Fellini's Luci del variet: The Limitations of the Stage and the "Morality of Movies" Frank Burke Italica,

Vol. 55, No. 2, Theatre. (Summer, 1978), pp. 225-235.

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FELLINI'S LUCI DEL VARIETA:

THE LIMITATIONS OF THE STAGE
AND THE " MORALITY OF MOVIES "

Luci del varietti (1950) marked the directorial debut of Federico Fellini, who has since become one of the world's most respected narrative artists. Though Fellini was not the film's sole director (he was assisted by Alberto Lattuada), he wrote the original story and the screenplay, and he chose the actors. The film is clearly Felliniesque in tone, in subject matter, and even in structure; and Fellini himself has expressed a strong sense of authorship in discussing it: " I regard the film as one of mine." Luci del varietii has been largely ignored, even in booklength studies of Fellini's career, partly because it has been considered inconsequential and partly because Fellini wasn't its sole director. However, the film is far from inconsequential. I t is a coherent and sophisticated vision of people who, living life in the artificial and distortive lights of the variety theatre, become increasingly absorbed by a world of illusion. And, Felliniesque through and through, i t serves as a valuable " introduction " to aesthetic and moral concerns that will prove central to all Fellini's films to follow. In particular, by accentuating the limitations of theatre and the theatrical-the world of stage(d) reality-it implicitly reveals theatre to be the " enemy " of cinema and simultaneously affirms the moral supremacy of cinematic properties and values. The film focusses on the activities of Checco dal Monte (Peppino de Filippo), Liliana Antonelli (Carla del PoggioLattuada's wife), and Melina Moor (Giulietta Masina-Fellini's wife). Liliana, obsessed by show business ambitions, joins the third-rate vaudeville troupe which includes Checco and Melina (Checco's fianc6e). Checco becomes increasingly infatuated with Liliana, not only as a woman but as a symbol for the fulfillment of his fantasies. When the troupe travels to Rome, Checco and Liliana abandon it-hoping to sell themselves as a " team " to a major show business impresario. Liliana

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becomes the constant companion of Adelmo Conti-an associate of the impresario Parmesani-and she ends up signing a contract with Parmesani and abandoning Checco. At the end of the film, Liliana is on her way to success as a soubrette in the Parmesani Revue, and Checco is on his way back to the provinces, having rejoined Melina and their old troupe-in body, if not in mind. The opening moments of Luci del varietit introduce a pattern that will characterize the film's movement as a whole. The movie opens at night, in a deserted street outside a variety theatre. The camera eye focusses briefly on the image of a clock, before abandoning it. Then, the camera eye reveals a hunchback emerging from the shadows and walking quickly to examine a photo display which advertises the show in progress within the theatre. Then, the camera eye abandons the hunchback, moves into the theatre, and then moves u p on stage-where it becomes and observer of the vaudeville troupe. Implicit and recurrent in all this activity is the abandonment of practical reality and the world of physical necessity for a world of stage reality-or illusion, artifice, fantasy. It is evident in the camera eye's movement from the clock (practical reality) and the hunchback (physical necessity) to the world of the stage. It is apparent in the hunchback's immediate gravitation toward the photo display. And it is subtly present in the fact that, except for the hunchback, the street is deserted, while the theatre is packed-leaving the impression that virtually an entire town has fled the world of everyday reality for the make-believe world of theatre. The movement from practical reality to stage realityfrom fact to fantasy-that informs the film's opening moments also informs the film's major geographical movement: from the provinces to Rome. The provinces are imaged largely as a world of physical activity (walking in particular), of physical needs and processes (hunger, thirst, eating, drinking), and of physical environment (extreme heat, torrential rain, and so on). I n contrast, the Rome of Luci del varietit is a world of overwhelming artifice and illusion. comprihed almost solely

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of artists' hangouts, decadent nightclubs, and theatrical rehearsals. It is a world of " International Fantasy," to borrow the title of one of Checco's stage routines. Not only does the movement from practical to stage reality underlie geographical change within the film, it informs the evolution of Liliana from a child of the provinces to a soubrette in Parmesani's Revue, and it characterizes the career of Checco as he tries, via Liliana, to break free of Melina and his variety troupe and attain Love, Renewed Youth, Success, Acclaim as an " Artiste," Power, and so forth. Liliana's urge to succumb to stage reality and illusion is evident from her initial appearances in the film. Her major ambition is to get into show business which, as it functions in Luci del varietii, is a world of escapist fantasy. And, perhaps even more important, she wants to become a STAR-an ideal or abstraction whose realization depends less on her own talents than on the arbitrary, uneducated opinions of others. (This is underscored by the fact that the closer Liliana gets to stardom, the less she exercises or seeks to refine her musical talents-which are negligible to begin with.) Her attainment of stardom by the film's end constitutes her total absorption by a world of illusion. Liliana's growing absorption by illusion manifests itself through her growing loss of identity and through her progressive disconnection from the world around her. Her loss of identity is suggested both when she abandons her dress with her initial " L " on it midway through the film and when Checco changes her name from Antonelli to " Lilli " for poster advertisements of the international troupe he i s attempting to assemble. Her sacrifice of identity becomes emphatically clear when she adopts an unflattering short hairdo midway through the film and begins to wear tailored suits-both of which accompany and accentuate a growing hardness and masculinization of her facial features. The extent to which Liliana becomes disconnected from her world in the course of the film becomes graphically evident if we contrast her initial appearance with her final two appearances. The first time we see Liliana she is in the midst

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of a crowd, shot i n high angle-which emphasizes her centerediless in h e r world. At Parmesani's Revue, however, she's high on a stage (removed from an audience instead of i n one as she was at the film's beginning), and as her act concludes she draws back from the audience and is detached from it by the closing curtain. I n the final scene, she is far above Checco in her Erst class compartment, cloistered in a fur coat that is far more ample than weather would demand. Just as Liliana becomes wholly absorbed by the illusion of stardom i n the course of Luci del varietk, Checco becomes absorbed by the illusion of Liliana. The nature of this absorption is suggested by the names of the two characters. " Checco," particularly as t h e name is pronounced in the film strongly Italian word for " blind "-and Checco suggests " cieco "-the clearly becomes blind to reality through his involvement with Liliana.2 " Liliana " recalls " Lilith," a demon of the night in mythology, and she acts upon Checco as a demon of darkness, delusion, and consequent blindness. She activates all his power3 of fantasy and bewitches him into believing she possesses the key to all he would like to have and be. (She does most of this unintentionally; Checco's bewitchment is primarily the result of his susceptibility t o self-delusion.) As the movie progresses and as Checco becomes blinded by his entrancement with Liliana, he projects more and more value onto Liliana, viewing her increasingly as a symbol and agent for his own advancement rather than as a concrete individual ( a process which is facilitated by Liliana's own growing de-individualization). Early i n t h e film, Checco sees Liliana pretty much for what she is-an attractive young girl-and h e seeks from her only values which she has or potentially could give : sexual pleasure, beauty, love. However, by the time h e has arrived in Rome, h e has begun to see Liliana almost solely as the embodiment of much less tangible values: Fame, Artistic Acclaim, Success, Power-values which, unlike sexuality and beauty, she does not inherently possess, and which, unlike love, she doesn't have the capacity to confer. The full extent to which Checco loses touch with reality and succumbs to illusion during the film becomes clear in the

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final scene, as he briefly encounters Liliana, who is en route to stardom, and then boards a train with Melina and his old ~ troupe, who are en route back to the p r ~ v i n c e s .The key indication lies in Checco's insistence on living a life of total pretense. When he sees Liliana, he pretends he's become a great success. (The troupe's destination clearly undercuts this.) H e pretends his troupe includes a Viennese ballet. (There's no evidence for this whatsoever.) H e pretends to Melina that h e loves her. (His comment is contradicted immediately by his flirtation with a young girl.) He pretends to the girl with whom he flirts that she has initiated the conversation. (The opposite is the case.) And, in trying to impress the girl, h e pretends he's an impresario. (He's merely one of the troupe's performers.) I n doing all this, Checco is imposing on his world all the illusions he has associated with Liliana: Success, Love, Power (i.e., being an impresario), Artistic acclaim (now projected onto the mythical Viennese ballet), and the capacity to " connect " with Youth and Feminine Beauty. Perhaps the most accurate description of Checco's condition and relation to his world in the film's final scene is provided by Checco himself i n a seemingly simple comment which says much more than h e suspects: " I'm in the theatre." As Luci del varietic comes to a close, Checco, though sitting theatre of his on a train, is indeed " i n the theatre "-the dissociated imagination. I n total defiance of the realities that surround him, he has manufactured a make-believe vision of life in which all the world's a theatre and he's the main attraction. I n so doing, h e has fulfilled more completely than anyone else in his world the impulse to abandon reality that was present in the camera eye's initial movement in the film, in the vaudeville troupe's journey to Rome, and in Liliana's surrender to the Roman world of illusion. I n selecting the world of vaudeville and the stage as the in which Liliana and Checco lose themselves in illusion, Fellini envisions the stage as a world of extreme limitations-one whose very nature and properties impair the individual's power to grow. His " portrait " of theatrical

" arena "

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activity accentuates virtually all the negative qualitiea pozaible and implicit within the theatre experience. The world of the stage in Luci del variet& is above all a world of distance, separation, compartmentalization. 3 o t only is the theatre divorced from the world of the town throughout the movie, but the backstage world of financial pressures and of egos-in-conflict (particularly evident in the film's first backstage scene) is divorced from the onstage world where illusions of happiness and harmony prevail. The theatre world is even further polarized by the separation of the stage from the audience and by the elevation of the former far above the latter. This creates, in effect, two " mini " worlds of performer and spectator and limits the kind of unification that can occur to the mutual absorption of the two worlds in the artificial stage reality of symbol and projected illusion. Distance and divorce are also implicit in the theatre's glorification of disguise and role-playing-the immersion of the performer in multiple characters or personae that divorce him o r her both from authentic personal identity and from an authentic, unmediated encounter with others. As a result of the distance between audience and performer and the emphasis on character or role in Luci del varietk, theatre within the film is, to a large extent, reducer1 to \erbal abstraction. I n order to project and communicate their roles to a distant audience, the performers must rely on words-and particularly on the vague generalizations of song lyrics, which function as the major illusion-generators in the film's theatrical performances. All the above helps contribute to what is probably the most subtle yet significant facet of theatre in Luci del varietci: its atmosphere of worship, self-abasement, and submission to authority. The extreme elevation of the performers above the audience, the " divinely " exotic roles they assume, and their verbal authority from on high (cf. the Mount Sinai archetype in Western religious experience) make them virtual god<. The stage becomes the altar before which the spectators worship in blind self-abandonment, ceding all individuality to authority and control from without. The epitome of this is Parmesani's

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Revue-imaged as a decadent religious ceremony which evokes debased reverential ecstasy from the crowd. The emphasis on authority and worship within the theatre experience provides Luci del varietic with its broad moral scope. T h e mindless dependency of the audience becomes emblematic of the more general reliance on external authority that Fellini sees as a fundamental weakness in Italian society-fostering t h e stranglehold over the individual enjoyed by Church and Family, and allowing in extreme instances for the ascendancy of something as dehumanizing as Fascism. While distance, disguise and role-playing, verbal abstraction, and self-abasement are the limitations of theatrical experience most blatantly on display in Luci del varietic, there are other less blatant but equally important limitations within the film's theatrical world. There is a stifling rationality and order to theatre life. Contracts, railroad timetables, and rigid starting times for performances rule the performers' lives. Moreover the acts within the performances are ruled over by a master of ceremonies (yet another embodiment of authority) who introduces and describes each act-insuring that all change and progression is confined within rationally comprehensible boundaries. There is also a stifling spatial confinement to the stage, which limits motion virtually to the point of stasis. Finally, there's endless repetition-aptly emphasized in the convention of the " encore," but more insidiously present in the fact that the performers act out the same routines night after night and the audience comes to see the same performers and routines night after night. Implicit within Fellini's accentuation of the negative properties of theatre is the recognition and affirmation of positive qualities denied by theatre. For instance, Fellini's depiction of the limitations of distance and separation constitutes implicit affirmation of their opposite: direct, concrete connection. Consistent with Fellini's vocation as moviemaker, the values which Fellini's imagination embraces as positive concompendium of stitute a virtual " morality of movies "-a qualities which Fellini sees as inherent in his medium and which his films seek to affirm either by revealing what happens

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in their absence (as in Luci del varietc) or by revealing what happens when they are fully actualized (as in 8 1,'2, Giulietta degli spiriti, I clowns, among others). Concrete connection is the fundamental value affirmed within Fellini's moral universe. I t is the sine qua non of truly moral existence, the requisite condition of love and of unceasing personal development upon which morality depends. Fellini's passionate affirmation of concrete connection is clearly conjoined with his sense of movies as an art of vision, and with his sense of vision as an art of marriage-ineluctably wedding t h e individual to the life process. I n Fellini's films to see is to be (i.e., to-be-connected), and the quality of one's vision determines the quality of one's relationship to the world. Vision is an agent of love, generating not only connection to but acceptance, embracement, and assimilation of what one sees. Perceiving vision to be the principal moral mandate of the supremely visual art of movies, Fellini evolves in his films a rnorality of growth- and love-through-vision which in intensity and inclusiveness rivals that expressed by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of iilan:
Seeing. We might say that the whole of life lies in that verb-if not ultimately, ar least essentially. Fuller life is closer union: such is the kernel and conclusion of this book. But let us emphasize the point: union increases only through an i n c r e a ~ ein consciousness, that is to say in vision. And that, doubtless, is why the history of the living world can be summarized as the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more to be seen.... To try to see more and better is not a matter of whim or curiosity or self-indulgence. To see or to perish is the very condition laid upon everything that makes up the universe, by reason of the mysterious gift of existence. Bnd this, in superior measure, is man's rondition.4

One need merely recall the ceaseless visual activity of Fellini's most creative characters-Cabiria, Guido, Giulietta, Encolpio-and the centrality of the visual activity of moviemaking within the films that depict Fellini's own growthFellini: A Direcmr's Notebook, I clowns, Fellini's Roma-to perceive how vital the act of seeing is to the act of personal evolution i n Fellini's cinematic universe.

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Inherent within Fellini's passion for connection through vision is a passion for individuals and individuality. (" At bottom, I am always making t h e same film, to t h e extent that what arouses my curiosity, what interests me definitively, what unlatches my inspiration, is that, each time, I am telling the story of characters in quest of themselves, in search of a more authentic source of life, of conduct, of behavior, that will more closely relate to t h e true roots of their individuality." As with concrete connection, individuality is a value implicit within the morality of movies, because it is intrinsic to the phenomenology of seeing upon which movies depend. The images we perceive (whether we're looking at movies or at anything else) are characterized by singularity, discreteness, uniqueness, in short, radical individuality. Both seeing and movies demand of us the predisposition and talent for dealing with concrete particulars. The individuality vital to movie art is, by its very nature, at mortal odds with the kind of theatricality present in Luci del varietii. I n particular, it is wholly incompatible with the reliance on character and role, on verbal abstraction, and on authority that typifies the film's theatre world. Each in its own way entails the sacrifice of concrete identity to something both external and de-individualizing, and by the end of the film the interaction of the three serves to strip all the film's principal creatures of vital singularity. By revealing so thoroughly the negative, de-individualizing, consequences of role, abstraction, and dependence on authority in Luci del varietk, Fellini is clearly placing his passion for individuals at the moral center of the film-making it the all-pervasive moral value within which the film's action acquires proportion and meaning. Just as Fellini's devaluation of the theatrical tendencies of distance and de-individualization imply the affirmation of opposing cinematic values, so does his devaluation of the rational order, confinement, stasis (or severely restricted motion), and repetition that characterize the theatre world of Luci del varietii. Implicit within the devaluation of the timetables and other forms of clock time that control and devitalize Checco et al. is t h e affirmation of the spontaneity and irrational

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change instinct within the moving images and the editing techniques (particularly cutting) of cinema. Implicit within the devaluation of spatial confinement and virtual stasis is the affirmation of motion free froni either temporal o r spatial limitation-i.e., the kind of motion movies are uniquely equipped t o render. And implicit within the devaluation of repetition is the affirmation of the new, the experimental, the never-before done or seen-which movies since their inception have embraced as their especial domain. As is suggested by Fellini's comment-" At bottom, I am always making the same film "-the values which h e implicitly affirms, by negating their opposites, in Luci del uarietci are values h e affirms in all his subsequent movies. T h e urge for concrete connection-or integration-and the passion for individuals repeatedly and insistently assert themselves within his films. T h e impulse for integration is most evident in his career-long efforts (largely via characterization) to diminish the distance between himself and his world. Whereas early in his career h e creats characters like Checco who are radically different (hence " distanced ") from him, Fellini progresses later i n his career to actual identification with his a characters-using a surrogate filmmaker (Guido) in 8 1 / 2 , creating a fictional embodiment of his own feminine powers (Giulietta) in Giulietta degli spiriti, and finally, functioning as his own main character (firstperson narrator) in Director's n'otebook, Clotc,rts. and Roma. Fellini's passion for individuals is evident throughout his career in his growing genius for creating unique creatures (rather than character types or roles), in his insistent preference for images (concrete particulars) over words (generalized abstractions), and in his career-long effort to spring his cinematic creatures free from the depersonalizing stranglehold of conventions, institutions-all external authority. I t is even more evident in the fact rhat Fellini is without question the contemporary " poet " par ~ r c e l l e n c eof individuarion. All his stories constitute attempts on the part of his characters to individuate, and films like 8 1 / 2 , Giulietta degli spiriti, Satyricon, and Roma comprise some of the most coniplex individuation processes ever rendered in cinema.

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Likewise Fellini's passion for irrational, spontaneous (and ultimately creative) change; his commitment to an energized existence free from conventional limitations of space and time; and his advocacy of open and unceasing engagement to the new-all have continued since Luci del varietii to function as vitalizing forces within Fellini's cinematic evolution. For confirmation of this we need look no further than the dynamism of Fellini's visual style, the imaginative power of his characters, and the boundless range and diversity of his work. Luci del varietii's implicit affirmation of integration, individuality, irrational change, illimitable motion, and creative receptivity to the new, provides the film with a moral/aesthetic dimension that is specifically cinematic. I t makes Luci del uarietic subtly but unmistakeably a film about film which, in focussing upon the limitations of theatre (and particularly the limitations of teatro del varietic), simultaneously embraces values which movies by their very nature must embody and affirm. In so doing, it attests to the presence of a cinematic imagination fully attuned to the properties of its medium. And it signals the birth of a directorial talent whose every film will serve either implicitly or explicitly to examine, clarify, and promote the powers instinct within movie art.

The University of iClanitoba

FRANK BURKE

1 Charles Thomas Samuels, Encountering Directors (New York: G. P. Putnam's, 1972), p. 118. 2 Checco's last name, dal Monte (" of or from the mountain "), though not as prominent in the film as his first name, is just as significant within the context of his character. For Checco does, indeed, live in a mountaintop world, divorced from a ground-level encounter with reality. 3 At first i t might appear that he is back i n touch with things, since h e has rejoined Melina and his old troupe. However, while h e seems to b e reunited physically, h e is clearly divorced mentally. And actually a close look reveals him to be divorced even physically. H e is alone on the station platform the first time w e see him in this scene. He is the last one of the troupe to get on the train. The only member of the troupe with whom h e associates is Melina. And, by the final shots, even she has disappeared-leaving him alone in the frame, radically isolated. 4 New York: Harper, 1965, p. 31. 5 Andrew Sarris, Interviews with Film Directors (New York: Avon, 1969), pp. 182-83.