The Road to San Giovanni Read online

  In the same way, I too have to leave the Italian context if I am to rediscover the pleasure of the cinema, have to become once again a pure spectator. In the tiny, smelly studios of the Latin Quarter I can dig out the films of the twenties or thirties, films I thought I had lost forever, submit myself to the onslaught of the most recent productions from Brasil maybe, or Poland, films from worlds I know nothing about. That is, either I go looking for old films that tell me about my own prehistory, or those that are so new as perhaps to suggest what the world will be like after me. And again, it is always the American film – I’m talking about the most recent ones – that have something absolutely novel to tell us: and as always that novelty has to do with the highways, the drugstores, young faces or old, the way one moves through spaces, the way one passes one’s life.

  But it isn’t distance that the cinema gives us now: it is the irreversible impression that everything is nearby, is hemming us in, is on top of us. And this close-up observation can be of an exploratory-documentary kind or an introspective kind, these being the two directions in which the cognitive function of today’s cinema can be described as operating. One gives us a strong image of a world outside ourselves that for some objective or subjective reason we are not able to perceive directly; the other forces us to see ourselves and our daily existence in a way that changes something in our relationship with ourselves. For example, Federico Fellini’s work very closely approximates my own cinema-goer’s biography, which Fellini himself recently convinced me to write; except that for him biography has become cinema, it is the outside world that invades the screen, the dark of the theatre turned inside out in the cone of light.

  The autobiography Fellini has been developing without a break from I Vitelloni on is special to me not just because he and I are almost the same age, and not just because we both come from seaside towns, his on the Adriatic, mine in Liguria, where the lives of idle young boys were pretty similar (although in many ways my San Remo, being a border town with a casino, was different from his Rimini, and for us the contrast between the summers and the “dead season” of winter was perhaps only really felt during the war years), but because behind all the wretchedness of the days in the cafe, the walks to the pier, the friend who dresses in woman’s clothes and then gets drunk and weeps, I recognize the unsatisfied youth of the cinema-goer, of a provincial world that judges itself in relation to the cinema, in a constant comparison between itself and that other world that is the cinema.

  In this sense, the biography of the Felliniesque hero – which the director starts over again every time – is more exemplary than my own in that his young man leaves the provinces, goes to Rome and crosses over to the other side of the screen, making films, becoming himself the cinema. A Fellini film is cinema turned inside out, the projector that swallows up the public and the camera that turns its back to the set, but the two poles are still interdependent, the provinces acquire meaning by being remembered in Rome, Rome acquires meaning in having arrived from the provinces, and between the human monstrosities of the one and the other, a common mythology is established, a mythology that revolves around gigantic female deities like the Anita Ekberg of La Dolce Vita. What Fellini’s work strives to do is bring this feverish mythology to light and classify it. And at the heart of that work, like a spiral crammed with archetypes, stands the self-analysis of 8½.

  To get a more exact picture of what happened, one must bear in mind that the role reversal from cinema spectator to cinema director was preceded in Fellini’s life by that of the reader of humorous weeklies turned illustrator and contributor to the same. The continuity between Fellini the illustrator-satirist and Fellini the director is evident in the character of Giulietta Masina and in all that special “Masina area” of his work, that is, in a rarefied lyricism that assimilates the figurative schematization of the humorous cartoons, and reaches out – through the small-town piazzas of La Strada – to the world of the circus and the melancholy of the clown, one of the most insistent motifs in the Fellini repertoire and one of those closely tied to a stylistic taste which was already given, I mean which corresponds to a childish, disembodied, pre-cinematographic way of visualizing a world that is other”. (That “other” world on which the cinema confers an illusion of embodiment, thus confounding its phantoms with the attractive-repulsive carnality of life.)

  It is no accident that the film which analyses the world of Masina, Giulietta degli spiriti, has its declared figurative and chromatic point of reference in the colour cartoons of Corriere dei Piccoli: it is the graphic world of the mass-market printed page which here reasserts both its special visual authority and the close relationship it has had with the cinema right from the start.

  Within this world of graphics, the humorous weekly, which I suspect is still virgin territory to sociologists (far as it is from the beaten tracks of Frankfurt and New York), really ought to be studied, since it is almost as indispensable a departure point as the cinema for understanding the popular culture of provincial Italy between the wars. Also to be studied (if it hasn’t already been) is the link between the humorous weeklies and the Italian cinema, if for no other reason than for the role it has in the biography of another and older of the founding fathers of our cinema: Zavattini. It is the contribution of the humorous weeklies (perhaps more than those of literature, figurative art, sophisticated photography and Longanese-style journalism) which provides the Italian cinema with a tried and tested form of mass communication functioning through figurative and narrative stylization.

  But as film director, Fellini’s relationship with the comic weeklies is not just with the “poetic”, “crepuscular” and “angelic” side of their humour, to which his cartoons and early articles subscribed, but also with the more plebeian and Roman slant typical of other cartoonists at the Marc’ Aurelio – Attalo, for example, who represented the society of the time with such nastiness and determined vulgarity, such a coarse and impudent deftness of line, as to exclude every illusion of consolation. The power of the image in Fellini’s films, which is so difficult to define because it cannot be placed within the codes of any figurative art, has its roots in the extravagant and discordant aggression of these journalistic cartoons. It’s the same aggression that lies behind the triumph of a certain kind of cartoon and comic strip worldwide, in the sense that the more individual these cartoons are in terms of style, the more capable they become of communicating to a wider public.

  This underlying capacity to communicate with the public is something Fellini has never lost, even after the language of his films becomes more sophisticated. Likewise the determined anti-intellectualism of his work has never let up: as Fellini sees it, the intellectual is always a hopeless case who may at best hang himself, as in 8½, and who when he loses control, as in La Dolce Vita, shoots himself after having first killed his children. (The same choice in Roma is taken in the time of classical stoicism.) Fellini has stated that his intention is to contrast the intellectual’s arid, reasoning lucidity with a magical, spiritual knowledge springing from religious participation in the mystery of the universe: but on looking at the results, my own impression is that neither of the two comes over with sufficient emphasis in the cinema. What we do have, on the other hand, as a constant defence against intellectualism, is the sanguine nature of Fellini’s instinct for spectacle, the elemental, carnival, end-of-the-world truculence that both his modern and ancient Romes never fail to evoke.

  What has so often been defined as Fellini’s baroque style consists in his constantly forcing the photographic image along the road that leads from the caricatural to the visionary, while always keeping in mind the departure point of a well-defined subject of representation which must seek out its most communicative and expressive form. For those of us who are his contemporaries, this is particularly evident in his images of fascism, which, however grotesque the caricature, always have the flavour of truth. Over two decades fascism generated as many different psychological climates as, with every new year
, it did uniforms: and Fellini always gets the right uniforms and the right psychological climate for the years he is representing.

  Faithfulness to the truth ought not to be a criterion of aesthetic judgement, and yet on looking at films by the new generation of directors who like to reconstruct the Fascist period indirectly, as a historical-symbolic scenario, I can hardly help but cringe. Particularly in the work of the most prestigious of our young film-makers, everything that has to do with fascism is always wide of the mark, justifiable conceptually perhaps, but false at the level of the image, as if the man never managed to hit a bull’s-eye even by accident. Does this mean that the experience of a historical period cannot be transmitted, that a fine fabric of perceptions is inevitably lost? Or does it mean that since the images the young use to conjure up Fascist Italy are mostly drawn from writers (from ourselves) and are fragmentary in nature, presupposing an experience that was once common property, they are unable to evoke the historical density of the period now that this shared reference has been lost? In Fellini, by contrast, we need only see the boys in the train blowing raspberries at the ridiculous stationmaster of The Clowns and him calling over a black-moustached railway militiaman and the boys’ arms coming up out of the ghostly train in a silent Roman salute, and the atmosphere of the period is completely and unmistakably restored to us. Or we need only hear the lugubrious sound of the air-raid siren wailing across the little variety theatre of Roma, and the effect is the same.

  Probably the same result of precise evocation through extremes of caricature can likewise be found in the images of a religious education which appears to have constituted a fundamental trauma in Fellini’s life, considering how frequently he presents us with terrifying priests of a positively physiological horror. (But I am not in a position to judge authenticity here: the only repression I was subjected to was secular, more internalized and less easily shaken off.) As a counterbalance to the image of a repressive church-as-school, Fellini offers us the vaguer image of church-as-mediator in the mysteries of nature and man, a church without distinct features, like the dwarf nun who calms the madman on the tree in Amarcord, a church which offers no answers to man’s tortured questions, like the ancient monsignor who speaks about the birds in 8½, certainly the most intriguing and unforgettable image of Fellini’s religious side.

  Thus Fellini can go far indeed along the road of visual repugnance, but along that of moral repugnance he stops short, he recuperates the monstrous into the human, into the indulgent complicity of the flesh. Both the well-fed province and the movie-making world of Rome are circles of hell, but at the same time enjoyable lands of Cockaigne as well. That is why Fellini manages to disturb us to the core: because he forces us to admit that what we would most like to distance ourselves from is what is intrinsically close to us.

  As in the analysis of neurosis, past and present perspectives become confused; as in the outbreak of an attack of hysteria, they are exteriorized in spectacle. Fellini turns the cinema into a symptomatology of Italian hysteria, that special family hysteria which prior to Fellini was represented as a mainly southern Italian phenomenon and which he, from the geographical middle ground of his Romagna, redefines in Amarcord as the one true unifying element of Italian behaviour. The cinema of distance which nourished our youth is turned forever on its head in the cinema of absolute proximity. For the brief span of our lifetimes, everything remains there on the screen, distressingly present; first images of eros and premonitions of death catch up with us in every dream; the end of the world began with us and shows no signs of ending; the film we thought we were merely watching is the story of our lives.

  MEMORIES OF A BATTLE

  It’s not true that I’ve forgotten everything, the memories are still there, hidden in the grey tangle of the brain, in the damp bed of sand deposited on the bottom of the stream of thought: assuming it’s true, that is, that every grain of this mental sand preserves a moment of our lives fixed in such a way that it can never be erased yet buried under billions and billions of other grains. I am trying to bring a day, a morning, back to the surface, moments between dark and light at the dawning of that day. It’s years since I stirred up these memories, lurking like eels in the pools of the mind. I was sure that whenever I wanted I had only to poke about in the shallows to see them rise to the surface with a flick of their tails. At most I would have to lift one or two of the big stones that form a barrier between present and past to uncover the little caves behind the forehead where things forgotten lie low. But why that morning? Why not another? Here and there bumps protrude from the sandy bottom, suggesting that a sort of vortex used to whirl around them, and when memories awake after a long sleep it is from the centre of one of those vortices that time’s spiral unravels.

  Yet almost thirty years later, now that I’ve finally decided to haul in memory’s nets and see what’s inside, I find myself groping in the dark, as if that morning didn’t want to begin again, as if I were unable to unglue the sleep from my eyes, and perhaps it is precisely this imprecision that guarantees that the memory is precise, what now seems half erased was so then too, that morning they woke us at four, and immediately the Olmo detachment was on the march down through the woods in the dark, almost running through shortcuts where you can’t see where you’re putting your feet, not paths at all perhaps, just steep gorges, beds of dry streams overrun by brambles and ferns, smooth pebbles your hobnail shoes slither on, and we’re still at the beginning of the approach march, just as it’s an approach march I’m trying to make now on the trail of memories that crumble under pressure, not visual memories because it was a moonless starless night, memories of my body slithering in the dark, with half a plate of chestnuts in my stomach that haven’t warmed me up and are just weighing me down like an acid handful of gravel that squeezes and jolts, with the weight of the machine-gun ammunition box banging on my back and every time my foot slips there’s the danger the thing will topple me facedown on the ground or pull me over backwards my back against the stones. Maybe all that’s left in my memory of the whole descent are these falls, which could equally be those of some other night or dawn. Morning marches before action are all the same, I’m one of the group carrying ammunition for my squad, always humping that hard square box with the straps that dig into my shoulders, but in this memory my curses and those of the men behind me are kept down to a crackle of whispers, as if our moving in silence were the key factor this time even more so than other times, because at the same moment on the same night lines of armed men like our own are coming down along all the ridges in the wood, all the detachments of the Figaro battalion billeted in hidden farmhouses have set out on time, all the battalions of Gino’s brigade are pouring down from the valleys, and along the mule tracks they run into other lines on the march since the evening before from mountains far away, since the moment they got that order from Vittò, who’s commanding the division: all partisans of the area to gather at dawn around Baiardo.

  The air is slow to brighten. Yet it should be March by now, spring should be beginning, the last (can it be true?) of the war or the last (for how many more of us?) of our lives. The uncertainty of the memory is surely the uncertainty of the light and the season and what was to follow. The important thing is that this descent into an uncertain memory swarming with shadows should lead me to set foot on something solid, as when I felt the crushed stones beneath my feet, and recognized that stretch of the big road to Baiardo that goes past the bottom of the cemetery, and at the turn, even though I can’t see it, I know that opposite us is the village rising to a point at the top of the hill. Now that I have wrenched a specific place from the shadows of my forgetfulness, a place I’ve known since childhood, immediately the darkness begins to grow transparent letting shapes and colours filter through: all of a sudden we’re not alone any more, our column is marching alongside another column stopped along the road, or rather we’re walking between two lines like our own shuffling their feet, their rifles propped on the ground. “Who are y
ou with?” someone asks us. “With Figaro. And you?” “With Pelletta.” “We’re with Gori,” names of commanders with bases in other valleys, other mountains.

  And passing by we watch each other, because it’s always strange when one unit meets another, when you see how many different things we are all wearing, clothes of every colour, odd bits of uniforms, but how recognizable and alike we are too, the same tears where our clothes tend to come apart (where the rifle strap rests on the shoulder, where the brass magazines wear out the pockets, where branches and bushes have torn our trousers to shreds), alike and unlike in the weapons we have, a sad collection of battered old “ninety-ones” and German hand grenades with their wooden handles tucked in our belts, in the midst of which the eye settles on examples of light, faster, more modern weapons that the war has scattered across the fields of Europe and that every battle redistributes on one side and the other. Some of us are bearded, some callow, long-haired or shorn, with the spots you get from eating nothing but chestnuts and potatoes for months on end. We size each other up coming out of the dark as though surprised to find that so many of us have survived the terrible winter, to see so many of us together as happens only on days of great victory or great defeat. And unanswered in our eyes as we look at each other are our questions about the day that is dawning, a day being planned in a back-and-forth of commanders with binoculars round their necks hurriedly sorting out the squads along the dusty road, deciding positions and assignments for the attack on Baiardo.

  Here I should open a parenthesis to tell you that this village of the Maritime Pre-Alps, clinging to the rocks like an old castle, was held at the time by the Republican bersaglieri, students for the most part, a well-armed, well-equipped, well-trained body of men controlling the whole olive-green valley right down as far as Ceriana, and that for months a ferocious unrelenting war had been going on between us partisans of the “Garibaldi” brigades and these bersaglieri of Graziani’s army. I would have to add all kinds of other things to explain what the war was like there in those months, but rather than awakening memories this would bury them again under the sedimentary crust of hindsight, the kind of reflections that put things in order and explain everything according to the logic of past history, whereas what I want to bring to light now is the moment when we struck off along a path that winds downwards around the village, in single file through a sparse reddish wood, and got the order: “Take your shoes off your feet and tie them round your necks, heaven help us if they hear footsteps, heaven help us if the dogs start barking in the village; pass the word along and forward in silence.”