silver nitrate notes

Fellini's La Strada and the Road as Moral Geography

15 nov 2019

Federico Fellini's La Strada (1954) is the film that put him on the international map. It won the first Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1957. It also established what would become the standard Fellini method: a small human story, photographed with an almost documentary plainness, then broken open by passages of grotesque visual invention.

The cinematographer was Otello Martelli (1902-2000), a veteran of Italian neorealism who had shot Rossellini's Paisan (1946) and Visconti's La Terra Trema (1948). Martelli's reputation was for available-light realism in the Italian landscape; Fellini hired him specifically because he wanted the film to look like a neorealist picture for the first two acts and then break that look as the story turned.

The film follows Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina), a half-witted young woman sold by her mother to the itinerant strongman Zampanò (Anthony Quinn). They travel Italy as a two-person circus, Zampanò bending iron bars, Gelsomina playing the drum and making the crowd laugh. They meet the Fool, a rival circus performer (Richard Basehart), whose kindness to Gelsomina and mockery of Zampanò eventually precipitates the film's tragedy.

Martelli shoots most of the first two acts in the flat daylight of the Italian countryside in winter. The small towns, the muddy squares, the roadside inns: all photographed in the plain documentary mode that neorealism had taught him. Masina's face, famously compared by critics to Chaplin's, is at the centre of every composition, but Martelli lights her conservatively, letting the available light do most of the work.

What breaks the documentary register is the scene where Gelsomina, abandoned by Zampanò after he has killed the Fool, wanders into a small religious procession. Fellini and Martelli stage the procession at night, in a mountain town, with enough candles and torches to light the square like a stage. The camera tracks with the procession. Gelsomina, lit as if by the candles alone, moves through the crowd as an almost hallucinated figure. This is Fellini's first visible borrowing from Catholic iconography and the first sign of the director who would make La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8½ (1963). The moment of rupture is in the lighting.

The film is about the slow moral education of Zampanò, who does not understand until the film's last scene that what Gelsomina gave him, he has destroyed. Quinn's performance is the one he would spend the rest of his career not quite matching. Masina's performance is the one Fellini would reprise ten years later in Juliet of the Spirits. Martelli's photography is, for Italian cinema, the bridge between the neorealism that had come before and the Fellini register that would define the 1960s.

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sources
[1] Bondanella, Peter. The Cinema of Federico Fellini. Princeton UP, 1992.
[2] Kezich, Tullio. Federico Fellini: His Life and Work. Faber, 2006.
[3] Burke, Frank. Fellini's Films. Twayne, 1996.
[4] Fellini, Federico. Fellini on Fellini, ed. Costanzo Costantini. Faber, 1995.