Federico Fellini: Painting in Film, Painting on Film by Hava Aldouby (review)

From very early on in Fellini scholarship, critics have casually emphasized the painterly qualities of Fellini’s films, not only remarking on the evocative visual correspondences between his filmic images and the works of painters such as Giorgio De Chirico but also noting how Fellini’s imagery eludes intellectual interpretation, appealing to the viewer with the subliminal power of painting. By means of her access to the director’s private library, Hava Aldouby is able to ascertain the influence of specific paintings on Fellini’s visual imagination and to trace, with admirable rigour, the aesthetic, thematic, and affective consequences of this intertextuality.

Concentrating her attention on select films that Fellini made in the middle years of his career, Aldouby devotes a chapter each to Giulietta degli spiriti (1965), Toby Dammit (1968), Fellini Satyricon (1969), and Fellini’s Casanova (1976) and explores the intermedial relations between each film and individual paintings that are directly or indirectly alluded to in works found in the director’s library. The author usefully differentiates between art-historical references in Fellini’s films and those in the films of his contemporaries, such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Jean-Luc Godard. By contrast, as she demonstrates, Fellini’s painterly intertexts are not intended as a “self-referential comment” created by formal opposition and do not produce the distancing static effects of the tableau vivant. Rather, they are an integral part of the “texture” and “atmosphere” of his films and are often resorted to in an effort to “describe childhood impressions.” In Fellini’s hands, Aldouby claims, “embedded evocations of painting” serve as a “conduit to the real … conceived in terms of primary psychic matter.”

This impressively researched book is a welcome and important contribution to film scholarship not only because of its emphasis on the underdiscussed role of the pictorial in film studies and on “the interface between film and the visual arts.” It also persuasively contradicts two critical arguments that have held sway in Fellini scholarship. First, it counters the trend that sees Fellini’s midcareer films as expressive of a postmodern sensibility privileging “the problematic of subjectivity,” “the absence of the real, the death of the subject and author.” Aldouby conversely argues for an intertextual aesthetic that is rooted in Fellini’s abiding devotion to the romantic myth of the artist and is inextricable from his psychoanalytic self-explorations and “deep-seated creative anxiety.” Of further significance is the book’s challenge to the timehonoured image of the director himself. The reigning image of Fellini, one that he himself encouraged in interviews, is of the artist as a primitive and “slightly puerile genius,” who drew his inspiration, if from anywhere, from “lowbrow” popular cultural sources such as fumetti, varietà, and the circus. Aldouby’s assiduous and intricate analysis of intertextual meanings in Fellini’s films enriches our sense of a filmmaker who obviously had much wider cultural influences and a “deep engagement with the visual arts.”

However, while the author argues very effectively and convincingly for the significance of the painterly intertext in Fellini’s work, she does not fully account for why the images featuring “intermedial moments” might be unique among filmic images in “heightening the potential for immediate non-verbal suggestion” and therefore for “forging a bridge to … ‘brute meaning.’” Her references to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work make it clear that even while he “ascribes considerable primacy to painting,” he speaks of art in general (presumably including film) “as a conduit for primal experience.” One might also wonder how the “heightened suggestiveness” [author’s emphasis] of painting in these “art-historical evocations” could be thought of as evoking an exclusively pure, presymbolic affect, independent of any intellectual component, even if it is only one of recognizing the painterly effect in the film image. One final quibble: it seems unfortunate that although Fellini’s films of this period contain some of the most arresting and arrestingly coloured imagery, with the exception of the cover image from Fellini...