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Federico Fellini: La Strada
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During Mussolini's Fascist regime, Fellini and his brother, Riccardo, were part of the Avanguardista, the fascist youth group that every adolescent Italian male was obliged to join. After moving to Rome in the spring of 1939, Fellini landed a well-paid job writing articles for the hugely popular satirical weekly, Marc’Aurelio. It was at this time that he interviewed Aldo Fabrizi, inaugurating a friendship that would lead to professional collaboration and radio work. Of conscription age since 1939, Fellini had nonetheless managed to avoid being drafted through a suite of clever ruses. Commenting on this turbulent epoch, Fellini biographer Tullio Kezich notes that although “the Marc’Aurelio period was happy, the happiness masked a phase of shameless political apathy. Many living under the Mussolini dictatorship during its last years experienced the schizophrenic tug between official loyalty to the regime and the intrinsic freedom of humor.”[3]
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In 1948, Fellini completed the screenplay for Il Miracolo, the second and longer section of Rossellini's two-part effort Amore. Here Fellini's utterly original worldview first began to truly take shape in the form of archetypal characters (a simple-minded peasant girl and her male counterpart, a kind of holy simpleton), recurring motifs (show business, parties, the sea), and an ambiguous relationship with religion and spirituality, a relationship further explored in his script for Rossellini's 1949 Francesco, Giullare di Dio, adapted from The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi. In 1950, Fellini made his first attempt at directing one of his own screenplays (albeit with the technical guidance of Alberto Lattuda); the result was Luci del Varieta, which further developed his fusion of neorealism with the atmosphere of surrealism.
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In some of his later extravaganzas, Fellini's Casanova (1976) and City of Women (1979), woman was a dream flowering into nightmare, and unfortunate man was Phallus in Wonderland. Fellini was not the sort of artist to mature as he grew older; he was emotionally a child, an avid teenager, like all the overage boys in his movies. And so, in some of the late ones, he tilted from parody to self-parody. It was inevitable, perhaps, that he would find it difficult to distinguish between being Fellini and doing Fellini.
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Federico is born on January 20th, a Capricorn with ascendant in the Virgin sign, son of Ida Barbiani, a housewife, and Urbano Fellini, a sales representative. Later on he will have a brother, Riccardo, born on February 27th 1921, an actor, and a sister, Maddalena, born on October 17th 1929, who will become both a housewife and an actress.
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Fellini Satyricon (1969) adapted the fragmented original text to visual narrative with wholly invented material. Curing the central character's impotence not with the male lover of the original but an earth mother figure is a marked alteration. The Labyrinth and Minotaur sequence is Fellini's, figures of the psyche and its ferocious unconscious.
In essence, the whole of Fellini can be found in [the first] sequence from La Strada [which ends with Gelsomina following the circus band after leaving Zampano]. His thematic centre is here. To begin with, reinforced by the title itself, there is the sense of life as a journey, as a constant tearing away from things known and a plunging into the unfamiliar.
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