Have you ever come out of a movie shaking your head with a smile, wondering how the director ever came up with such inventive and impressive ideas of how to make the movie come alive?
Unless you have some background in the making of film, the techniques used to create cinematic images might never be obvious. How do directors dream up these images and the characters used to put the images across, and what influences might have set them on their way to this origination of art?
Peter Bondanella, professor of comparative literature and chairman of the West European studies department at Indiana University, presented the Fellini Retrospective Lecture, "The Birth of an Auteur: Fellini's Artistic Origins," yesterday afternoon in Dartmouth Hall. The lecture revealed Federico Fellini's background as a cartoonist and a scriptwriter.
Fellini began his career at a young age, selling caricatures to tourists and creating postcards with one-liner gags which went with drawings. Later he began doing cartoons for various humor magazines, and eventually he broke into the world of film.
According to Bondanella, Fellini's scripts, such as in his film "La Strada," started slowly and deliberately, based heavily on literary allusions and traditional styles. Some of these early scripts even included lengthy and philosophically heavy passages from Dante, though these passages were often cut from the final version of the film.
As Fellini's career progressed over the years, he learned to "trust the image" more than the dialogue in his films, as seen in "La Dolce Vita." This strong trust in the value of images over words is something Federico Fellini learned from his earliest influences: cartoons.
Among Fellini's main influences, comics, caricature sketches, variety shows, and radio comedies, cartoons made the most lasting impression on Fellini's artistic development. Born in 1920, he grew up around early types of cartoons which were simply drawings with text underneath the images.
One of these early cartoons, the Happy Hooligan, drawn by Frederick Burr Opper, inspired Fellini throughout his career. The Happy Hooligan, also known as Fortunello, was a melancholy clown and an underdog. This character, wearing a tin can for a hat, anticipated later similar characters like Charlie Chaplin.
Fellini adapted the style of the Happy Hooligan character in a drawing of little clowns on the front of the script, "La Famiglia," which he wrote for Pietro Germi during the height of the Neo-Realist period, between 1947 and 1950.
Fellini's doodles can be seen on the back of the script, revealing a visual mind free at work. Although the main purpose of the folder was to hold the script inside, the spontaneous drawings suggest that Fellini was preoccupied with the dream-world which became a regular part of his work later on in his career.
Fellini's notion of a dreamlike world included American music, unapproachable, beautiful non-Italian women, golden cigarette cases, and other images of decadence. To Fellini's visual mind, a perfect definition of freedom was to see Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing together.
Later drawings show that Fellini's drawings helped him visualize the way he wanted to construct his films. Bondanella showed brightly colored slides of some of Fellini's movie characters depicted by the director in cartoon, including Cabiria from "The Nights of Cabiria" and Giulietta, from "Juliet of the Spirits."
Winsor McCay's "Little Nemo in Slumberland", a cartoon strip invented in 1905, also influenced Fellini's artistic world. The strip always began in the same way: Nemo, a little boy, gets into bed and falls asleep, his dream taking control of the rest of the strip. The image appealed to Fellini, who felt a strong connection to the dream world, and he actually began to dream of himself as Little Nemo.
Fellini was also one of the few in Italy who followed Carl Jung's work on psychoanalysis in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Fellini felt that it is natural for humans to produce images in their heads. Bondanella showed several slides of dreams taken down by Fellini in surrealistic drawings.
Fellini's attraction to bright cartoon-like colors, Bondanella said, was in part due to a job he had in which he was to invent an Italian version of Flash Gordon. The Fascist regime in Italy was against importing non-Italian products at the time, but the American comics, led by Flash Gordon, were too popular to overcome.
Although Fellini's main artistic venue shifted from selling cartoons to directing films, drawings continued to serve him constantly as a means of communication of how he wanted the makeup, the sets, and the characters to appear in filming.
Peter Bondanella will present another lecture in 217 Dartmouth Hall at 4 p.m., entitled "Beyond Neorealism: Fellini, Calvino and fantasy."
