Cultural Cohesion (73 page)

The tension between these two attitudes was fruitful for him as long as they could be held in balance. When it became evident, however, that the only wish of the poor was to join the consumers he despised, Pasolini could find no recourse except to enrol them among his enemies. In his three, increasingly dreadful last movies, his ideal pre-bourgeois world of freely available sex is successively discovered in Boccaccio, Chaucer and de Sade. The trilogy makes painful viewing. Escapism is too dignified a word. Pasolini was fleeing into a past that never existed from a present he couldn't face. In a notorious front-page piece for the
Corriere
he dismissed his once beloved Roman sub-proletariat as having succumbed to “a degeneration of bodies and sex organs.” Pasolini even had the gall to suggest that education was ruining them. For the admirer of Gramsci it was a sad betrayal. Gramsci had always been delighted by any evidence of his proletarians' improving themselves. Pasolini wanted them to stay the way they were. When they showed signs of independent life, he lost interest in them.

Perhaps too kindly, Mr. Schwartz doesn't make much of the possibility that they were losing interest in Pasolini. One of the most famous men in the country, recognizable at a glance, he still drove by night into the territory of the Violent Life. But time was ticking by. Once, the car and the clothes would have been enough. Now he needed his fame. What next? Charlus with his rouged cheeks? Aschenbach with his rinse? Rage, rage against the dyeing of the hair. Luckily, Pasolini never had to face the sad, slow twilight of the predator gone weak in the hams. He died the way he had lived, dramatically.

He had always thought that life was like that: drama. It was the belief that made him the kind of Communist who sounds like a Fascist. His politics were an insult to his intelligence. But there was a saving grace. The Italians are cursed with a language so seductive it can gloss over anything; Pasolini could always make it reveal more than it concealed, even when he talked tripe. He cut through the mellifluous uproar to speak the unspeakable. Pasolini's matchless ability to be irritating in every way meant that he was also irritating in the ways that count. Beneath Pasolini's politics lay his perceptions, and some of those remain permanently true. Free societies feel free to waste human lives, pushing them to the edge and calling them part of the landscape. The better we are at telling ourselves that this is inevitable, the more we still need telling that it won't do.

The New Yorker
, December 28, 1992, and January
4, 1993;

later included in
Even As We Speak
, 2001

POSTSCRIPT

When I was at Cambridge in the mid-1960s, my other seat of education was Florence, where my future wife was enrolled for a doctorate at the university. I was never enrolled anywhere except at a bar near the Bargello, but I learned the language, read in it hungrily and loved the life. This piece and the next were two of the long-term fruits. There is nothing like submission to another culture for getting a handle on one's own. At the time, the brightest foreign scholars in Florence were American graduate students. I was lucky enough to make friends with several of them, and was always impressed by how they could range in their talk from Pontormo to U.S. foreign policy during the course of a single flask of chianti. But when they went home they were claimed by the university system that had paid for their time abroad, and their civilized knowledge was soaked up by the learned quarterlies. What was good for academic learning was bad for literary journalism until the advent of the
New York Review of Books
, which gave the scholars who had something extra to say a chance to go moonlighting, with excellent results.

2003

45

MONDO FELLINI

Asanisimasa
is a seeming nonsense word that crops up early in Fellini's
. Later on you find out that it isn't nonsense at all, but a real word expressed in a children's code, like one of the language games Mozart played with his sister. Simpler even than pig Latin, the code works by inserting an “s” after each vowel and then repeating the vowel before moving on to the next consonant. Take out the padding and
asanisimasa
contracts to
anima
, the Italian for “soul.” At the heart of Fellini's greatest film, one of the greatest works of art of the century, is a single word.

To get to it, though, you have to do more than crack a childishly simple code. You have to follow the director down a long corridor in an old-fashioned luxury hotel. It is late at night. Along the corridor comes Marcello Mastroianni in the role of Guido Anselmi, a renowned Italian director buckling under the strain of starting work on his latest, make-or-break film before the script is really finished. Guido is wearing a black hat with its sides curled up, he has hangdog bags under his eyes and his overcoat is draped over his forearm. Surely this is the studied sartorial insouciance of Fellini himself—a clear confession that the director is his own hero. We know who this is. We know what must be going on in his head: anguish, remorse, panic. But without breaking step in his forlorn march he suddenly twists and flicks one foot sidewise while it is in midair, as if he were momentarily attacked by the memory of a dance. Why does he do that?

I first asked myself this question in Florence, in 1963, when
came out. Even in the delighted shock of that first viewing, it was clear that
had dozens of such apparently self-contained moments, enigmatic yet instantly memorable: the squeaky crackle of Guido lying back with languorous angst on a bed heaped with the eight-by-ten glossies of actresses from whom he has to choose the supporting cast; the sheeting that shrouds the scaffolding of the uncompleted rocket ship flapping in the sea wind at night; Guido's father going down into his hole in the ground; the ancient cardinal's face inhaling the steam in the sauna at the spa; Sandra Milo, Guido's airhead mistress, trying to walk in two different directions at once when she spots Anouk Aimée, the terrifyingly poised wife; Guido slumped in the preview theatre in front of the intellectualizing screenwriter who has nagged him beyond endurance and who, in the beleaguered director's imagination, has just allowed himself to be hanged. If you could have stopped the film from moment to moment, it might have looked like any film in which a visually gifted director lights fireworks that will illuminate the darkness of an unilluminating script. But the film established its coherence in the first few minutes and unfolded inevitably. It was a film about an unfinished film—about a film that never even started—and yet it looked and sounded more finished than any film you had ever seen. About a director who didn't know what to do next, it always knew exactly what to do next. It was a cosmic joke.

That much I got, though I couldn't understand all the dialogue. At the time, I knew barely enough Italian to follow the story. My future wife, who spoke Italian fluently, was sitting beside me: she disliked having her concentration broken but provided whispered explanations when asked, filling in the details about the lying, cheating husband, who is insufficiently consumed by guilt for having granted himself romantic privileges on the strength of his creative gift, while his classy wife faces yet another crisis in the endless process of deciding whether to put up with him or walk away. The film should have functioned as a pre-emptive counselling session—an advertisement for the advisability of filling out the divorce papers before signing the marriage register. But the aesthetic thrill overwhelmed everything. Long before the lights went up on the stunned audience, everyone in it knew that this was a work to grow old with—one that, as T. S. Eliot once said about Dante's poetry, you could hope to appreciate fully only at the end of your life. You couldn't expect, then, to tease out the meaning of the film's single moments. First, you had to absorb the impact of its initial impression, as authoritative and disabling as that created by the two great widescreen Botticellis in the Uffizi—only a few hundred yards away from the cinema where
was playing
in prima visione
—which slowed your step and kept you at a distance while you strove to refocus your brain along with your eyes.

In the subsequent three decades, growing older if not wiser, I have seen
every time it was re-released. Now there is a video of it: not a perfect way for a newcomer to see the film but, for anyone who knows it well, a handy
aide-memoire
to the order of its events—an order that, though precisely calculated, is inherently bewildering, because the chronology of the immediate narrative sometimes includes scene-long figments of Guido's self-serving imagination and is continually intersected by divergent ripples spun out from his underlying memory. On the whole, “personal” films are to be distrusted, if by personal it is meant that they are personal to their authors. (After the
auteur
theory took hold, no director could make a film bad enough to be dismissed: a kludge on the scale of John Ford's
Seven Women
was discovered to be personal instead of lousy.) But
is the kind of film that becomes personal to its viewer. Whether
is really about Fellini is a question raised by the film itself—a question answered, in part, by the uncomfortable certitude of any married man who watches it that it is really about
him
. Men, we're all in this together. Fellini had us figured out.

Until almost the eve of the start of production on
the Guido Anselmi character wasn't a film director. We know this because Deena Boyer, a journalist born in America but raised in France, was trusted enough by Fellini to be given unprecedented access to the preparation of this film about the preparation of a film. Even the best movie books are usually more entertaining than indispensable; hers breaks the rule. It was first published in French, as
Les 200 Jours de
, but I have never seen it except in German, as a tatty second-hand Rowohlt paperback called
Die 200 Tage von
. There is no point in trying to be omniscient about a work of art whose stature depends upon its knowing more about life than you do, but Boyer's supply of first-hand information is handy for dispelling illusions, and the illusion that Fellini set out to make a film about a film director is a crucial one to have dispelled. Woody Allen's
Stardust Memories
, in part a copycat of
, could hardly work if it were not about an artist in a crisis. But Fellini's ur-hero was
l'homme moyen sensuel
in a crisis. At first, he was “just anyone,” or, as Fellini told Boyer, “a man who goes to a watering place and starts thinking about his life.”