Thank you very much, Alicia (Kozma), for that kind introduction.
Let me begin by commending you and the IU Cinema team for your outstanding efforts in building on the legacy of the founding director of the Cinema, John Vickers, by further enhancing its reputation as one of the nation's premier university cinemas and for your dedication to continually advancing its innovative and quality programming.
I would also like to once again thank the faculty and staff whose gifts in 2017 generously endowed a fund to establish the McRobbie’s Choice Film Series, a series that I continue to greatly enjoy curating each semester.
I am particularly pleased to be here this evening to say a few words about the films that I have chosen for this semester’s series, "Fellini’s Carnevale," and to introduce the first film in the series Giulietta degli Spiriti or Juliet of the Spirits.
PREVIOUS FELLINI FILM SCREENINGS
I formally dedicated and opened the IU Cinema as IU president exactly 14 years ago this month on January 27, 2011. Later that year, the Cinema screened three films that Jon Vickers invited me to select. I chose three of my favorite films by three directors I regard as among the very greatest masters of cinematic art – Akira Kurosawa, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Federico Fellini. The Fellini film I chose was Juliet of the Spirits.
Then in 2020, which was the 100th anniversary of Fellini’s birth, I had chosen four Fellini films for the spring semester program – Juliet of the Spirits, 8½, Satyricon, and Roma. Though we were actually able to show Juliet of the Spirits, soon after it was shown the pandemic forced the cancellation of the Cinema program for much of the next 18 months. We did, though, manage virtual streamed screenings in the spring semester of 2021 of 8½ and two other Fellini films – Amarcord and And the Ship Sails On.
So, this series is actually the first full in-person Fellini series we have been able to screen since the opening of the Cinema. Of course, Juliet of the Spirits has been screened twice before. But apart from it simply being one of my all-time favorite films, this year is the 60th anniversary of its release in 1965.
I have spoken many times in the past about the long-standing excellence of the academic film studies program at IU and how part of the rationale for the establishment of the IU Cinema was to provide a facility appropriate to support this program. For many years until his retirement, IU had as a member of this program and its faculty one of the world’s preeminent Fellini scholars and experts, Peter Bondanella, who sadly passed away in 2017. Peter wrote or edited four books on Fellini as well as numerous articles and gave many lectures and papers on his work, including the IU Distinguished Research Lecture in 2006 on "Fellini and Fantasy," which I had the great privilege of chairing.
Peter dedicated his wonderful book, A History of Italian Cinema, to Fellini and says:
"As time passes since his disappearance, it is more and more clear what a towering figure he represented in twentieth-century Italian culture and what a seminal contribution he made not only to Italian film but also to cinema in general, a contribution recognized by the best directors of our day."1
Thus, I would like to dedicate this series to the memory of Peter Bondanella, a superb scholar of outstanding excellence of the kind synonymous with a university of IU’s reputation.
FEDERICO FELLINI
There is very little new that can be said about Fellini that Peter and others have not already said, in many cases at exceptional length and with great erudition.
He was without doubt a true cinematic genius. He wrote for about 40 films and directed about half of these. And of these, around seven or eight would be regarded as some of the finest films ever made. Almost no other director has ever reached such a towering level of achievement.
His films are characterized by the remarkable diversity of human types he chose as his actors, and by imagery that is both luxurious and opulent, but also at times extraordinarily surrealistic and hallucinatory, so much so that "Felliniesque" has entered the English language as a descriptive term.
According to Bondanella, who knew Fellini well, between the making of La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8½ (1963), Fellini discovered Jungian psychoanalysis and began seeing a Jungian analyst. It was an experience, to quote Bondanella, that Fellini described as "like the sight of unknown landscapes, like the discovery of a new way of looking at life" where the youthful experiences traumatic and otherwise manifest themselves in dreams and anxieties that can only be overcome by confronting them. Bondanella adds that with the encouragement of the analyst, "Fellini began to record his extremely active dream life, compiling large notebooks with colorful sketches made with felt-tip markers that would become the inspiration for the works shot over the rest of his life."2
The first film he made after what one might term his Jungian awakening was 8½, and the difference stylistically between this and La Dolce Vita is quite striking. La Dolce Vita was Fellini’s farewell to neo-realism.
JULIET OF THE SPIRITS
The next film Fellini made was Juliet of the Spirits. It is a landmark in Fellini’s career, as it is the first full-length film he made in color. In this film we see the first full flowering of his new Jungian perspective on human beings. It is the film about a rather plain, conservative, down-trodden, and repressed Italian housewife, Juliet, living in a beautiful villa near the sea who begins to suspect her husband is having an affair. She begins retreating into a series of dream-like states where her childhood traumatic experiences and phobias in a sense come to life in startling imagery. Gradually Juliet confronts and eventually overcomes these traumas and phobias. It allows Fellini to enthusiastically address many of his favorite themes and targets – religion, sex, and conformity, and as such Bondanella says that it "may well be one of the first 'feminist' films shot in Italy."3
Significantly, the film stars Fellini’s real-life wife, the wonderful actress Guilietta Masina. How much of the film is autobiographical can only be speculated about, but Roger Ebert is quoted as saying, "Fellini lore has it that the master made 'Juliet Of The Spirits' as a gift to his wife."4 It won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and the New York Film Critics Circle award as Best Foreign Language Film.
The cinematography is by one of the greats of Italian neo-realism cinematography, Gianni Di Venanzo, who also worked with Michelangelo Antonioni and other renowned Italian directors. Tragically, he died at 45.
The remarkable and haunting music that you will hear in the film is by the legendary Italian composer, Nino Rota. It is a feature of this film that Rota’s eerie but upbeat music plays whenever Juliet is in reality, so to speak, but cuts out completely when she drifts into a dream state. Rota had a huge musical output and not just for film. He was also responsible for the music for the next two films in this series. He is probably most famous though for the theme music used in The Godfather.
SATYRICON AND ROMA
The next two films in this series are Satyricon (1969) to be screened next Saturday and Roma (1972) to be screened two weeks after that. Together with La Dolce Vita, they may, somewhat loosely, be regarded as comprising Fellini’s Rome trilogy.
Fellini’s Satyricon is a remarkable and dark portrait of Rome during Nero’s reign at the end of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, which collapses with Nero’s assassination in 68 CE. It is a portrait of a society in complete moral, artistic, and spiritual decay and decadence. But this film is no Hollywood sword-and-sandals fantasy. It is liberally adapted from a famous book written in the first century, The Satyricon, by Gaius Petronius Arbiter. It is no coincidence that T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland, that searing portrait of a modern society that he sees at a similar stage of decline, prefaces this poetic masterpiece with a quote from The Satyricon.
Petronius was a true "insider" at Nero’s court and a renowned voluptuary and decadent. He was regarded as Nero’s "arbiter of elegance" who defined style and taste in the court of his psychotic, sociopathic, and paranoid master. In modern terms, Petronius could be regarded as a bit like a Tik Tok influencer to the great and powerful. But like all such paranoids, Nero began to suspect Petronius of conspiracy against him and ordered him to commit suicide. This book has not survived in full, so the film ends abruptly as the book does.
Finally, after Satyricon, Roma has an almost apologetic feel to it. A sense of Fellini saying, "Well, Roman society was pretty bad in the time of Petronius, but it has evolved into something much better today – though it is still pretty strange." This is my admittedly thoroughly subjective reaction to these two films seen together. But as Bondanella notes, Roma is a series of, in general, very affectionate though highly satirical and ironic vignettes of Rome as told through his memories from his youth, as a young man first arriving in Rome, and of contemporary Rome.5 And the sense of "strangeness" is heightened by the disjointed and disconnected nature of these vignettes, many presented with all of Fellini’s characteristic lush cinematographic excess. Watch in particular towards the end of Roma for a brief and witty appearance by the great novelist Gore Vidal who lived for many years in Italy.
Incidentally, Roma as well as the other two films in this series were nearly all filmed in sets created and constructed in the legendary Cinecittà film studios even though Fellini could have shot much of them on location. This use of a superb studio-constructed cinematographic universe helps give Fellini’s films their unique and inimitable character.
With that, please enjoy tonight’s film, Juliet of the Spirits, by one of the greatest masters of film as an art form, Federico Fellini.
SOURCES
1. Peter Bondanella, A History of Italian Cinema, (New York and London: Continuum, 2009), p. xiv.
2. Bondanella, A History of Italian Cinema, p. 294.
3. Bondanella, A History of Italian Cinema, p.295.
