Fellini Lexicon by Sam Rohdie;

Author:Sam Rohdie;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2019-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

La dolce vita: Marcello and Sylvia

He is himself and not himself, a figure of fiction, an actor, and the person standing outside of himself looking in. He is in all these positions at once. 'Marcello' and Marcello are side by side, accompanying each other, reflecting one another, the self and its shadow, the one and its double. Marcello never completely enters artifice but never remains in a reality outside it except to point to the game, the play, the instability. But the pointing is part of the game and every outside in Fellini has another outside beyond it and so on.

'Marcello' seems often like a child wandering through a Luna Park which includes memories of childhood. As the character 'Marcello', he projects himself back into his imagined, fictional childhood when he was the child, 'Marcell(ino)'.

This happens in Otto e mezzo, La dolce vita, La città delle donne, Ginger e Fred and Intervista. Marcello as 'Marcello' or as Marcello by a different name, is the witness to his imagined self voyaging through the images in his mind played out as images on the screen.

In La città delle donne, Snàporaz–Marcello is in a fairy land of desire, infantilism and fear as surely as Jerry Lewis is in Ladies' Man.

The fairy land is regressive. Snàporaz enters it through a hole in a wall onto a slide, not unlike Alice through the looking glass.

The hole is vaginal, slippery, moist.

Snàporaz emerges sometime later as an adult or at least as more aware, regarding himself and his journey. This passage is repeated by Marcello in film after film. Grown but not adult, he returns to infancy to be reborn again by travelling back.

'Marcello' can and cannot be identified with Fellini.

He cannot be because the character of the one is differently located than the person of the other. This is true between Fellini and Mastroianni. It is also true because when Mastroianni is Fellini he is so at a distance.

It is Fellini projected, thrust forward and fictionalised.

On the other hand as Mastroianni is divided between Marcello/'Marcello' so too is Fellini divided between Fellini/'Fellini', one place of make-believe and another of awareness. It is the division and the impossibility of seizing upon it and possessing it as an identity that is duplicated between Fellini and Mastroianni. The film for Fellini is the voyage through fantasies and instincts as a voyage toward the sources of his creativity. Mastroianni is his vehicle and the film is also that vehicle and the consequence and evidence of the journey.

Almost every Fellini film from first to last is an entry into make-believe toward a consciousness of it in the facing of it and that consciousness is the film in its forms.

In Block-notes di un regista, I clowns, Roma, Amarcord, Prova d'orchestra, E la nave va and Intervista, Fellini plays himself as Mastroianni does as 'Marcello'. There are moments when Fellini encounters 'Fellini' and the two selves greet each other as Marcello comes across 'Marcello' on the set, like two symmetrical clowns in one body, distorted doubles of oneself, facing each other across a divide.

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