2023-05-21 03:48:20
A few days ago a friend, the journalist and writer Carlos Alfieri, sent me a long article of his that he published in the magazine Florencio de Argentores in which he narrates his relationship with Fellini’s films.
Alfieri, who has a particular sensitivity when conversing with works like Giorgio Morandi’s and elucidating the strangeness of his everyday geometry, a strange metaphysics that he commented to me on many occasions, separates Fellini’s images from any plot, saves them from the words and exposes the plastic seas of La Nave va or Casanova or that ocean liner that everyone observes absorbed in Amarcord: a simple foreshortened projection of an illustration that expressed not only the titanic figure of the ship but the creation of his gaze, perhaps of the dream, but sure of desire.
Once, having a coffee in Venice, distracted by a reading, I was suddenly surprised by a cruise ship that hid the Giudecca for a long time, on the other side of the canal, and I was certain that I was living in a nightmare: it was like being before a street built with a mass of apartments stacked vertically, full of balconies, from which an enraged neighborhood greeted without rhyme or reason to everything that moved in front of it. It was dizzying to experience that it might be us, the ones who were seated on the terrace of the café, who were moving dragged by some strange force that was not that of destiny: the mere reality that happens.
I saw Giulietta from the spirits at the age of ten and never saw her once more. She that time she went aboard another boat; an ocean liner on line C that linked Buenos Aires with southern Europe still in the 1970s. Small ships when compared to the Poseidon I sighted in Venice. Among the permissive activities that the children had on board was going in and out of the cinema at any time; there was continuous session every day. Over the years I have kept a few images and the atmospheres –many– of that film and for some reason that is not entirely clear I have preferred to preserve those scenes, as if by preserving them I might have a record of my childhood gaze. Despite the accumulation of layers that are continually joining the memory, as happens to me when I add some, involuntarily, right now, that astonishment still comes to me in the form of a dream, between figures and lights, without any narrative logic: just a gush of visual stimuli. And that was what impressed me: accustomed, at that age, only to the plot of the comic and the collection of illustrated Robin Hood classics, that film was a lysergic break (allow the metaphor in this childish section).
Alfieri emphasizes that Fellini’s gaze returns reality with an honest eye, but not just any reality, not only the social, but also, metaphysically, “the spiritual and whatever man has inside.” That is why he does not rightly consider La Dolce Vita an anti-religious film but, on the contrary, a chronicle of lost faith.
Almost at the end of his career, Fellini shot Interview and the center of the film is the appearance of Mastroianni dressed as the magician Mandrake. The filmmaker has no better way of expressing vital and creative decadence, wrapped in a fierce criticism: “What are you doing in this disguise?” Fellini asks him. “archyde news”, answers Mastroianni. “They don’t offer me,” says the director. “It’s lucky,” concludes the actor.
After the meeting, Mastroianni, always dressed as a magician, gets into Fellini’s car and they go to the house of Anita Ekberg, the actress who starred with Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita. Ekberg receives them and sets up a screen where the scene of the couple in the Trevi Fountain is projected. Anita and Marcello look at each other, thirty years later, and melancholy, a certain decadence and the nearness of the end are closing the Interview that will culminate with a scene that agrees with Alfieri. We hear Fellini’s voiceover saying: “The film must end now and in fact it has. I seem to hear one of my former producers: ‘How do you end up like this, without a thread of hope, a ray of sunshine? Give me at least a ray of sunshine’, they begged me at first. A ray of sun? I don’t know, we’ll try it.”
*Writer and journalist.
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