| Federico Fellini: Juliet of the Spirits |
‘International success came to Fellini with “La Dolce Vita” (1959) starring Marcello Mastroianni in his first great role as a journalist who tries to balance his job, his marriage, his mistress, his erotic daydreams and his vague ambitions. I think it's Fellini's best movie; others would argue for “8 1/2” (1963), which is about a director trying to make a movie despite personal, professional and health problems. By the time of “Juliet of the Spirits,” the conventional view has it, Fellini was on autopilot, using his waltzing camera and jolly Nina Rota scores to recycle his phantasmagorical visions of human grotesques on parade. The only later film widely admired is “Amarcord” (1974).
‘Sometimes, however, you get your best look at an artist's style when he's indulging it. “Juliet of the Spirits,” Fellini's first film in color, is the work of a director who has cut loose from the realism of his early work and is toying with the images, situations and obsessions that delight him. It is well known that young Federico experienced some kind of psychic fixation during his first visit to the circus, and all of his films feature processions or parades. It may not be too much to suggest that the sight of bizarre characters walking in time to music has a sexual component for Fellini, who almost always composes the scenes the same way: Characters in background and middle distance walk in procession in time with one another, and then a foreground face appears in frame, eager to comment.’
– Roger Ebert
The following extract is the second part of an interview with Federico Fellini by Bert Cardullo.
BC: How does a project of yours come into being in the first place?
FF: The real ideas come to me when I sign a contract and get an advance that I don’t want to give back, when I’m obliged to make a picture. I’m kidding, naturally. I don’t want to appear brutal, like Groucho Marx, but I’m the kind of creator who needs to have a higher authority—a grand duke, the pope, an emperor, a producer, a bank—to push me. Such a vulgar condition puts me on the right track. It’s only then that I start thinking about what I can, and want to, do.
BC: Why do you think you decided to start using color—first for the episode in Boccaccio ’70 and then for Juliet of the Spirits? Was there an external factor, such as an offer from a producer, the sheer possibility of doing a film in color, or was this your own aesthetic choice?
FF: The two cases are different. For the episode in Boccaccio ’70, the choice wasn’t mine. It was an episodic or anthology film, and the producers decided that it was to be in color. I didn’t object at all. The playful air of the whole undertaking and the brief form of the episode seemed just right for an experiment with color without too great a commitment on my part. I didn’t think about the problem very seriously; I didn’t go into it deeply. In Juliet of the Spirits, on the other hand, color is an essential part of the film; it was born in color in my imagination. I don’t think I would have done it in black and white. It is a type of fantasy that is developed through colored illuminations. As you know, color is a part not only of the language of dreams but also of the idea and feeling behind them. Colors in a dream are concepts, not mere approximations or memories.
That said, I certainly prefer a good black-and-white picture to a bad one in color. All the more so because in some cases so-called “natural color” impoverishes the imagination. The more you mimic reality, the more you lose in the imitation. Black and white, in this sense, offers wider margins for the imagination. I know that after having seen a good black- and-white film, many spectators, when asked about its chromatic aspect, will say, “The colors were beautiful,” because each viewer lends to the otherwise black-and-white images the colors he has within himself.
BC: You seem to be saying that you prefer black-and-white to color cinematography, period.
FF: Well, making films in color is, I believe, an impossible operation, for cinema is movement, color immobility; to try to blend these two artistic expressions is a desperate ambition, like wanting to breathe under water. Let me explain. In order to truly express the chromatic values of a face, a landscape, some scene or other, it is necessary to light it according to certain criteria that are functions of both personal taste and technical exigency. And all goes well so long as the camera doesn’t move. But as soon as the camera moves in on the faces or objects to be lighted, the intensity of the light is heightened or lessened, and all the chromatic values are intensified or lessened as a result. In short: The camera moves, the light changes.
There is also an infinitude of contingencies that condition the color, aside from the grave errors that can occur at the laboratory, where the negative can be totally transformed by its development and printing. These contingencies are the innumerable and continual traps that have to be dealt with every day when you shoot in color. For instance, colors interfere or clash, set up “echoes,” are conditioned by one another. Once lighted, color runs over the outline that holds it, emanating a sort of luminous aureola around neighboring objects. Thus there is an incessant game of tennis, let us say, between the various colors. Sometimes it even happens that the result of these changes is agreeable, better than what one had imagined; but this is always a somewhat chancy, uncontrollable occurrence.
Finally, the human eye selects and in this way already does an artist’s work, because the human eye, the eye of man, sees chromatic reality through the prisms of nostalgia, of memory, of presentiment or imagina- tion. This is not the case with the lens, and it happens that you believe you are bringing out certain values in a face, a set, a costume, while the lens brings out others. In this way, writing with a camera—or caméra stylo, as Astruc put it—becomes very difficult. It is as if, while writing, a modi- fying word escapes your pen in capital letters, or, still worse, one adjective shows up instead of another, or some form of punctuation appears that completely changes the sense of a line.
