II, re-emerged in force. First, it was visible in the neorealist movement. And by the end of the 1950s, it was crystallized in one splendidly imaginative figure.
That person, of course, was Federico Fellini, who may well have been the last completely articulate genius Italy produced in the domain of the visual arts. Fellini was not the only Italian moviemaker of exceptional talent working in Rome immediately after World War II. There were other, perhaps slightly less gifted figures: Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica come to mind. Others may yet appear, and one should never assume that the long history of Roman painting is permanently closed, deep as its hiatus now looks—though the “death of painting” is constantly announced, it never quite happens. But certainly they have not appeared yet, and even the most sanguine tour of the horizon does not reveal another talent of Fellini’s order in the art of film. Not yet. Perhaps not ever.
The most enduring gift Mussolini made to Italian culture had been the creation of Cinecitta, the studio complex erected in 1937 just outside Rome. As the Duce so correctly pointed out, “Cinema is the most powerful weapon” for propaganda purposes, including a people’s understanding of its own history. Within six years of the official opening of Cinecitta, a ninety-nine-acre spread which had large facilities for training, production and post-production—it was in effect Europe’s only full-service production center—almost three hundred films had been made there, partly government-financed. That number is now closer to three thousand; and of course these vary extremely in quality.
Because of the disruption of war, there was little security for Cinecitta. When Italy surrendered in 1943, the whole complex was intermittently bombed by the Allies, though not heavily enough to destroy its production capability altogether. The Germans, retreating, looted Cinecitta’s equipment and facilities. Immediately after the war, when it became clear that bombing the sets and sound stages was of little strategic use, the Allies converted Cinecitta into a camp for refugees and other displaced persons. It was, in effect, closed down; and Italian filmmakers, deprived of its facilities, took to the streets, using contemporary Rome as their setting and amateur actors as their players. The result was “neorealist” cinema, which amounted to a complete rebirth of the medium in Italy. One “classic” of this type was the film that made Roberto Rossellini’s reputation, Roma citta aperta (Rome, Open City), starring Anna Magnani and coscripted by the as yet little-known Federico Fellini, and released in 1945; it was partly shot as documentary during the actual liberation of Rome, and created a sensation when it took the Grand Prize at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival. Another neorealist landmark was Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di bicicletta (Bicycle Thieves). The masterpiece of the neorealist genre was, however, Rossellini’s film. As not infrequently happens in times of shortage, its moody newsreel style was partly an accident, due to a lack of film stock, so that its unexplained variations in image consistency are now agreed to have been produced by poor processing and insufficient fixing. Had it not been for the war, this belt-tightening would not have taken place, and Cinecitta would probably have kept turning out the inferior, anodyne telefono-bianco romances and comedies that had provided much of its staple fodder in the late 1930s and early ’40s. But as things stood after the triumph of Roma citta aperta, a new form of hybrid cinema had been created, partly by design and partly by accident; quite suddenly, Italy—whose influence on movies had been slight, at best, before—was creating world standards for film from its local industry. The influence of Roma citta aperta would be felt for more than twenty years, in such works as Ermanno Olmi’s Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) and Michael Cimino’s much-underrated Heaven’s Gate (1980).
It would be quite wrong to suppose that most of the productions at Cinecitta followed suit. After a grittily realist start, the movies found their natural home in a ready-made ancient Rome touched up with plaster, among what one of their titles (1984) called Le calde notti di Caligola, The Hot Nights of Caligula. Certain historical figures kept cropping up. One of the earliest Rome-set features, long antedating Cinecitta, was Spartacus (1914). It was followed by Spartaco (1953), and Stanley Kubrick’s excellent Spartacus, starring Kirk Douglas (1960), followed by Son of Spartacus (played by that doughty American weightlifter Steve Reeves, effortlessly tossing huge chunks of foam plastic around the Forum) and, as further spin-offs from the gladiator mode, The Revenge of Spartacus (1965), Spartacus and the Ten Gladiators (1964), Triumph of the Ten Gladiators (1964), and, perhaps inevitably, Gladiatress (2004). Some sixteen features, between 1908 and 2003, bore the title of Julius Caesar, and Gerard Depardieu even played him in French (Asterix et Obelix: Mission Cleopatre, 2002). The most famous and ruinously expensive of all the Rome reconstructions was Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1963 Cleopatra, the cheapest and sluttiest was the Warholish Cleopatra (1970), starring Viva and Gerard Malanga, and the silliest was the British Carry On Cleo (1964). The first of the Antony-and-Cleopatra movies was released in 1908, and it was followed by more than twenty bearing the lady’s name.
In the 1950s, thanks to the cheapness of Rome production and the attractions of the city itself—what American actor wasn’t going to prefer living in a grand Roman hotel to working in Hollywood?—giant international coproductions were filmed there, such as Ben-Hur (1959), the 1951 Quo Vadis, and Spartacus (the fourth version, 1960). But the film director whose name is most strongly, indeed indissolubly, linked to the Via Vittorio Veneto was Federico Fellini, and the movie which provided the link was his best-known one, La dolce vita.
No film has ever fascinated me more. This really was Europe on celluloid. It seems odd that Rome would have been rendered more attractive to a writer in his hot-potato twenties by seeing a film as intensely pessimistic as La dolce vita, but it was, and for a double reason. First, I was a callow and inexperienced romantic, yearning for foreign parts; second, Fellini’s film was a real (if flawed) masterpiece about places and situations that seemed overwhelmingly exotic to me. There was no gainsaying either.
Shooting on La dolce vita had begun in March 1959, and the film was released in a storm of publicity and controversy early in 1960. It broke all box-office records; L’osservatore romano, the Vatican’s official paper, called for its censorship; crowds queued for hours to see it; and Fellini was physically attacked at a screening in Milan. For those who have not watched it, it is about the sexual and emotional experiences of a peripheral journalist, Marcello Rubini, played by the iconically handsome Marcello Mastroianni, who makes his living purveying trivial gossip about celebrities to the Italian press. (Originally, the producer, Dino De Laurentiis, had wanted Paul Newman to play Marcello, to guarantee his investment; Fellini adamantly insisted against it.) In order to gather the gossip he peddles, which is never of the least political or cultural significance, he hangs out around the bars and cafes of the Via Veneto. (At the time Fellini was making this movie, the Via Veneto was not yet the caricature of urban glamour La dolce vita turned it into. But it was getting there, and the success of the movie cemented the process in the sixties. Indeed, a stone plaque on one of the buildings acknowledges Fellini’s role in “creating” the Via Veneto as everyone came to know it.)
Marcello is a weakling, one of the class of people who create nothing substantial or even authentic but to whom things merely happen and create a brief, tinny resonance—the essence of voyeurism, which is how Fellini portrays journalism in general. His companion, the Sancho Panza to this ineffectual and passive Quixote—for all gossip papers need photos—is an irrepressibly cheery, fast-footed, and pea-brained photographer named Paparazzo (Walter Santesso)—whose name, such being the film’s enormous afterlife, was to become generic for gossip photographers from then to now. (The name came from the character Paparazzo in a long-disregarded novel set in Italy by the semi-bohemian English novelist George Gissing, By the Ionian Sea, but that title seems to have no bearing on the film. Gissing’s Paparazzo does not even have a camera.)
The atmosphere of fraudulence leaking from on high is set in the very first shots—a clatter of rotor blades that
