ABSTRACT
The opening credits of Fellini’s Vitelloni (I., 1953) are printed upon a photograph taken by night, from above. It is of a crossroads but is first and foremost an artificial setting, a replica of Rimini’s central square erected in a studio for a film.1 Other settings similar to that one had been used in American or European cinema from the beginning of the century; the presence of the junction at the outset and its frequent return throughout Fellini’s movie was therefore a way of informing the spectators that they were going to see something with which they were familiar, a cinematic fiction. Faked settings are reassuring-remember Brief Encounter. The story is simple and involving but everything has been so obviously shot in a studio that it is impossible to get totally immersed in Celia Johnson’s desperate quest for love. The ‘classical’ cinema does not conceal the fact that it is merely an ‘imitation of life’ (as the title of a famous American movie of the 1930s reminds us)—a close, faithful imitation, but not life. Later in Fellini’s film, at dawn, after a foolish night of feasting and pleasure, the public is taken back to the crossroads and this time, unexpectedly, it is the actual setting-stones and cement instead of cardboard and plaster. Fellini, who could have chosen either a real or artificial representation, decided to play on ambiguity. The story is not ‘truer’ when it is shot in Rimini itself; it is still the same fiction but the viewers are asked to distinguish artificial from real. Of course, they can ignore the distinction. They can also try to puzzle out its meaning; it is up to them to concentrate on the plot or to allow their attention to waver from the story to the setting and vice versa. I Vitelloni is, in many respects, a classical film, with an introductory sequence, some episodes, a climax and an ending. It is also something different. There is no central character, no problem which must be solved, no love story. There is also an
important part of the film which is purely visual; a great many shots were taken because they were interesting or enjoyable, even though they were not directly connected with the narrative. Fellini emphasized the fact that he was showing a film; not just a fiction, but also a text, an audiovisual artefact which owes its qualities to its physical components (photographs and sounds). As early as 1953 Fellini was at variance with the dominant cinema in at least three ways: some of his movies lacked a leading strand and, at the same time as including purely pleasurable shots, drew attention to the fact that they were artificially made. There was nothing new in this use of cinematic language since film-makers had already had recourse to the same devices, especially during the 1920s, but the triumph of Hollywood between the wars swept away all these experiments and imposed ‘classical’ patterns which were accepted by the largest audiences. Stephen Heath2 rightly notes that the narration (the fact that a story is being told and that what is shown on the screen is not really happening) is not necessarily hidden in the classical cinema; as he says: ‘the narration may well be given as visible in its filmic procedures; what is crucial is that it be given as visible for the narrated’—that is to say, for the story itself, as it is told-‘and that the spectator be caught up in the play of that process’, for instance, the process and conventions characteristic of a genre; the film does not conceal its operations but it offers them as a transposition of a pre-existent reality. An important change occurred in the realm of cinema when movies began to confess that they were constructing the story-that the narrative did not exist outside the narration.
