Toronto’s Lightbox Gets Obsessive Over the Spectacular Cinema of Fellini

After spending over half an hour trying to find the Italian translations for every adjective I could think of that is synonymous with ‘spectacular’ and ‘comprehensive,’ it finally came time to stop belabouring the cheesy Italiano wordplays and settle on a more modest headline (one more in line with TIFF’s own ‘Fellini: Spectacular Obsessions’).

Adding culinary lingo into the mix was a possibility, but ‘spaghetti’ was already confiscated by Leone, and ‘macaroni’ a bit too noodly. Alas, ‘Spectacular,’ ‘obsessive,’ and – it needed to be added – ‘comprehensive,’ turn out to be a most à propos, if unsatisfactorily colourless, trio of descriptives for characterizing the work on display by both Federico Fellini and the TIFF Bell Lightbox right now in downtown Toronto. Having just opened on June 30 for a three-month run (it closes September 18), cinephiles and families alike currently have one of the best opportunities ever in North America to really know Fellini, and all that came to inspire his highly influential body of work.

Autobiographical, ecstatic, navel-gazing, absurd, excessive, and Italian to the very centre, Fellini is one of the heavy-weights of cinema history precisely because his personal vision was so singular and subjective, yet at the same time so accessibly animated. While watching these films offers its own experiential whirligig of psychoanalytic readings and cultural anthropology, the exhibition – which consists largely of photographs, movie clips, and advertising memorabilia – gives them the sort of depth that one could only really have had by actually living through the pop culture melee that spawned them. La Dolce Vita, for instance, is revealed to be a quilt of bizarre celebrity and religious tabloid headlines that Fellini stumbled upon than just some episodic patchwork narrative that Fellini cooked up for quirk’s sake.

Perhaps the ‘primo’ supplement of the exhibit, though, is Fellini’s The Book of Dreams. Hoisted like a precious relic in the back corner of the back room of the exhibit, it sits open-cover on a pedestal under a thick, plexiglass cube. The book taunts viewers from within its protective display, a holy grail of the Italian maestro’s deepest desires and thoughts, waiting to be read and analyzed by academics, psychologists, and cinephiles alike. Bearing an uncanny resemblance to Carl G. Jung’s recently exhumed The Red Book, curators lined this room – which looks like a makeshift, modernist temple – with samples of about twenty reproduced pages from the book. The child-like drawings offer a glimpse of what Fellini’s films might have looked like had they been completely unchained from the shackles of photographic representation. Think René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet crossed with…well…Fellini.

Another key element to the exhibit is the photography of paparazzo Marcello Geppetti and frequent Fellini camera-operator Arturo Zavattini. Not only does the nature of paparazzi hold tremendous relevance to the evolution of high-life glamour and showbiz that Fellini reveled in, but Geppetti’s images make up a kind of behind-the-scenes diary that can really only be paralleled today by making-of docs in the Special Features sections on DVDs and trashy tabloid pages – only these are infinitely more beautiful. Not far removed from the stunning photographs by New York’s contemporaneous equivalent, Weegee, the gloriously high-contrast and grainy snapshots of Audrey Hepburn, Bridget Bardot, and even The Beatles in their ‘down time’ seems as inspired byFellini’s brand of glitz as they may be inspirational for it. Zavattini, by contrast, demonstrated a more private and convivial approach to capturing Fellini’s home life – photographing the man with his family while, notably, in his company (and in no-less gorgeous prints).

While the exhibition certainly has enough insight into the exterior live of Fellini’s films, the screening rooms upstairs provide the rest of the context with an exhaustive, compare-and-contrast programme titled Fellini Dream Double Bills. For these dozen double-dips, TIFF invited a crew of filmmakers, programmers, and critics to pair Fellini’s films with like-minded companions. In Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s duet of Fellini’s Roma with Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, the juxtaposition highlights the films’ – and Weerasethakul’s – concerns with dreams and memories, as painted with broad, fantastical brushstrokes. Isabella Rossellini’s couplet consists of La Strada and Chaplin’s Limelight, both somber tales of clowns and the tragedy of aging (Limelight would probably make a logical double feature with any Fellini film, though, as the style of inconspicuous self-reflexivity with which Chaplin engages was one of Fellini’s signature touches).

Life those two, many of the double features are straightforward enough, especially Radley Metzger’s matching of The Clowns with Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise. However, some are quite a bit more whimsical and inspired. TIFF-director Piers Handling’s own pairing of Fellini’s Casanova with Hal Ashby’s Shampoo is the kind of programme that the double-feature format was made for. But even at its most predictable, Fellini Dream Double Bills goes beyond drawing parallels in the set designs, or Italian quirks, or themes and motifs that can also often be found in other’s filmmakers’ works. It’s a programme that isn’t so much about identifying who influenced whom, or what was borrowed from where, but, rather, about identifying what is truly Fellini-esque in the world of Fellini. That, and showing as many great films per day as possible.