Fellini the Anarchist

The author's expert analysis retraces Fellini's uniqueness, restoring the director's anarchist vision of society, which emerges as by a colour contrast across the whole of his opus.

It was two Frenchmen, the critic André Bazin and later the writer Daniel Pennac, who first spoke of Fellini as an anarchist - and a willful one. After all, his cinema - always attentive to the marginalized, recounting their clouded attempts at revolt and living toil - made use of brilliant screenwriters such as Ennio Flaiano, Tonino Guerra or Bernardino Zapponi, some of whom openly identify as anarchists. And there is no doubt that Romagna's environment and the confrontation with fascism as a young man also influenced his vision of society - as is evident in Amarcord, his most autobiographical film. But Fellini's divergence is equally evident in masterpieces such as Otto e mezzo or La dolce vita, in which the director foreshadows the anthropological mutation taking place in Italy, at the same time sanctioning his irreclaimability as an artist by any bourgeois order. However, it's in his latest works - Satyricon, Casanova and La voce della luna - those in which the narrative becomes metaphor and judgment, that Fellini's irreducible distance from a society of festive and consumerist degeneration is finally made clear, as he purposefully shows us the consumerist euphoria of the "gnocco festival"...

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