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| Federico Fellini: Juliet of the Spirits |
Fellini started his career as a cartoonist at the end of the 1930s, before branching out into radio, and then working in movies as a screenwriter.
His collaboration on the screenplay for the neo-realist classic Rome, Open City (1945) by Roberto Rossellini was immediately rewarded with an Oscar nomination. Many more would later follow: eight nominations and four Oscars in the best foreign language film category.
Five years later, Fellini made his first film, together with director Alberto Lattuada: Variety Lights. The White Sheik (1952) was the first film he directed alone. His first films were in black-and-white, had a basis in neo-realism and focused on figures on the fringes of society. But unlike his fellow countrymen who remained true to neo-realism, Fellini came to employ fantasy and fairytale, poetic and playful elements to his cinematic cosmos.
This first became evident with La Strada, Fellini's first worldwide success. The world of the circus, magic and enchantment seemed to inspire and mesmerise Fellini. The carnival environment became one of his trademarks.
Fellini's films celebrate nostalgia and a yearning for the joys of childhood. Idlers, strays and petty criminals populate his films, just as prostitutes and outcasts do. Larger-than-life women, or men searching for the meaning of life: Fellini put them in the spotlight.
Fellini's 8 1/2 from 1963, his autobiographically inspired film about a director in crisis, would also usher in a new artistic phase in his work. From then on, his films became more fragmentary and sometimes even more playful, more opulent.
Whether bringing the old and the new Rome and its people in front of the cameras, whether following on the heels of a cynical Casanova in Venice or, such as in Amarcord, focusing on childhood and youth again: Fellini's image tableaux, his grotesque arsenal of figures, his opulent camera angles, at once sophisticated and grotesque, established his distinctive original style. You can recognize a Fellini film at first glance.
He provided the greatest roles for his wife Giulietta Masina and his alter ego Marcello Mastroianni. He relied on a few outstanding cameramen, and his composer Nino Rota became a star composer by working with him.
Fellini was invited to shoot in the US on several, occasions. He always refused; Rimini and Rome were his artistic inspiration, especially sonbecause he made his best work in the surroundings of Cinecittà Studios in Rome.
In “La Dolce Vita” (1959) Fellini gave Marcello Mastroianni his first great role as a journalist who tries to balance the competing claims of his work, his marriage, his mistress, his erotic daydreams and his vague ambitions.
“Juliet of the Spirits,” was Fellini's first film in color, and according to Roger Ebert “is the work of a director who has cut loose from the realism of his early work and is toying with the images, situations and obsessions that delight him. It is well known that young Federico experienced some kind of psychic fixation during his first visit to the circus, and all of his films feature processions or parades. It may not be too much to suggest that the sight of bizarre characters walking in time to music has a sexual component for Fellini, who almost always composes the scenes the same way: Characters in background and middle distance walk in procession in time with one another, and then a foreground face appears in frame, eager to comment.”
The following extract is from an interview with Federico Fellini by Bert Cardullo where Fellini discusses Juliet of the Spirits in detail. It is a fascinating glimpse of the great director’s creative process.
BC: How does a project of yours come into being in the first place?
FF: The real ideas come to me when I sign a contract and get an advance that I don’t want to give back, when I’m obliged to make a picture. I’m kidding, naturally. I don’t want to appear brutal, like Groucho Marx, but I’m the kind of creator who needs to have a higher authority—a grand duke, the pope, an emperor, a producer, a bank—to push me. Such a vulgar condition puts me on the right track. It’s only then that I start thinking about what I can, and want to, do.
BC: Why do you think you decided to start using color—first for the episode in Boccaccio ’70 and then for Juliet of the Spirits? Was there an external factor, such as an offer from a producer, the sheer possibility of doing a film in color, or was this your own aesthetic choice?
FF: The two cases are different. For the episode in Boccaccio ’70, the choice wasn’t mine. It was an episodic or anthology film, and the producers decided that it was to be in color. I didn’t object at all. The playful air of the whole undertaking and the brief form of the episode seemed just right for an experiment with color without too great a commitment on my part. I didn’t think about the problem very seriously; I didn’t go into it deeply. In Juliet of the Spirits, on the other hand, color is an essential part of the film; it was born in color in my imagination. I don’t think I would have done it in black and white. It is a type of fantasy that is developed through colored illuminations. As you know, color is a part not only of the language of dreams but also of the idea and feeling behind them. Colors in a dream are concepts, not mere approximations or memories.
That said, I certainly prefer a good black-and-white picture to a bad one in color. All the more so because in some cases so-called “natural color” impoverishes the imagination. The more you mimic reality, the more you lose in the imitation. Black and white, in this sense, offers wider margins for the imagination. I know that after having seen a good black- and-white film, many spectators, when asked about its chromatic aspect, will say, “The colors were beautiful,” because each viewer lends to the otherwise black-and-white images the colors he has within himself.
BC: You seem to be saying that you prefer black-and-white to color cinematography, period.
FF: Well, making films in color is, I believe, an impossible operation, for cinema is movement, color immobility; to try to blend these two artistic expressions is a desperate ambition, like wanting to breathe under water. Let me explain. In order to truly express the chromatic values of a face, a landscape, some scene or other, it is necessary to light it according to certain criteria that are functions of both personal taste and technical exigency. And all goes well so long as the camera doesn’t move. But as soon as the camera moves in on the faces or objects to be lighted, the intensity of the light is heightened or lessened, and all the chromatic values are intensified or lessened as a result. In short: The camera moves, the light changes.
There is also an infinitude of contingencies that condition the color, aside from the grave errors that can occur at the laboratory, where the negative can be totally transformed by its development and printing. These contingencies are the innumerable and continual traps that have to be dealt with every day when you shoot in color. For instance, colors interfere or clash, set up “echoes,” are conditioned by one another. Once lighted, color runs over the outline that holds it, emanating a sort of luminous aureola around neighboring objects. Thus there is an incessant game of tennis, let us say, between the various colors. Sometimes it even happens that the result of these changes is agreeable, better than what one had imagined; but this is always a somewhat chancy, uncontrollable occurrence.
Finally, the human eye selects and in this way already does an artist’s work, because the human eye, the eye of man, sees chromatic reality through the prisms of nostalgia, of memory, of presentiment or imagina- tion. This is not the case with the lens, and it happens that you believe you are bringing out certain values in a face, a set, a costume, while the lens brings out others. In this way, writing with a camera—or caméra stylo, as Astruc put it—becomes very difficult. It is as if, while writing, a modi- fying word escapes your pen in capital letters, or, still worse, one adjective shows up instead of another, or some form of punctuation appears that completely changes the sense of a line.
