the pebble’s purpose
by Douglas Messerli
Federico
Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano (screenplay, based on a story by Fellini
and Pinelli), Federico Fellini (director) La
Strada (The Road) / 1954, USA
1956
Yes,
Fellini’s La Strada, at moments, is highly
sentimental, using stereotypes instead of developed characters, and employing
symbols to stand-in for a credible story! With this movie, moreover, Fellini
declared his rupture with Italian neo-realism—at least the kind of neo-realism
that demanded the ideological political and anti-religious perspectives.
Indeed, along with Roberto Rossellini and, soon after, Michelangelo Antonioni,
Fellini helped to destroy it! How the Marxist critics hated what they saw as
Fellini’s betrayal.
Fellini himself has described the filming
of this seemingly simple story as nearly impossible, resulting near the end of
the shoot in a complete nervous breakdown. Actor Anthony Quinn remembers it as
a bone-wearying experience (“He drove me mercilessly, making me do scene after
scene over and over again until he got what he wanted.”), but, Quinn continues “I
learned more about film acting in three months with Fellini than I’d learned in
all the movies I’d made before.” Fellini’s wife, Giulietta Masina (as
Gelsomina) complained that the director was being particularly mean to her
during its shoot. And there are moments, finally, when—as marvelous as she is
playing the slightly retarded naïf—Masina, as Roger Ebert notes, is a shade to
conscious and knowing, playing to her audience.
Yet for all this, La Strada is simply radiant in its look, subject, and portrayal of
deviant love. From the very first moment of this film, when the small-time
circus performer, Zampanò (Quinn), returns to Gelsomina’s mother, reporting
that the daughter he has previously bought from her, Rosa, has died, and
purchases the second daughter for 10,000 lire, we know such a cruel transaction
can lead to no good for the young woman. But the very thought that she might be
of any value to anyone excites her, as she merrily joins the brutal strongman
on what will be a voyage into death.
Zampanò, true to his appearance, rapes,
whips, and psychologically maltreats her as he leaves her waiting for his
return home (a perfectly ridiculous cart hooked up to a motorcycle) from his dalliances
with other women. Yet gradually Gelsomina does learn, not only to beat the drum
while announcing “the Great Zampanò,” and, after the performance to pass the
hat; but to play a comic in the absurdly badly acted sketch which begins by the
strongman describing his rifle as a “fifle.” She even learns to play the
trumpet.
What she also learns, however, is just
how painful life can be, behaving a bit like Fellini’s later high-spirited
prostitute in another of his “road” movies, Nights
of Cabiria. And she not only learns from Zampanò, but from a passing nun
that life, even an itinerant life, can contain great joy and nobility. From the
tight-rope-walking fool, Il Matto (a wonderful Richard Baseheart), she discovers
that she might be a credible performer and, more importantly, that she does
have a purpose in living, even if it is
the role of a pebble, in her “husband’s” life.
The Fool, however, cannot resist
taunting Zampanò, calling him “fifle,” and mocking the strongman’s greatest
accomplishment: his ability, through flexing his abdominal muscles, to break a
link of chains in which he has been wrapped. When Gelsomina is asked to also
perform in Il Matto’s act, Zampanò grows wild, chasing the Fool with the
intention of killing, an act that results with both performers in jail—Gelsomina
waiting outside the prison.

We later discover that Gelsomina is found
along a beach, eventually wasting away and dying. Hearing of the story from a
woman whose father has taken Gelsomina in, Zampanò gets drunk and wanders to
the nearby beach, where he breaks down in despair for having lost the woman to
whom he could never acknowledge, even to himself, he loved.
If
Fellini’s work is a simple playing out of body, soul, and mind (Zampanò,
Gelsomina, and Il Motto) it is also a profound statement about the Postwar
world which the film portrays, a bleak landscape in which the souls and minds
of the body politic have been clearly ravaged by the brute force of Italian Fascism.
The tawdry circuses Fellini reveals of weak—if sometimes charming—imitations of
more serious entertainments such as literature, cinema, and drama, remind us of
Juvenal’s satiric statement “Two things only the people anxiously desire—bread
and circuses. For Fellini, it is clear, the circus of life is a merely a coarser
version of the vast mythic fantasies conjured up by the imagination—particularly
his own. The very straightforward emblematic approach of La Strada is an early, provincial exploration, of the grand orgiastic
entertainments he will later role out before our eyes in the Roman landscapes
of La Dolce Vita, 8 ½, and Fellini Satryricon. If I prefer the later works over this gently
personal remembrance, it is only that they represent elegantly deft fantasias
that the characters of La Strada might
never even have imagined. But then, it would hard for any of us to imagine the
gifts Fellini left us when he became determined to go “full throttle.” How can a pebble, no matter how useful, match the
whole of Italian society—as Fellini portrayed it—gone berserk?
Los Angeles,
January 22, 2014
La Strada, the "pebble' my favorite of all of Fellini's films... Kerry
ReplyDeletePebble
Perhaps it was such a pebble
with which Cain killed Abel.
Perhaps such a pebble
pelted by a youth
slew Goliath.
Perhaps it was such a pebble
that was thrown over a shoulder.
Perhaps such a pebble
is the daughter of a boulder
that over and over
rolls down a hill.
Perhaps such a pebble
played hopscotch and pocket-pool
with Beckett and Cortázar
in a Paris bazaar.
Perhaps such a pebble
is buried in a nook
in the Wailing Wall
or shook
in the confines of Jericho.
Perhaps such a pebble
was born in the sea
of tranquility
and the stillness
of eternity.
Perhaps such a pebble
gave birth to the sea
which then bore you and me.
Perhaps such a pebble
is a pebble after all
and the child
of a rose and a stone
and a pebble is a pebble
is a pebble is the bone
of the earth and a koan.
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