Fellini and the Deep Mysteries of Filmmaking by Craig Hammill

It always feels short sighted, even wrong, to say, “Well. . .they’ll never make movies like that again.” 

Because every now and then a movie always rises to the fore that takes our collective breaths away.

In the 21st century, we’ve already seen all-time masterpieces like Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood For Love, David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, Jacques Audiard’s Un Prophete, George Miller’s Mad Max Fury Road, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World just to name a very few.

Yet, when I see a movie like Federico Fellini’s 1965 Juliet of the Spirits I can’t help but want to see a resurgence of that kind of mid-twentieth century art-house blockbuster. But with a new twist and new advance for our current times.

Fellini made Juliet of the Spirits at a critical juncture. He had just made 1963’s 8 1/2 still considered one of the greatest movies of all time. 

For his follow up, after a 7 year hiatus, he worked with his wife, the amazing Italian actress Giulietta Masina who had helped launch her husband’s career with her all-time performances in La Strada and Nights of Cabiria. 

Fellini cast Giulietta Masina as. . . .Giulietta Boldrini, a dutiful wife who has an existential crisis when she realizes her philandering husband and their marriage may be lost for good (though we never completely know for sure).

Juliet was Fellini’s first color film and he fills every frame with incredible color schemes. He also gave full vent to his (and Masina’s) fascination with the occult, astrology, ghosts, spirits.  

In the movie, a supernatural spirit heard at a seance implores Giulietta to review her life.

Fellini married the ethereal to the deeply personal by telling the story (in thinly veiled fiction) of the troubled Fellini marriage from his wife’s point of view.

Fellini later admitted that for the first time, he and Masina had major disagreements on her character. 

Fellini, who was an admitted serial philanderer, wanted to make a movie about how a wife moves past her cheating husband to gain independence. Masina fired back that such a woman who had devoted her life to her marriage would feel overwhelming tragedy and sadness.

The Fellinis battled it out by making a movie about it. And creating stunning cinema.

Fellini is still at the height of his powers. He deliriously cross cuts between waking life, fantasy, and memory to achieve a near James Joyce modernist level of brilliance.  He even has the audacity to collapse these three worlds of the mind-the real, the imagined, the remembered-within the same shot in a final third act where Giulietta suffers a near nervous breakdown.

Masina turns in a heartbreaking performance. But whereas her turns in La Strada and Nights of Cabiria are anchored in an irrepressible joy and fiery emotion, here Masina shocks by allowing seriousness, vulnerability, sadness, and thoughtfulness to dominate.

While very few of us ever got to meet the real Giulietta Masina, one feels they are watching her for two and a half hours in this movie.

It’s almost as if Masina decided to counter Fellini’s wishful thinking by delivering her response in the strength, power, and depth of her performance.

This movie is ultimately a dialogue between two master filmmakers. 

The result is a tremendous eruption of cinema, emotion, and ambivalence.

Famously, Fellini wanted the end of the movie (in which the husband lies and leaves the house, possibly for good to be with his mistress, followed by Giulietta who leaves the house to be outside alone in the morning sunlight) to feel like Giulietta had been liberated.  

Masina was having none of it, however, and felt the ending was a tragedy and that her character would feel confused, hurt, and adrift.

The final shot of the movie mysteriously encapsulates both of these readings. Fellini himself later admitted he came to realize that Masina’s reading was the more correct one.

And for anyone interested who does not know the end of this story, the Fellinis remained married for fifty years until Federico’s death in 1993. Masina died just one year later in 1994.

I’ve always found it hard to figure out exactly how mid-twentieth century moviemakers like Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa, Bunuel, Godard, Satyajit Ray (and just a decade later Rainer Werner Fassbinder), could make exciting, stunning, ground breaking, deeply personal, yet utterly cinematic works of art that spoke to audiences around the world.  

I find it hard because I’ve felt that later attempts by other moviemakers often feel a tad self-absorbed, insular, narcissistic, not quite on the mark.

Was it the work ethic at the time?

It’s of course also the alchemy of the times. There was an entire eco-system of passionate film criticism-Cahiers du Cinema, Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, Peter Bogdonavich etc-and a receptive post World War II audience excited by the frontiers explored and boundaries shattered by these moviemakers.

Ultimately, we all have to figure out how to make it in our own times. It’s easy to look back at decades long since sorted, hashed over, distilled and pine for them.

And we all have our own jams. Movies like Bergman’s Smiles on a Summer Night, Wild Strawberries, Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni, Nights of Cabiria, 8 1/2, Juliet of the Spirits, Godard’s Vivre Se Vie, A Bande Apart, Masculin Feminine, Alphaville, Luis Bunuel’s Los Olvidados, Viridiana, The Exterminating Angel, Fassbinder’s Fox and his Friends, The Merchant of Four Seasons, Ali Fear Eats the Soul, In a Year of Thirteen Moons have always been revelations to me.

And I’m sure you have your batch of secret cinematic poems that moved you to action.

What I’d love to see somehow, someway is a new crop of moviemakers, movies reinventing, rediscovering, re-falling in love with the form to tell moving stories in ways that stun, shock, excite the world anew.

I hope we do it. I pray we do it. 

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.