The Secret Life of Federico Fellini

Abstract

There is a sequence in La Strada that is crucial for our understanding of the films of Federico Fellini. It begins with a wedding celebration taking place in the open air. To one side of a long banquet table, really quite unnoticed by the wedding party, Zampano and Gelsomina are performing one of their tatty numbers, a kind of raggle-taggle conga. Zampano is seated and is playing the drum, his huge form made awkward by the crumpled position necessary for him to hold the drum between his knees, while Gelsomina is performing her stiff little dance. Bowler hat on her head and clown's make-up on her face, she hops about in time to the music, thrusting her arms forward on every fourth beat. All about them both is the litter that is always associated with any festivity in Fellini; and although she is ignored by the wedding party, scarcely noticed by the adult world, while Gelsomina dances, a number of children in the background dance in unison with her. They respond in sympathy to what she is doing and imitate her movements. One of the guests offers Gelsomina some wine which, after a hurried sip, she passes on to Zampano. Then the lady-of-the-house calls them to come and eat, and the sad little performance ends. On her way to the house, however, Gelsomina is led away by the children who have been so attentive to her dancing. There is apparently something that they want her to see. She is led up a narrow flight of stairs by the side of the house and along a network of corridors where she almost loses her way. At one moment we see a little boy dressed in a black cloak gliding along. We've never seen him before in this film and we'll never see him again; but the magical fascination of his sudden appearance holds us for that moment and gives us the sense of something festive about to take place as well as perhaps of something that we can't quite understand. Who is this boy? What is he doing here? What is going on? Gelsomina is then led into a large dark room, all the windows shuttered to keep out the sun, at the end of which crouches Osvaldo, a little boy in a big bed. There are two small mobiles suspended above him, little universes that rotate before his eyes. Indeed, his eyes stare out of his misshaped head, for he is apparently some kind of spastic, in the film regarded as a little idiot boy. The children ask Gelsomina to try and make him laugh, but her imitative bird flutterings only strike more terror into the boy's already terrified eyes. Finally, in a moment impossible to describe without limiting its implications, she draws close to him-he staring in confused terror at her, her own eyes opening wide to receive the full impact of this stare. Then abruptly, she and all the children are chased out of the room by a nun. What is the meaning of this moment in La Strada? What is it that she receives from those wild staring eyes? Is it that in this misformed child she recognizes some affinity with her own gentle strangeness? Un po strana, as her mother described her at the beginning of the film. Or is it that she senses in this blank unmovable face something beyond the powers of her simple goodness to affect in any way? And is it, then, a feeling of real terror that communicates itself to her, the result of a sudden recognition that at the end of long corridors hidden away in some sunless room there might lurk something terrible, something beyond our understanding, something deeply buried away and kept from conscious sight, but something terrifyingly real