Spiritual Reassessment and Moral Reconciliation in the Films of Fellini

"I feel that decadence is indispensable to rebirth," Federico Fellini said of his films. "I have already said that I love shipwrecks. So I am happy to be living at a time when everything is capsizing. It's a marvellous time, for the very reason that a whole series of ideologies, concepts and conventions is being wrecked....This process of dissolution is quite natural, I think. I don't see it as a sign of the death of civilisation but, as a contrary, as a sign of its life" (Bondanella 229). Unlike its neorealist predecessors, the cinema of Federico Fellini is built on an explosion of surreal, exaggerated, and often dream-like images that result from the "explosion of signs of prosperity in the late 1950s" (Sorlin 116). These images, as propelled into an inevitable "shipwreck" for one or more characters, are the basis for the subconscious of each character, allowing Fellini's cinema to be an exploration of the individual subconscious. Such exploration in three of his films shows their main characters-Marcello, Guido, and Giulietta- work towards a progressive moment of spiritual reassessment and moral reconciliation.

Beginning with La Dolce Vita, Fellini abandons a linear plot in lieu of creating atmospheric vignettes about Europeans in Post-War prosperity, all linked together by one central, unredeemable character. Throughout the course of his passionless travels, Marcello encounters various opportunities to reassess and reconcile with his spiritual and moral demons, personified mainly in the sparrow-like paparazzi that follow him while he is on-call. Yet any efforts would be more or less in vain as he chooses to surround himself with people as devoid of spirituality and morality as he is. Marcello, according to Peter Bondanella, "can gain nothing from jaded women such as Maddalena....whose only link to reality is through sexual games... [nor his] neurotic mistress, Emma, [who] suffocates him with her unreasonable emotional demands" (Bondanella 232).

From the Thai restaurant to the circus-themed nightclub, even the secondary female characters that he encounters are spiritual and moral voids, content with a glass of French champagne and a dance with a wealthy man. The beginnings of the Fellinian trend in experimenting with makeup and costume are also both seen with such characters as these, particularly in the makeup of the nightclub dancer and the flower-like costumes of the aristocratc party-goers. Nico, albeit in a very simple black pullover and little to no makeup, exemplifies this stance in the scenes prior to and in the castle party. It is clear that her engagement is based upon her fiancé's wealth and status which hold together an otherwise tepid relationship. It is in this party scene that the decadent-without-substance lifestyle comes to head. Its first point of cleavage is in the scene between Marcello and Maddalena and her, questionably substance-induced, declaration of love for him. However, Maddalena is incapable of telling Marcello she would marry him in person, rather she chooses to communicate with him through a sound-tunnel that mysteriously connects one room of the castle to another. As Marcello becomes convinced that Maddalena's feelings are genuine, however, she leaves with another man.

The second, and much greater point, is the morning following the party in which Marcello learns that Steiner has killed both his children and himself. Steiner, "who believes that 'to succeed, one has to be detached' from life and who must play natural sounds (rain, thunder, the wind, birdsongs) on a mechanical device in order to enjoy them," serves as an example of what becomes of man as he is gradually crushed by the weight of his own decadence. Yet this cannot serve as an omen to Marcello, as he, like Steiner, is a victim of the "emptiness of modern values and the loss of meaning in our life" (Bondanella 232).

Marcello's greatest beacon of hope in the female form is Paola. It is at Steiner's encouragement that Marcello takes to his writing again and encounters the young waitress. However, Marcello cannot separate himself from his world, and, while he is able to have a conversation with Paola, he sees her as no more than a face-in this case, a face like a cherub's. At the end of the film when they meet again on the beach; she remembers him, however he does not recognize her. For Marcello, Paola holds nothing more than "the illusion of lost innocence" (Bondanella 232). With that, he shrugs and is pulled back into his world by one of his fellow party-goers, and resumes his life of unchecked morals and decayed spirituality. Like the transvestite on the beach who remarks that "by 1965 there will be total depravity. How squalid everything will be," Marcello accepts the squalor, as he is clearly not at any level that would allow him to reconcile or reassess.

Like Marcello, Guido in 8½ begins initially as a spiritually impotent character. Unlike the open roads of neorealism, or even the open, desolate road of Fellini's earlier La Strada, we meet Guido in the middle of a claustrophobically-shot traffic jam. It becomes clear within the first few minutes that the traffic jam, while potentially literal, is mainly a metaphor for Guido's symbolic spiritual congestion. It is this congestion that leads to Guido's ultimate abandonment of his film project, an element that prevails through the entire film. "I thought my ideas were so clear," Guido says at the failure of his project, "I wanted to make an honest film. No lies whatsoever. I thought I had something simple to say. Something useful to everybody. A film that could help bury forever all those dead things we carry within ourselves. Instead, I'm the one without the courage to bury anything at all. When did I go wrong? I really have nothing to say, but I want to say it all the same."

Guido's deterioration, is projected more visually than the deterioration of Marcello. In general, the women he views as "whores" rather than "virgins"-for Guido there is no grey area-are accentuated in the film by some deformity in the case of costumes, makeup, or both. Fellini's experimentations with makeup become more grotesque, especially in the characters of Carla-who dons even more over the top makeup for a role-playing scene in bed with Guido-and La Saraghina. This visual classification is also incredibly evident in the scene with Luisa and Carla as the plainness of Luisa's glasses and tunic are juxtaposed with the magazine-cover makeup and fur ensemble of Claudia. The density of imagery, however, is not restricted to the women in Guido's waking life. As Mira Liehm notes, "[i]n Otto e Mezzo (8½), Fellini's own world of dreams and illusions prevails for the first time over the real world. The film's pivotal episodes take place in fantasy, and art mixes with life to a point where there is no way of telling them apart" (Liehm 221).

These pivotal episodes show Guido travelling through these dreams and illusions on a quixotic journey towards a sense of completion, not only of his film, but also of his spiritual self. He attempts to satisfy his curiosity towards religion in the steam bath, however he is only told by the cardinal that happiness is not of this world. He attempts to reconcile himself with his parents as he helps his father into a grave, however turns to Oedpial desires as his mother kisses him before turning into Luisa in real-life. He also attempts to make sense of his relationship to women, only to indulge in his harem fantasy where he is tended to by every woman in his life, virgin and whore. From these episodes, Guido emerges more confused and more hopeless. Yet Guido does not resign himself as Marcello does to his emptiness. As Maurice, the telepath, reads his mind, Guido is revealed to be thinking the seemingly "nonsense" word asa nisi masa. It is explained, by Peter Bondanella, "as a children's word game, not unlike our English 'pig-Latin' and actually means anima, a Jungian concept as well as the Italian word for 'soul'" (Bondanella 242).

Moreover, unlike Marcello, Guido ultimately displays hope at the end of 8½. By killing his physical project-again in an illusionary moment of a suffocating press conference, not unlike the opening traffic jam scene, in which he symbolically shoots himself-Guido allows himself a hope for spiritual reassessment and moral reconciliation. Guido redeems himself as the "various characters in his life or fantasies assemble at the launching-pad set of the film he is unable to complete-all, that is, except the Ideal. Now most are dressed in white, purified by Guido's irrational willingness to accept them for what they are. Guido and Luisa join the parade, and we suddenly shift to night, where the characters in the circular procession are replaced by four clowns and little Guido, now dressed in white and shot alone in a spotlight" (Bondanella 244). The Ideal to which Bondanella refers is Claudia Cardinale, who remains absent from all of Guido's fantasies, including the harem scene.

Claudia, like Sylvia in La Dolce Vita, represents the ideal, unattainable woman. Also like Sylvia, Claudia is strongly connected with the recurring image of water in Fellini's films. Sylvia enters La Dolce Vita with a flourish that she laughs off and laps up, at once utterly within her surroundings and floating aimlessly around them, at home anywhere. On her whirlwind tour of Rome with Marcello, she wades into the waters of the Trevi Fountain as if she is a part of the fountain itself, "however, when Marcello tries to join her in the water, it mysteriously ceases to flow, a clear sign of his spiritual impotence" (Bondanella 234). Similarly, Claudia is first seen magically appearing at the fountain at Guido's spa, offering Guido the spa's healing waters. While slightly more grounded than Sylvia, Claudia is just as ethereal to Guido, and just as unattainable.

The potency of water is also one of many symbolic images in Fellini's first colour film, Giulietta degli Spiriti, in which Giulietta's neighbour keeps an underground post-coital pool that connects to her master bedroom through a slide. As Mira Liehm notes, "[t]he story is completely detached from reality, substituting instead fantasmagoric visions whose unnatural colors and forms suggest Juliet's instability" (Liehm 223). These images, such as the pool and the eery, gingerbread-like suburban house that Giulietta lives in, are at the heart of the film and the heart of Giulietta's spiritual journey.

Like Guido, Giulietta is spiritually trapped by emotional demons from her childhood, demons once again that are linked to the church and sexuality. However, Giulietta's greater challenge lies in that she does not live within a world of decadence and excess. Her hairstyle and dress are simple, and Giulietta Masina carries a more demure version of her glowing smile in La Strada. However, Giulietta's surrounding worlds, both physical and spiritual, are vivid to excess. Her mother and sister's dress, compared to Giulietta's matronly cotton shirts and slacks, are bright, colourful, and at the height of fashion, not unlike the flower-like costumes at the castle party in La Dolce Vita. Her neighbour and her neighbour's friends are seen in far more ostentatious, exotic clothing. Moreover, the very environment of her neighbour's house is enough to seem stark against the plain housewife.

However, underneath Giulietta's demode front lies a world as rich and exotic as that of her neighbour's, though severely more haunting. Giulietta's neuroses, much like Guido's, were formed in her childhood, particularly in Catholic school. Like Guido's parents, Giulietta's grandfather plays a significant part in her spiritual life. In Giulietta's dream on the beach in which she pulls a boat to shore filled with savages, we later learn "that these savages are circus characters and that her grandfather, whom she dearly loved, once ran off with a circus ballerina" (Bondanella 247). It is this same grandfather who leads to Giulietta's traumatic class play experience-in which Giulietta plays a martyr being raised on a grate to Heaven-interrupting the performance and "denying [Giulietta] the vision of God which the nuns promised she would find on the other side of a ceiling panel" (Bondanella 248).

For Giulietta, these events-in conjunction with an overbearing mother-are not only the whole of her childhood, but also the sources of her hallucinatory demons: her younger self (much like Guido's younger self), the nuns, circus figures, exotic party-goers, and Nazi generals. Together, they represent her "reminiscences, her present experiences, and her future anguishes," and in order to rebuild herself, Giulietta must first be able to liberate herself from these demons (Liehm 223). Much like 8½, the climax of the film centers around the turning point of its protagonist. As Giulietta is faced with the possibility of betraying her cheating husband with an exotic young man at her neighbour's lavish party, she becomes consumed again by the image of her younger self as a martyr. Once again, the lapping pool waters that she peers at in the bedroom symbolize her impotence. While Guido and Marcello are able to be sexually liberated, it is clear that Giulietta suffers from a severe case of repression. Moral reconciliation is still necessary for Giulietta, but hers comes from the other side of the spectrum than her male counterparts, albeit it is still a big step.

Such a step is made in the final scene. By disobeying her mother, Giulietta is able to open both a figurative and literal door, liberating her martyred self and, in turn, liberating herself from her own demons. Finally able to leave her home and her old, repressed life behind, Giulietta is able to walk freely and guiltlessly.

Peter Bondanella notes in respect to Fellini that "...the artist's function in a period of crisis is to serve not only as observer but also as midwife to the birth of new values" (Bondanella 230). By giving cinematic life to these surreal images derived from the subconscious, Fellini himself is able to spiritually reassess and morally reconcile. After the success du scandale of La Dolce Vita, Fellini was faced with writer's block. Unable to focus on anything else, he made his next-his eighth and one half-film based on this writer's block. Fellini often asserted that, while to call any of his films autobiographical was too pedantic a generalization, that he was the real-life Guido. While he mired himself in the waking-life imagery of the film, he ultimately had to attach a note to himself on his camera which reminded him that the film was a comedy. Giulietta degli Spiriti, in which he claimed to have taken LSD in order to prepare for, was written exclusively for his estranged wife, Giulietta Masina, whose career was faltering at the time. It is under these circumstances that, through little dialogue and a proliferation of imagery, that Fellini can connect with and guide his protagonists through their crises to these new values.

Works Cited

Bondanella, Peter. Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001.

"Giulietta degli Spiriti." Dir. Federico Fellini. Rizzoli Film, 1965.

"La Dolce Vita." Dir. Federico Fellini. Riama Film, 1960.

Liehm, Mira. Passion and Defiance: Film in Italy from 1942 to the Present. University of California Press, 1986.

"Otto e Mezzo (8½)." Dir. Federico Fellini. Cineriz, 1963.

Sorlin, Pierre. Italian National Cinema: 1896-1996. Routledge, 1997.