising that Fellini would cast Giulietta Masina in La Strada, who can produce some of the most outrageous and subtle facial expressions ever. There are no words to describe the wealth of feelings that emerge from looking at Gelsomina’s face; just beneath the thin layer of her almost clown-like accentuated expressions lies a palette of seemingly simple and yet most powerful emotions. Here is a person, whose figure resembles a child with no particular gender, but whose heart yearns for the romantic attention it has learned to deserve merely from social convention, although experience or the lack thereof has told her otherwise; she is, herself, the symbiosis and dichotomy of simplicity and intricacy, childhood and adulthood, imagination and reality, and one can never pinpoint precisely what may be running through her head.

I often wonder what is the significance of the Church and the circus, which both appear in Fellini’s films. I see them both as settings that exercise authority and submission. Assuming Fellini’s point of view, humans are innately individualistic creatures, but their participation in a social community, especially in a working society, calls for a degree of submission, in the sense that those under a vertical hierarchical system are mutually dependent on one another. Just like the Church cannot stand without laymen and a tiger would not be a circus attraction without its trainer, humans are influenced by their environment and are also causes that influence their environment. Contrarily, a person cannot function entirely alone, as seen in La Strada: Gelsomina, deserted with nothing other than her trumpet skills dolefully ends her life sick and alone; Zampano attempts to pursue a self-sufficient life only to fall into despair as a lone wolf.

However, the Church and the circus have another entity in common: the idea of escapism. Fellini often creates a means of evading reality; consequently it is often difficult to differentiate where the line between fiction and fantasy are drawn - he seems to favor leaving the doorway to imagination propped at all times. Religious sites served as places for tranquil rest and inspiration in both films: in 8 1/2, the fountain of holy water resembles Eden, a sanctuary to escape the chaos of civil society and to regain purity through spiritual contact; in La Estrada, as Gelsomina rests in the abbey, she encounters a sense of belonging among the nuns. Fellini tends to romanticize the beauty of faith and in both films he uses a saintly maternal figure that seems to epitomize an aesthetic or divine beauty.

A circus has a similar effect in that through entertainment, one can temporarily withdraw from daily life to be mesmerized by extraordinary performances, gawk at peculiar creatures and laugh nonchalantly at the oddities or flaws of others. Guido is also very much like a circus entertainer, the whole film (as stated earlier) like a conglomerate dance. Perhaps we are all in a circus, trying to perceive our lives with light hearts (like The Fool) and striving to communicate a certain personal joy to others. This would make sense, since throughout the process of creating his film, Guido deliberates on how best to convey this child-like reverie and Gelsomina, too, lives to play the only song she knows and loves with her trumpet.

Personally, I love Fellini’s work for the freedom he physically creates through his pictures. After viewing his films, one sees the world in a slightly different manner and feels more inclined to fall into nostalgic reveries. He encourages people to delve deeper than the surface level of life, and to bear a poetic spirit, that which gives even a pebble a purpose for existing. “For if its useless, everything is useless. So are the stars!”