Sam Rohdie - Fellini Lexicon

Otto e mezzo: 'Claudia'

The faggot on Gelsomina's back in La strada as she is called from the beach is a fact of reality. Yet, by a shift in view, it transports her to another world.

Her mother sells her to Zampan. At that moment Gelsomina finds another existence imagining being elsewhere. She will journey with Zampan into the world. The world to her is magic, make-believe, theatre, masquerade, spectacle, clowning. Gelsomina is overjoyed. She accomplishes the journey in her imagination and anticipation before it begins.

This imagination is angelic.

Picasso saw in two metal toy cars, placed bottom to bottom, the head of a baboon; in everyday nails, he saw the feet of a chicken; in bicycle handlebars, the horns of a bull; in scraps of wood and paper, a guitar.

There was nothing symbolic in these transformative sights.

The toy cars remain what they are (toy cars) to become what they are not (the head of a baboon) which they could be (in sculpture) if only you can see the likeness, the poetry in the banal, the fantastic in the quotidian.

Such strategies are not representational.

The toy cars do not represent the head of a baboon. They are the head of a baboon. And they are not.

There can be a make-believe without falsity, a make-believe with reality.

By such means the world is expanded.

Nothing changes yet every object, every moment is opened to an infinity of relations and possibilities by remaining what it is in order to be truly itself, and not. The universe becomes filled with unlikely paradigms.

As a result, vast distances can be traversed.

In La strada, 'Il matto' on the high wire, has wings attached to his back. To Gelsomina he seems an angel. When 'Il matto' descends the wire he notices Gelsomina. She seems to him to be an angel in the guise of a clown as he to her is a clown in the guise of an angel.

Her clown aspect (and his) are matters of resemblance, suggestions only. Resemblance makes them a couple. Angels, clowns, actors belong to otherworldliness, to the fantastic. You have to be a bit mad, certainly fanciful, to follow the lines of suggestion, perhaps you need to be an angel yourself.

Angels exist in Fellinian reality but they require our imagination to summon them into being.

Marcello in La dolce vita says to the young girl, Paola, in the restaurant by the beach: 'You look like an angel in an Umbrian church.'

In that instant she is an angel and remains herself.

The sadness of La dolce vita is that Marcello by the end of the film can neither recognise the young girl as herself nor as an angel in an Umbrian church.

He has lost sight.

The loss of sight is a loss of hope and thereby of invention, possibility, imagination, the loss of metaphor, the renunciation of the invisible. Joy has left the world for Marcello after having seen death and despair in the infanticide and suicide of Steiner where he also saw a part of himself and a part thereby of everyone.

Fausto and Moraldo in I vitelloni steal the statue of an angel from Fausto's employer, a seller of religious articles who has fired Fausto. Fausto and Moraldo wrap the statue in a cloth and put it on a handcart. Accompanied by the town's lunatic they bring the statue to a monastery where they try unsuccessfully to sell it. The friar, who refuses them, is perched on the branch of a tree (like an angel).

Fausto and Moraldo try to sell the statue at a convent to a nun, who is fragile and innocent, like Marcello's angel.

The friar and the nun are beings from another world while remaining in this one.

Dejected, the dishonest trio sprawl on vacant land, the statue of the angel beside them. Could they be the three Magi dressed as clowns? Or the Holy Trinity?

The lunatic is overtaken with joy. He sees an angel in the statue. The sight is not secular, not an angel represented, but spiritual, an angel present. An angel is there though nothing has changed, only a perspective.

This moment is like a miracle.

Reality is transformed without anything having happened.

The wife of the owner of the religious articles shop where Fausto works is plain, ordinary, dull. She is the provincial wife of a provincial shopkeeper. It is the eve of New Year. There is a celebration for the entire town. Fausto brings his new wife Sandrina to the celebration. The shopkeeper brings his wife. The wife enters the spectacle of the celebration and begins to glow, to scintillate like fireworks. She is happy, gay, smiling, laughing, fetching, flirtatious, animated, in short, another self.

She throws confetti in Fausto's face and giggles, her eyes shining.

He notices that she is beautiful, enchanting, and he desires her. She is an image he had seen every day. Today the image was different.