Some comments on Fellini's work

Upon viewing several of Federico Fellini's cinema, one thing becomes clear; each film designed by his hand is itself a microcosm of experientialism. La Strada (1954) is an archetypal story re-telling of the beauty and the beast that begs the question of what it means to be human. Roma (1972) is the journey to the center of hedonism and the spectacle of national deterioration.
La Strada tells the story of Zampano, a gypsy strongman performer, and Gelsomina, the woman who comes to help him throughout his travels. La strada means the road, and it is the story of Zampano's road to humanity. He is initially a completely inhuman man; he has incredible strength, a skill which he employs as his livelihood, bursting a chain wrapped around his torso simply by flexing his pectoral muscles. Moreover, he is only an emotionless, empty shell of a man; the film opens when Zampano arrives at the cottage of his late wife's mother, whom he informs that her daughter has died. Throughout her teary-eyed mourning and wailing, Zampano simply smokes a cigarette and is concerned primarily with what he will fill his stomach with (a pound of cheese, a pound of salami, and two bottles of wine). Enter Gelsomina, the next eldest daughter of the same woman. Gelsomina is portrayed as some kind of idiot, very childish and is said to have never worked a day in her life. She comes to take the place of her sister at Zampano's side. Zampano abuses Gelsomina and, like a boy in grade school, it turns out that he is mistreating Gelsomina because he has some deep affection for her. Gelsomina leaves and Zampano his unwilling attachment to her, the pain he suffers without her, is his road to salvation. By the end he clutches the sand on a beach, sobbing to himself in a powerful image of redemption and gleaned humanity. The art is in Fellini's use of image and music rather than blatantly spoken lines to convey this peripety. The audience is left wondering, what about this fool Gelsomina could send a man into such torment and deliverance to his self.
Roma, on the other hand, is a literal and figurative journey to the deteriorating Rome of Fellini's 1972, where, as one character puts it, “There are no real Romans left.” Roma is the peripatetic spectacle of a once-great land that is now inhabited by vulgar, insult-slinging men and women, an immense traffic jam, and a brothel. It is a vision of Rome as seen through the eyes of a famous resident. Fellini's characters vociferate that the Rome he portrays is a hell on earth, built literally over the historic ruins of the past. The subway scene demonstrates most visually Fellini's denunciation; while attempting to dig a tunnel for a subway, a surveying crew finds a sealed chamber of the extensive catacombs beneath Rome, but as they explore the chamber they find that the sudden change in air pressure causes the religious frescoes on the walls to deteriorate. This visual metaphor is a powerful illustration of the wickedness of the modern day society coming into contact with extinct greatness, literally causing the vivid colors of an antecedent era to etiolate in seconds – as if the idolized Christian figures were poisoned by the very air that had brewed above them in for past centuries. Fellini includes a re-enactment of Julius Caesar's assassination, a scene that to me acts as an archetypal scene proclaiming that the greatness of Rome, a populace that would kill a tyrant, had become a populace that would show open contempt, discourtesy, and mockery of the same performance. In lieu of a close reading of the historical context of Fellini's commentary (most likely a revealing commentary on the Years of Lead), Fellini's film is both a disgusted disillusionment and a warning to Italy.
Fellini's work is characterized by the unsaid, that is what he does not make explicit and instead leaves to the audience to piece together. He concentrates on an abstraction that is once removed from the imagery that he films and in this way has a pointedness and directness (albeit through indirectness) that his films illustrate.