Voicing the Silence in Federico Fellini's "La voce della luna"

Abstract

What Richard Kearney considers the postmodern deconstruction of the human subject as origin of meaning1 appears in Fellini's films as a recurrent motif which develops metacinematically within each film especially the films of his later production.2 Fellini has stated many times that making films is the way of his life and the only possible way to look at himself in the mirror. True to himself he reiterates the same concepts with those inevitable differences that the passing of time forcefully presents. The discourse of the Subject in Fellini's films revolves around itself, or better it is coiled upon itself.3 Fellini brings it beyond what the external world would like to impose on his internal world and on the voracity of his nostalgia.4 As a Subject looking at himself into the mirror's space of his past life, Fellini is, once again, trying to voice the filmic space/zone of silence which takes, in La voce della luna (The Voice of the Moon, 1990), various metaleptic aspects. While in Intervista (Intervista, 1988), released in the United States in November 1992, Fellini appears both as analyst and analysand on screen, in La voce della luna his presence remains off-screen to direct, metonymically, different versions of himself, of his previous character/personae, of the art of the cinema.