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More Fellini
Pre-"Felliniesque" Fellini: The Nights of Cabiria — The crown jewel of Fellini's pre-"Felliniesque" work
Fellini's Variety Lights on DVD — A tacky theatrical troupe finds fun and romance — and occasionally a paycheck — on the road in Fellini’s classic
Fellini's Society Rehearsal: Orchestra Rehearsal Reconsidered — In which "Fellini takes us beyond our frailties and chaos"
Knocking on Modernity's Door: Fellini's I Vitelloni — Postwar despair, Italian style
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Tell me about a film you never started, the one about Carlos Castaneda.
It’s a very complicated story.
I first looked for Castaneda through his publishers. I talked with the publisher, who gave me the address of Castaneda’s agent, a Ned Brown in New York. The publisher told me it would be easy for Brown to give me Castaneda’s address. Once a year a Mexican boy brought the publisher manuscripts. Ned Brown told me he had never met Castaneda.
Persisting in my search, I was told that Castaneda was in an insane asylum, even that he was dead. Someone else said he’d met him and that he was alive, that he had seen him at a lecture Castaneda gave. Then, in Rome, there was a Mrs. Ioghi who put me in contact with him. And I finally met Castaneda.
Castaneda’s personality is quite different from what you might imagine. He seemed like a Sicilian — a cordial, easygoing, smiling Sicilian host. Brown skin, black eyes, a very white smile. He has the effusiveness of a Latin, a Mediterranean. He’s Peruvian, not Mexican.
Are you sure it was really him?
What are you trying to say? Of course; he was surrounded by other people. Mrs. Ioghi knew him.
This likable gentleman, who had seen all my films, told me that one day with Don Juan, thirty or forty years ago, he had seen my film, La Strada — which was made in 1952. Don Juan had told him, "You will have to meet the director of this film." He said that Don Juan had prophesied this meeting. That’s what Castaneda told me. I told you that he came to find me, here, in this living rom, seated right here.
From the beginning I was fascinated by his book The Teachings of Don Juan, a book about esoteric, parapsychological ventures. Then I was fascinated by the overall idea: that of a scientific man, an anthropologist, who starts with a speculative, scientific purpose, a man who keeps his feet on the ground, watches where he’s going and literally looks at the ground, in fields, in vegetable gardens, in glades, toward the hills — where mushrooms grow. This man of science then finds himself, after initiation, following a path that brings him into contact with some ancient Toltecs.
I like the route supplied by a scientific, rational curiosity, a route that he took with a rational attention and which, at the same time, led him toward the mysterious world, a world we define in a vague way as "irrational."
This relation between science and a supernatural world seems especially interesting. In this connection, you talked about your experience with LSD, your belief in Jung’s psychoanalysis, and your friendship with Roll, the most famous Italian clairvoyant.
Yes, this seems to me the end point of true science. The more it advances, protected by its parameters, its mode of inquiry, its certainties, and its doubts, also its distrust, the closer it comes to something that is "the mystery." And, therefore, it approaches a religious vision of the phenomenon it’s investigating.
The one thing that fascinated and also somewhat alienated me — an Italian, a Latin, a Mediterranean, conditioned by a Catholic education — was Castaneda’s and Don Juan’s particular vision of the world. I saw something unhuman there. Independently of Don Juan, who is charming in a literary way and whom we are made to see as an old sage, I couldn’t help being invaded at times by a feeling of strangeness. As if I were confronted with a vision of a world dictated by a quartz! Or a green lizard!
What I found fascinating was that you felt transported to a point of view never before imagined, never suspected, that truly had you breathing outside yourself, outside of your humanity, and that for an instant gave you an unfamiliar shiver of belonging to other elements, to elements of the vegetable world, animal world, even the mineral world. A feeling, that is, of silences, of extraterrestrial, extra-planetary colors. This was what seduced my propensity for the fantastic, the visionary, the unknown, the enigmatic.
In Don Juan’s vision of the world, there was no comfort, nothing of what so many other texts can give you or that other esoteric authors like Rudolph Steiner or the Templars give. In short, Castaneda’s stories, unlike so many other esoteric or initiatory texts that try to tell you about other dimensions, offered a vision lacking any psychological comfort. This was what made them terrible and fascinating for me. Yet I seemed to find myself in an asphyxiated world.
You told me once that from the moment you arrived in Los Angeles, where Castaneda was waiting for you, some strange events began.
Phenomena and wonders popped up. When he came to my hotel, he brought along some women. I never saw him again, but after that I found strange messages in my room and objects moved around. I think it was black magic. His women, but not Castaneda, went with me to Tulun, and the same things happened there.
You felt threatened, and Castaneda disappeared.
It’s been some years — that was in 1986 — and I still haven’t been able to figure out what really happened. Maybe Castaneda was sorry to have brought me there and worked out a series of phenomena that discouraged me from making my film. Or maybe his associates didn’t want me to make a film and did these things. Anyway, it was all too strange, so I decided not to make the film.
Castaneda’s books brought back some feelings that I had experienced as a boy.... It’s difficult to define.... Maybe madness can resemble this kind of astral, icy cold, solitary silence. I put one boyhood experience in The Voice from the Moon, when Benigni tells his grandmother that he became a poplar tree. It happened when I was a boy and spent the summer with my grandmother, Francesca, my father’s mother, in the country at Gambettola.
 Fellini's peculiar mix of modernism and antiquity: Amarcord  |
The name of this place, Gambettola, could come from a fable, some sort of Pinocchio adventure....
Yes! It was also called "the forest," because there was a large forest nearby. There, I had a few experiences that I remembered only thirty or forty years later. They came back in a more hallucinatory or more revivified way because I was reading some parapsychological texts. In short, they were experiences of special feelings. First was the episode of the poplar tree.
I was able to translate sounds into colors, an experience that happened to me afterward. I could chromatize sounds. It’s a faculty that can surprise us, but which seems natural to me, given that life is a single thing, a totality that we have learned to divide, file, separate, tying different sensations together in different ways.
Here I was seated under that poplar at Gambettola, and I heard the ox lowing in the stable. At the same time, I saw coming out of the stable’s wall something fibrillating, like an enormous tongue, a mat, a carpet, a flying carpet moving slowly in the air.
I was sitting with my back to the stall, but I could see everything around me and behind me, 360 degrees. And this wave dissolved, passing through me, like a huge fan of very tiny, microscopic rubies that shimmered in the sun. Then it disappeared.
This phenomenon of translating sounds into colors, the chromatic equivalent of sound, stayed with me for many years. I could tell you about other such episodes that happened when I was a child, and also when I was twenty and had come to Rome.
But let’s go back to what happened under the poplar. At a certain moment, while I was playing, I seemed to see myself up above, very high, I seemed to be swinging there, and to hear a light wind in my hair. Then I felt — it’s difficult for me to describe it — that I was solidly planted in the ground. And that little boy I saw — which was me — now had his legs sunk in the ground, so far that I felt I had roots. And the whole body was covered by a kind of hot, thick blood that rose, rose, rose up to the head because of the sound that I was making ("whooo") while I was playing. I heard this sound with a different organ, magnificent, more....
Like a mantra!
It was a mantra, yes, like "ommm." And then this feeling of rapture, of lightness, of lightness and power, power in the roots and lightness above in the branches shaking in the sky. I had become the poplar!
These are the great intuitions and feelings, the great visionary wisdom of childhood that one has to tell later as fantasies.
Let’s say they need to assume the form of fables. The fable is always the more human, and also the more faithful, way of recounting.
And your grandmother, what did she think of this fantasizing little boy?
My grandmother could have been a character in a fable herself. She was an old peasant woman; she was capable of great tenderness. She was an old, tall, thin woman with many petticoats.
I still live on the fantasy income from those summers spent with my grandmother. Even La Strada lifted a little from memories of those summer endings and autumn beginnings in the country, from that almost spiritual contact with the animals, smells, places. I remember the first veglia in the stable.
What do you mean by "veglia"? [Literally, "waking" or "wakefulness."]
Peasant men got together in the stable at night to drink, and eat bread and cheese. It was a way for them to be together for some hours, even up to eleven at night, which was late for them because they had to get up at four in the morning.
Besides telling stories, they laughed, joked; they laughed talking about women. The laughs were a way of exorcising, of defending themselves, a form of nervousness. And I, still a young boy, didn’t understand very well why, when the men were talking about women, they poked each other with their elbows and laughed. As if they were alluding to something vaguely comic, but also indecent, something from which they defended each other, protected each other, conspiring to create a solidarity.
 The mother of us all … Donyale Luna in Fellini Satyricon |
You told me in one of our conversations that you’ve always had a latent envy for anyone who expresses, even in a primitive way, a conviction, a creed, a dogma. You, who don’t want to take refuge in any rigid system of convictions or ideologies, what’s your "center," your "pivot"? The cinema?
Do you mean "when do I feel at home"?
Yes.
You ask a question that’s not so simple to answer. I think my pivot point is finding myself in a nowhere in which I recognize myself. Said that way, it can seem like romantic complacency, shamelessly poetic.
No, no, I understand your answer very well. I’ve written about the nowhere. It’s a perception I know well precisely because I believe that creative people are acquainted with it. That is, people who have refused the comfort of certainties, of dogmatic, ideological constructions.
A less esoteric and less presumptuous center is my work, when I’m seized, when I have an identity, am caught up by what I’m doing. As in driving a nail, putting up a wall on a set, putting a wig on an actress’s head, seeing that the makeup is just right; when I’m on the go, obsessed in filming in the midst of a group of people who look at me with the respect due to age and, maybe, also with a little worry and amusement.
I lend my body, my common sense, or talent to something that is a stream, a stream that invites me, obliges me, forces me to personify myself in so many things, persons, thoughts, attitudes. And there, just at the moment in which I’m not there — since I’m in so many places taken up by so many details — is, I believe, my pivot point.
I believe that for me this is happiness — to lose one’s memory, to forget the self, the part you call yourself, which is really just a superstructure. This is the part you forget in order to be inhabited by an energy that borrows your body and your nervous system.
There’s a big contradiction between what the West maintains, driving people to look for themselves, fortifying their own personality, and what the East maintains, which encourages you to free yourself from yourself. The problem seems to be that of liberating the self without destroying it.
It’s important to put yourself in a condition to be everlastingly born. In any case, I consider myself particularly fortunate because of my profession. Which isn’t a profession, but only a path, a route for amusement, for levity. It can lead you to have — in a free, nonschematic, nondogmatic way — intuitions that others have had with more sacrifices and in a more dramatic way. It’s a game that puts you in touch with other territories, intuitions of different possibilities. Perhaps these intuitions are paler, less colorful than those earned more dramatically and knowingly, with more sacrifices.
You said that you love directors like Bergman, Bunuel, Kurosawa. Do you go to the movies often?
I’m embarrassed to confess, no, I don’t go to the movies much. I’ve never gone much. As a boy in Rimini, they let me go to the movies once a week.
No, no, it wasn’t a matter of cost. Our family was petit bourgeois. My father was a sales representative. My brother and I went to the movies accompanied by Alfredo, a handyman who worked in my father’s warehouse.
When I came to Rome, at eighteen, I began to go more often. There were two cinemas on the street where I lived, San Giovanni. But I went most of all because I was fascinated by the crude variety shows. First there was the film and immediately after it the variety shows.
I was taken by those colored posters. The theater put photos of the film outside and also the huge playbills for the variety shows that had pictures of these beautiful fat women with naked thighs and piggish faces. If I saw some films then, I owe it to the attraction of these playbills.
 Giulietta Masina in The Nights of Cabiria |
What kind of films?
American. There were only American films then. The Italian films were either about war or Romans; and there was always fascist propaganda — these were the early forties. They weren’t very seductive.
For my generation, born in the twenties, movies were essentially American — a cinema supported by the most powerful press office that the history of film may have ever had. Even today, the sympathy Americans enjoy is due to their movies, movies that have always told us — and during those times in Italy, this was perceived more yearningly and strikingly than today — that there was another country, another dimension to life, a dimension more fanciful than the Italian priests’ Sunday sermons about paradise.
American movies were more effective, more seductive. They really showed a paradise on earth, a paradise in a country they called America. For our generation, this was an inexhaustible source of admiration for a country, a people, movie personalities, for a nonchalant way of acting, without rhetoric.
Even the Americans’ military rhetoric was acceptable, because the heroes were Gary Cooper, Clark Gable. They were cheerful guys who had nothing to do with the obligatory sadness of our soldiers. In our films from that time, our soldiers had to be mangled, starved, ragged. In order to get people interested, the Italian soldier had to die or be seriously wounded! Meanwhile, everything went swimmingly for the American soldier, who got married, maybe to a beautiful actress like Myrna Loy.
However, I didn’t go to movies much. But I loved them. I loved seeing the variety show from the stalls like holds of pirate ships, seething with spectators. Take Sunday afternoon, for example. It seemed like going into a big, hot potbelly — a potbelly of rascally humanity — that consummated a magic rite, which was to dream together.
In the little towns in winter, the movie theater was like a tiny galaxy, a planet under a spell, a grand passion that seems forgotten today. Or that no longer seems to have the same seductiveness it had when I was young. Now the people stay home to watch television.
Until seven or eight years ago, we made around 100 to 150 pictures each year. Today, it’s a miracle if there are ten in production. That’s really okay, but it’s always with or for television. And these are films made under reduced, censored circumstances, a castrating way of dealing with a fable that needs telling.
Almost all the studios, Elios, Incom, and so forth, have closed down. Half of Cinecitta has been sold, turned into Cinecitta II, which is a commercial center. Now it looks like they’re also selling the other half. The only place that’s left is where I made my last film, at Pontina, which was created by Dino De Laurentis in 1960. But it’s having continued failure.
This leaves things more open to American competition.
Yes, of course. But it could also be stimulating for Italy, because Americans often give us impeccable films, very well directed, with splendid actors, with stories that tell about their own country. The whole American show keeps something in mind that we, in our conceit as spoiled children, look at almost with distaste. They keep in mind a Master of Ceremonies’ fundamental fact. He knows that to tell something to someone he has to seduce his audience with entertainment. Journalists, writers, poets, playwrights, directors are consistent in this sense.
November 1999 | Issue
26
Interview copyright © 1994, 1995, 1999 by Toni Maraini
Translation copyright © 1994, 1995, 1999 by A. K. Bierman
This interview originally appeared in issue 12 (1994) and issue 14 (1995) of our discontinued print edition.
Toni Maraini is a poet who has written a two-volume work on the poets of Provencal. She has also taught art at Rabat University in Tunisia. Her novel L’anno 1424 — the year of the premiere of La Danse Macabre at the cemetery of the Most Sainted Innocents in Paris — has been translated into English.
A. K. Bierman is a philosopher, playwright, and ex-naval aviator. A frequent translator of Italian literature, he has written Philosophy of Urban Existence, Life, and Morals, and a musical based on the life of Walt Whitman.
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