Federico Fellini: Contemporary Perspectives by Frank Burke , Marguerite R. Waller (review)

Abstract

MLR, 98.4, 2003 1011 Federico Fellini: Contemporary Perspectives. Ed. by Frank Burke and Marguerite R. Waller. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2002. xxxii + 239 pp. ?42 (pbk ?15). ISBN 0-8020-0696-5 (pbk 0-8020-7647-5). Fellini's influence upon contemporary film directors remains considerable, despite an uneven cinematic output. He was arguably at his best while he drew on his early experiences of provincial and urban life, and incorporated the acerbic, observational humour of co-writers Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano into his screenplays. By con? trast, the second half of Fellini's career is characterized by a whimsical excess caused by his estrangement from Pinelli and Flaiano, and also by his rather stagnant, cosseted existence as an established director. This paucity of fresh life experiences prompted him to cannibalize existing literary works or recycle his own dreams and fantasies, some of which were decades old, into film projects. Consequently, most overviews of Fellini's filmography reveal that for every Dolce vita there is usually a Casanova lurking offscreen. Whether this collection of essays, together with Marguerite Waller's thoughtful introduction, will have 'a significant impact on filmstudies', as its introductory pages proclaim, is questionable. Similarly, the assertion that the volume employs 'a range of recent critical approaches' (p. i) is also debatable, given that the semiotic, psychoanalytical , feminist, and deconstructionist perspectives adopted by most of the contributors are past the firstflush of youth and approaching middle age. Although there is a whiff of the seventies about this anthology, Waller justifiably highlights the lack of critical material on Fellini written during this theoretically productive decade, and in a sense the application of these perspectives to Fellini's work within this volume fillsa discernible gap within scholarly writing on Italian film. Using a semiotic approach, Frank Burke focuses primarily on the final, postmod? ern phase of Fellini's career, when his work consistently transformed the real and the representable into pure sign. Burke convincingly argues that certain effects in Casanova, such as the (in)famous 'garbage bag sea', exemplify the director's attempts to erase referentsaltogether, but is generous in his interpretation ofthe self-indulgent Intervista as 'codified' and 'parodic' in the way it constructs meaning through recycling Fellini's past films and experiences, and by exhibiting his film-making routine. Christopher Sharratt highlights Toby Dammit as a pivotal moment in Fellini's ceuvre, a film which marked a transition towards 'artificial cinema' and artifice, and which, together with the self-consciousness of later films, formed a basis for the director's critique of the 'formulaic, mind-deadening, mass production of art, the culture industry 's resuscitation and reformulation of bankrupt styles and conventions in its constant search for new forms and satisfactions' (p. 123). On a related theme, Millicent Marcus contributes a valuable discussion of Fellini's portrayal of television in Ginger e Fred, the medium constituting another source of signs that endlessly reflect other signs without any trace of a referent. Marcus also argues that beyond its surface attack on the brutalizing effectof commercial television upon the world of cinema, the film also contains an implicit indictment of cinema itself as a medium of simulation and self-referentiality. Through an analysis of Fellini's scepticism towards intellectuals, and towards lan? guage as a communication tool, William Van Watson's Lacan-influenced essay posi? tions Fellini's work in the realm ofthe visual imaginary rather than within the verbal symbolic, and interprets the director's keenness on studio filming as an example of a desire to reincorporate reality into the Imaginary Order, within a 'studio-womb'. Yet, as sometimes occurs with psychoanalytically oriented work, biographical detail?not in the formofunreliable quotations from Fellini himself, which several contributors to this volume use unquestioningly, but in terms of corroborated accounts from friends and family?can prove equally illuminating. It is well documented that Fellini's 1012 Reviews provincial upbringing made for an ambivalent attitude towards Rome's intellectuals; similarly,aftera frustratingspell of location filmingon a beach forLo sceicco bianco, he subsequently preferred to reinvent reality on his own terms in the studios of Cinecitta. Virginia Picchietti's study of Lo sceicco bianco explores the paradox that emerges when...