ABSTRACT
Fellini has made one of those very rare films about which it can be said, one forgets that they are movies and accepts them simply as works of art. One remembers the discovery of La Strada as an aesthetic experi ence of great emotion, as an unanticipated encounter with the world of imagination. I mean that this is less a case of a film’s having known how to attain a certain intellectual or moral level than of its having made a per sonal statement for which the cinema is most surely the necessary and natural form, but which statement nevertheless possesses a virtual artistic existence of its own. It is not a film that is called La Strada; it is La Strada that is called a film. In connection with this idea, Chaplin’s last film also comes to mind, although in many ways it is quite different from La Strada. One could just as well say of Limelight (1952) that its only ade quate embodiment was the cinema, that it was inconceivable through any other means of expression, and that, nonetheless, everything in it tran scended the elements of a particular art form. Thus La Strada confirms in its own way the following critical premise: to wit, that the cinema has arrived at a stage in its evolution where the form itself no longer deter mines anything, where filmic language no longer calls attention to itself,
but on the contrary suggests only as much as any stylistic device that an artist might employ. Doubtless it will be said that only the cinema could, for example, endow Zampano’s extraordinary motorcycle caravan with the significance of living myth that this simultaneously strange and com monplace object attains here. But one can just as clearly see that the film is in this case neither transforming nor interpreting anything for us. No lyricism of the image or of montage takes it upon itself to guide our per ceptions; I will even say that the mise en scene does not attempt to do soat least not the mise en scene from a technically cinematic point of view.1 The screen restricts itself to showing us the caravan better and more objectively than could the painter or the novelist. I am not saying that the camera has photographed the caravan in a very plain manner-even the word “photographed” is too much here-but rather that the camera has simply shown the caravan to us, or even better, has enabled us to see it.
