Cultural Cohesion (74 page)

Guido graduated from being just anybody after Fellini decided to give him a career, so that the audience could get a handle on what his immediate crisis was about. Guido graduated from being just anybody to being a writer, Boyer records. If
had actually been made on that basis, it would have provided an interesting parallel to Antonioni's masterpiece of two years earlier,
La Notte
: same leading man, same professional anguish, same lustrous camerawork by Gianni Di Venanzo. But, as the start of production drew near, Fellini, with Mastroianni already cast, opted for the calling whose nuts and bolts he and his star could most easily show. Thus, very late in the game,
acquired the solid-seeming foreground that snares your initial attention while the psychological background sends out tendrils through its interstices to gather you in. All the fascination, all the
fun
of the Italian film world, the
mondo del cinema
, is right up front working its charm: the randy production manager getting off with bimbo bit players, the producer carrying on like a prima donna, the prima donna melting down like a maniac, the deals, the double deals, the chaos, the creativity.

.    .    .

Above all, the creativity. It's getting hard for younger generations to grasp, as time goes by, but in the 1950s and 1960s Italy was the true centre of the film world. Before the
auteur
theories promoted by
Cahiers du Cinéma
in France, by the magazine
Movie
in Britain and by critics such as Andrew Sarris in America forced the movie-mad intelligentsia all over the globe to reassess the Hollywood heritage instead of just enjoying it—a vital preparatory step in the development of the Planet Hollywood we all so uneasily inhabit now—the lesser nations produced the films that seemed to matter most, and of the lesser nations Italy led the pack, ahead of France, Sweden, Poland, India and Japan. It was as if Italy had risen reinvigorated out of the ashes of the war, a phoenix with a body by Farina and the Klaxon voice of Giuseppe Di Stefano: sexy, strident, attention-getting, bung-full of tradition yet terrifically up-to-date. Italian movies were a worldwide art-house attraction even before
La Dolce Vita
came out, in 1960. After that, they were a sensation. Fellini, with his big hat and loosely slung coat, was in all the photo magazines. Apparently, he lived at a table in the Via Veneto, looking tolerant but reserved while being mobbed by students and
paparazzi
. (Actually, he never went there or anywhere else in public except to be photographed, and he put up with it only so that his face could pull in money with which to make movies—but we couldn't tell that from looking.) He wasn't alone. Film artists of impeccable intellectual credentials lived in coronas of personal publicity. Everybody had just worked with everybody else or was about to. The general effect was to make Italy look like an updated opera, with props and costumes shipped in from the future:
Cavalleria Rusticana
with a Ferrari onstage instead of a horse,
Tosca
on a Vespa. The effect, in short, was magnetic.

Australians of my generation on their way to Britain stopped off in Italy to absorb an atmosphere they had correctly divined to be a magic compound of culture and hedonism. Those of us who stuck around long enough to pick up the language found that the film world was even more effervescent than we had guessed. In Florence there was an unending supply of American Fulbright scholars who were supposed to be studying Mannerist painting but still found time to keep up with all the gossip of the Rome-based industry, as if Pasolini were as important as Pontormo, Bolognini as Bronzino. They didn't have to haunt the library to get the facts. It was all in the papers. Producers, directors, cameramen and actors were getting married, divorced, sued, betrayed, killed, buried and born again in a pattern constant only in its unrelenting turbulence. Everyone was a star.

Essentially, each Italian film was a collaboration, usually involving three or more writers, two or more of whom would be directors next week and one or more of whom was a producer last week, but the money ran out. All those egos, however, were born to clash: hence the fizz, and hence the air of dedication, detectable in comedies and serious films alike. It is unfair to Antonioni to read his career backward—from the disaster of
Zabriskie Point
, through the awful, wilful obfuscations of
Blow-Up
to the brain-curdling deterministic lethargy of
Red Desert
and
The Eclipse
—and to decide that the spaced-out pacing of his high-impact central movies
La Notte
and
L'Avventura
was a bogus claim to seriousness. You didn't have to be mad about Monica Vitti (and we all were, even the women) to decide that those films were definitive treatises on the loss of love, all the more convincing for moving no faster than a snail's funeral. They retain their integrity when seen now, if we can suppress our awareness of how the director himself fell to pieces. Seen at the time, they looked monumental, but they didn't stand alone: bustling at their feet was a metropolis of the imagination.

On the subject of the mature Italian male's sexual dilemma, the comedies of Pietro Germi looked at least as thoughtful as any dirge by Antonioni, and packed in a lot more incident. (In Germi's
L'Immorale
, Ugo Tognazzi runs around frantically to keep three fully fleshed female characters happily out of touch with one another until he finally conks out—not from guilt but from an overtaxed heart.) Watching the comedies of Germi, Salce, Comencini, Monicelli and a half-dozen others as they appeared, we got an education in just how comprehensive and satisfying a popular art form could be without ceasing to be either popular or artistic. The entire national life was up there on the screen, with an interval for drinks.

Over and above the comedies, there was the straight stuff. Post-war neo-realism had evolved into something even better: realism, with a fact-based imaginative scope that could take in anything, even the deep-seated, dangerously retaliatory corruption of the country that had given rise to it. In 1963, Francesco Rosi's
Le Mani sulla Città
(
Hands over the City
) helped to light a fuse under the Italian political system which finally burned its way to the dynamite more than two decades later. In 1966, Gillo Pontecorvo made
The Battle of Algiers
. A radical film of such power that it remains compulsory viewing even for conservatives, it put the dazzling first features of Bertolucci and Bellocchio into sober perspective, making them look childishly hipped on their own anger. In short, the Italian cinema of those years was a lush field for someone to stand out from. Fellini did, head and shoulders.

.    .    .

Even more than
La Dolce Vita,
is a clear demonstration of how Fellini became Italy's national director and its ambassador to the world—the ambassador who never left home. The totality of his films is more than the sum of its parts, but all his films are contained, at some degree of compression, in
: they all lead up to it or lead on from it. Rich even by his standards, his supreme masterpiece first conveys its wealth through its sumptuous visual texture. Since
Nights of Cabiria
, for which the designer Piero Gherardi joined his entourage, Fellini had already put more of his country's visual excitement into his movies than any other director except perhaps Kurosawa. In
, with Di Venanzo lighting Gherardi's sets, Fellini excelled even his own previous efforts at pulling his tumultuous homeland into shape.

The lustre isn't just the look of Italy; it's the look of Fellini. Compared with him, the world's other great national directors hardly cared about what the camera could do. Buñuel never moved the camera unless he had to. Renoir called for a bravura set-up only if there was no other way to make a narrative point: that much-studied, Ophuls-like long exterior tracking shot in
Le Crime de Monsieur Lange
is there just so you can see exactly how far the hero has to run along corridors and down flights of stairs. And you can't imagine Bergman actually enjoying what in his case you feel inclined to call the physical side of it. But Fellini, even in his maturity, is like Orson Welles playing with the toy train set for the first time. In
, through sets built by Gherardi to look real and real locations lit by Di Venanzo to look like sets, the camera sails and swoops weightlessly yet without a flutter, as if following grooves in space. As Boyer's book reveals, there was no question of Fellini's standing aside and letting Di Venanzo make all this happen. Fellini was with him behind the camera: the instructions given to the operator, Pasquale de Santis, were their joint work, with Fellini always in the ascendant, specifying every aspect of a black-and-white
mise en scène
gorgeous enough to make colour look famished. Fellini was so sure of getting what he wanted that it didn't bother him if he was unable to check his work. He almost never looked at rushes, although for much of the shooting of
he couldn't have even if he had wanted to: the laboratories were on strike.