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Fellini: I'm a Born
Liar
review by
Gregory Avery,
2 May 2003 The
documentary Fellini: I'm a Born Liar is perhaps best enjoyed
as a fabulous tale told by an expert and highly adept con man.
Damian Pettigrew filmed Federico Fellini speaking, at length, about
his life and career in 1992, one year before the director's death,
and the results are dazzling and, sometimes, Laocoönian in their
twists and turns: a filmmaker who professes never to look at his own
films, and, when he does, wonders who other than himself could have
made these; who says that, once he starts work on the set, someone
else takes control and he must put himself at the service of this
"mysterious stranger"; an artist who claims to wanting to be
"authentic" in his work, yet finds artificial renditions of places
and events hold more meaning to him than the actual things
themselves.
Fellini says he strives to have a
"harmonious" set that will facilitate inspiration and creative
freedom, yet disdains "improvisation" -- even though his filmmaking
collaborators say that his whole directoral style is
"improvisatory". The contradictions are sometimes dazzling: Fellini
speaks about how he "adores" actors one moment, than in the next
refers to them as "puppets" (not the first time we hear this word in
the documentary, and not from the same person). This apparently
works fine with inexperienced actors such as Hiram Keller and Martin
Potter, whom, in behind-the-scenes footage, we see being minutely
choreographed, movement by movement, by the "maestro" while filming
a scene for Satyricon (1969). Donald Sutherland, on the other
hand. describes with complete lucidity how Fellini behaved on the
set of Casanova (1976) -- a "martinet", a "Tartar", a
"dictator", a "demon" -- and that the first five weeks of shooting
were "hell on earth". (And Sutherland would be stuck working a total
of 150 days on the film before it was completed. He was not
Fellini's first choice for the role, and -- along with the fact that
Fellini was forced to make the film in English, and using direct
sound, neither of which he'd done before -- Sutherland suffered
because of it). By contrast, Roberto Benigni, who starred in
Fellini's last film, La Voce della Luna (1990), says
the director was bounteously supportive and treated him like "a real
actor". Terence Stamp, who appeared in Toby Dammit, the
episode Fellini made for Spirits of the Dead (1968),
describes how he showed up for the first day of filming -- the scene
where Toby arrives at an airport in Rome -- and had to ask Fellini
for at least a little direction to get going. Fellini provided it,
describing, in detail, a sex-booze-and-drugs fueled party -- or, as
Stamp says Fellini called it, a "h'orgy" -- Toby would have
participated in back in London the night before. It worked: Stamp
gives Toby the exact, perfect look of desiccation needed to set the
tone of the film.
Avoiding a didactic approach,
Pettigrew layers in the material that he has collected for the
documentary -- an approach which allows him to include a comment by
author Italo Calvino on how, from a psychological standpoint, lies
are often more interesting than the truth -- and which includes
interviews with many of Fellini's collaborators, associates, and
friends, as well as film showing the director at work on Amarcord
(1973), Casanova, directing Marcello Mastroianni in City
of Women (1980), Alain Cuny in La Dolce Vita
(1960), Giulietta Masina in Juliet of the Spirits (1965), and
Edra Gale, who played the benevolent, voluptuous giantess Saraghina,
in 8 1/2 (1963). Footage from the T.V. special A
Director's Notebook (1969) shows one of the gigantic sets built
for Fellini's big, unrealized project The Voyage of G. Mastorna,
as well as Mastroianni costumed as the title character, a cellist
who finds his passenger air flight re-routed to land in a locale
that turns out to be increasingly unreal and strange. A sudden, near
fatal, medical ailment forced Fellini to cancel making the film, but
he continued trying to get it made -- even though, as Sutherland
observes, making a film which is essentially a metaphor about death
meant that Fellini, had he made it, would have emerged at the end a
different person. (Pettigrew follows this with footage from a key
scene in Juliet of the Spirits, in which the heroine is given
an opportunity to experience new things, but declines, deciding she
would rather stay the way she was.)
Fellini could recreate the Adriatic
in a studio, as production designer Dante Ferretti describes, when,
going to see the actual thing, he decides it doesn't look the way he
wants it to look in his film; or instruct an actor to pace back and
forth before the camera, counting, and then just dub in the dialogue
needed later in post-production. (I never really believed this to be
true, until Pettigrew produces footage showing actors doing just
that for Fellini on both Amarcord and Satyricon.) But,
as painter Rinaldo Geleng, who befriended Fellini in Rome during the
1940s, tells Pettigrew, by practicing his art, Fellini was revealing
himself. Fellini may tell Pettigrew that, in marrying Giuletta
Masina, he found a true, companionable and "just" partner. But it is
known that Masina, for whatever reason, walked away from her acting
career when it was at its height to become Signora Fellini
full-time. And, for 8 1/2, Fellini cast Anouk Aimée to play
the wife of Mastroianni's character Guido, then cropped the actress'
hair short and gave her an unflattering pair of horizontal
spectacles to wear. In a scene from the film, she's seen cackling
and telling Guido that she could never leave him -- not because it
would make him look ridiculous, but because he was ridiculous,
period.
However, Fellini's methods could
also produce art, even poetry: the scene on the bridge in Toby
Dammit; the moment when Claudia Cardinale first appears,
smiling, radiant, rushing forward with hands outstretched, palms
turned outward, in 8 1/2; the motorcyclists who roar through
the nighttime streets at the conclusion of Roma
(1972), to name just a few. What continues to make Fellini's best
films exciting is the way he can take elements that may seem
initially arbitrary and turn them into something that becomes
ultimately meaningful to us, often in unexpected ways, such as how
the promenade that concludes 8 1/2 ends on an inexplicable,
yet moving, note. Pettigrew does not, fortunately, show us the T.V.
commercial work Fellini had to do during some dry spells in the
1980s (the Campari ads are, trust me, not very good). While he
embraced the counterculture movement of the 'Sixties and early
'Seventies, Fellini blamed the rise of "youth culture" as being part
of the cause for his career downturn in the Eighties -- City of
Women includes a scene showing young, pudgy-faced girls
listening to rock music, twitching and moaning, like Regan in The
Exorcist. In La Voce della Luna, Roberto Benigni
plays a man who confuses the face of the moon with that of the woman
he loves -- eventually, the two become one, up in the sky, forever
unattainable. Benigni's character asks to, at least, be told what
the secret to happiness on earth is. The woman replies, alright,
she'll tell him, but, first, "Publicità!" (And now, a word from our
sponsor....)
Pettigrew's documentary is,
noticeably, short on the work Fellini did prior to La Dolce
Vita in 1960 -- eight films, including two which made
Giuletta Masina an internationally renowned star, as well as working
as a co-screenwriter on several films for Roberto Rossellini. This
may be due in part to the fact that Fellini doesn't mention them
himself during the interviews with Pettigrew -- he mentions only the
title of his great 1953 film I Vitteloni in passing --
and, probably, in part because of the effect "La Dolce Vita" had on
both his professional and personal life. The film was hugely
successful, both in Italy and abroad, and garnered the first of four
Best Director Oscar nominations for Fellini. On the other hand, in
the ultra-politicized Italy of the 1960s, it was actively condemned
by the Catholic Church, the government, and, most cuttingly, in
Fellini's own home town of Rimini.
"I often had a natural inclination
to invent for myself a relationship to my family, to women, to life.
I was always inventing," Fellini tells Pettigrew. "For me, the
things that are most real are the ones I invent...." So, using the
"mathematical" precision of an artist who is both a "medium" and a
"craftsman", Fellini recreates his home town in films such as
"Amarcord", and the reconstruction becomes "much more of a part of
my life than the real town of Rimini...." That town vanishes, and
the phantasmagoria -- the autostradas, the circus
rings, the stadiums filled with women, the sunken airliners sending
up "radioactive signals", the houses of painted plastics filled with
distorted memories and grotesque hallucinations -- began to unfurl
and take over from there on. |
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