FELLINI GETS ANOTHER LOOK AFTER CRITICS KNOCK HIM DOWN SEVERAL PEGS

This year the legendary film director Federico Fellini is getting his first box office test since his movies 8 ½ and La Dolce Vita plummeted in the famous 2022 Sight and Sound ranking of the best 250 films of all time, probably thanks to a reckoning on the treatment of women provoked by the “#MeToo” movement. A new 35mm print of 8 ½ is running all this week at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre as part of a mini-retrospective called “Five by Fellini,” on the heels of a prolonged and much-extended run for the movie at New York City’s Film Forum this Spring. The Music Box’s five Fellini films include both 8 ½ (1963) and La Dolce Vita (1960), as well as La Strada (1954), City of Women (1980) and Amarcord (1983), all five of which depict aspects of Fellini’s relationship to women. He once said that throughout his life he viewed women “from the vantage point of a pre-puberty or slightly post-puberty boy” (The New York Times, Nov. 12, 1979). That perspective is at the heart of the films’ reception both now and, as the Sight and Sound poll may show, in the eyes of history. 

The success in New York of this new print of 8 ½, a semi-autobiographical story about a philandering film director who is creatively blocked while he deals with his own relationships with many women, came despite the fact that a disclaimer at the opening of the movie belatedly warns audiences that “15 percent” of the subtitles in this Italian film are completely unreadable. This inconvenience almost leads us to sympathize with a female character at the end of the movie who declares Fellini's film-within-a-film has “nothing to say! Nothing to say!” After all, if we are not expected to care about 15 percent of the dialogue, how much can the film have to say? On the contrary, however, all five films have much to say, both unctuous and affecting. While 8 ½ might still be best watched in its Criterion Collection 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray disc format, which has no legibility problems at all, the pictures all reward re-visitation.

It's funny that in all the press I’ve seen about the Sight and Sound poll of filmmakers and critics, none has directly drawn the connections between #MeToo, Fellini’s performance on the poll, and the results of the poll as a whole. The closest I saw an article come was a short piece in Variety that covered the drop in Fellini’s popularity and speculated that perhaps #MeToo had made his movies play less favorably. “It was reported during production that Fellini kept a note pinned just below his movie camera’s eyepiece that read, ‘Remember, this is a comedy,’” the article noted. “In the years since #MeToo, that might not be as easy as it once was.” But the Variety story didn’t mention that the rest of the 2022 Sight and Sound list had been dramatically overhauled in a specifically feminist direction, featuring a record number of female directors and a brand-new number one film of all time: Chantal Akerman’s 1975 feminist film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels. The movie displaced Citizen Kane and Vertigo, one of which had topped the list each decade for more than half a century.

Akerman’s ascent blew many minds, not least because the film is a relentlessly thorough three-and-a-half-hour “Slow Cinema” depiction of the mundane details of the life of a woman, typified by one much-referenced six-minute sequence in which Jeanne silently makes meatloaf. The Sight and Sound poll is taken once every 10 years, and this sudden, totally unexpected top ranking for Jeanne Dielman after decades of relative stability on the list left director and screenwriter Paul Schrader speculating that “someone had put their thumb on the scales” of the poll’s tabulation. Schrader implied the vote counting had been tampered with. The real story behind the poll’s dramatic changes probably has more to do with the makeup of the voting body, which has expanded dramatically, and quite possibly now includes more women.  When the poll began in 1952, only 63 voters determined the list. In 2022 it was up to more than 1,600. Previous iterations of the poll have evolved very slowly, with multiple articles over time about how “stodgy” and unchanging the list had been before the revolution in 2022.  

Interestingly, Fellini’s drop on the Sight and Sound poll was not the fault of film directors: 8 ½ tied with Vertigo for 6^th on the director’s poll. But with critics and other voters the drop was steep. It went from #7 in the 2012 poll to #31 in the 2022 ranking. La Dolce Vita, meanwhile, went from #36 to #60. This disparity between directors and other voters may be explained by a few things: First, directors probably remain overwhelmingly male, while the rest of the voting body has perhaps expanded to include more women. Second, 8 ½ is a story about a film director with a creative block and thus appeals to directors who relate. And third, maybe Fellini’s lifestyle, as depicted in 8 ½, of being surrounded by many different female lovers at once is more attractive and relatable to directors than to critics.

Complaints about sexism in Fellini movies is nothing new, as City of Women shows. That film, which tells the story of a horny heterosexual who chases after a woman on a train and ends up being led into a hotel full of thousands of raging feminists, was protested even while it was being made. One feminist newspaper addressed the actresses making the film while it was under production: “You women who agreed to participate in Fellini’s movie, you’ve sold out the movement. Didn’t you feel ashamed of yourself when you acted in those disgusting scenes, didn’t you feel pity or repulsion for yourself?” (Quoted from Frederico Fellini: His Life and Work by Tullio Kezich.) This reaction may make it sound like the film is filled with sexist sex scenes, but after a kiss in the opening 10 minutes, the film’s hapless protagonist does not even get a kiss for the rest of the movie. There are however many scenes to provoke concern. City of Women has been called a sequel to 8 1/2 , as was noted in a brief introduction before the 1980 film at the Music Box by one of the theater’s programmers. But if so, it is sort of a photographic negative sequel, because this time around the lead, played once again by Marcello Mastroianni, is not so much a lothario as a nebbish, really a self-deprecating depiction of Fellini himself. The portrayal of Mastroianni’s character is a contrast to the famously autobiographical character who leads 8 ½, the film director Guido Anselmi. The last third of that film depicts Guido’s fantasy of keeping all his favorite women in a harem, at one point literally subjugating them with a whip – and the impacts of this on his relationship with those women. This time, in City of Women, it’s the women who carry the whips, as they turn out to rule the whole town in which Snaporaz (Mastroianni) has managed to strand himself.

Not that the portrayal of women in City of Women is flattering. Mastroianni told reporters that the film was an attempt by Fellini and himself to understand what modern women are all about. That description makes the film much more offensive than it would be had that not been the purpose, as it shows that the pair really have no idea about women. Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader said the film’s “hallucinatory survey of the women’s movement” is not “reactionary enough to offend or progressive enough to matter.” Roger Ebert didn’t like the film either but said Fellini was incapable of making a boring movie. That City of Women is not. It remains entertaining even as it pushes the edges of an endurable running time, at a typical-for-Fellini two hours and 18 minutes.  

The uproar over Fellini’s depiction of the male-female divide really goes back at least to his first big hit, La Strada, about a woman (played by by Fellini’s wife Giulietta Masina) who is purchased by a circus performer who subsequently marries her, bullies her, and even rapes her. The sexual politics of La Strada probably played into a battle over the direction of post-Fascist, post-war Italy that sparked a fist fight when it debuted at the Venice Film Festival in 1954. The fisticuffs were caused by the shift from the then-dominant Italian film style of Neorealism to the new styles of La Strada and Luchino Visconti’s historical melodrama Senso, which were both seen as betraying Neorealism’s political and social priorities but in very different ways. The fight was between supporters of the two films. Masina’s character’s lack of resistance to her mistreatment probably sparked anger from corners of the audience who felt it mirrored a retreat from political engagement in Italy. Meanwhile, when researchers from the University of Oxford collected memories of filmgoing in 1950s Italy from audience members of the time, the reactions from women were often the longest and most engaged, according to an article on TheConversation.com. “They recognized [the lead female character] Gelsomina’s fragility in the face of [the male lead] Zampano’s womanizing and commands, echoing all too closely Masina’s subjugation of the whims of her own bulky husband, Fellini – he was notoriously harsh with her on set,” the article reads. “Perhaps the film also reflected their own experiences of a society in which men still very much had the brutal upper hand.” And yet audiences often react quite differently to La Strada than Fellini's other films because of the powerfully sympathetic central performance by Masina, who echoes Charlie Chaplin and whom Charlie Chaplin called one of his favorite actresses of all time. Masina reportedly told reporters she had received many letters from women who said their absent husbands returned home after seeing La Strada, because the portrayal was so authentically compassion-inspiring. (Pope Francis called it “the movie that perhaps I loved the most” in an interview with The Jesuit Review in 2013.) 

Similarly sympathetic viewings are often reported online of other Masina performances, most notably Nights of Cabiria (1957), though that film once again shows her in dire straits and mistreated by men. After 8 ½, Fellini seemingly attempted to make amends for the wrongs to the wife character in that film (“his idea of a liberated woman is fairly clear from the wife-character in 8 ½,” Ebert wrote in his review of City of Women. “She is severe, wears horn-rim glasses, and wants to spoil all the fun.”), casting Masina in the brilliant if overlong Juliet of the Spirits, the whole of which was described as a gift from the director to the actress. But it’s a strange gift: Fellini wrote a story about her devastation at his cheating on her, made hay of her having hired a detective to track his infidelities, made her uncomfortable by sharing her memories, disagreed with her on the meaning of the ending, and to some critics’ minds depicted her as no fun all over again. (See for example Ebert’s review of that one, too: "Certainly Fellini does not present her as someone it would be fun to be married to. She’s a house-proud little bourgeois Hummel figurine, meek, frumpy, sexually timid.") Still, Masina’s wide-eyed facial nuance is impossible not to sympathize with, and it transforms the movies she’s in, despite thunderingly un-feminist situations, to that extent into sensitive works to feminine concerns.

Masina is not in Amarcord, and in some ways the absence shows. The film depicts Fellini’s memories of growing up in Fascist Italy in the 1930s with so sweepingly evocative a style that Woody Allen cribbed its rhythms and notes with flabbergasting exactitude. Its depiction of women, often in closeups on their rear ends, is the clearest example of that pre-pubescent vantage point on the female sex he said he never lost. The film persuades us that this is what growing up in Rimini, Italy was like, and to the extent that it's an accurate portrait of a time and place its depiction of such sexism serves a purpose. 

What Amarcord does for childhood in Rimini, La Dolce Vita does for adulthood in Rome: a vivid, stylized depiction, though the style is very different. Once again led by Mastroianni, this time as a pop culture journalist named Marcello, the film depicts his chase after Rome’s sweet life with multiple women while neglecting his own sick wife. Much of the commentary on sexism in this film centers on its treatment of liberated women, but the film is unforgiving in its description of the ends of a male-centric life of philandering.

The centerpiece of the Music Box’s “Five by Fellini” program is 8 ½, however. Ultimately, of course, that movie s ranking as the 31^st best film of all time is not much of a fall from grace. But the change from #7 reflects the growing power of those creatures he always found so mysterious. To an ever-growing degree he must share the power of his voice with the voices of the women who react to his.