A Film Canon

With The Young And The Passionate, Fellini provides his first, tentative exploration of how the fantastic, cinematic cocoon that he wraps around his characters might become oppressive, simultaneously clotting it with confetti, streamers, and wet, sweaty bodies, and setting it against a barren, wintry waste; a dialectic between troupe and void, claustrophobia and agoraphobia, most beautiful when one of the characters leaves a crowded, smoky, visceral cinema audience to pursue a patron down unending, empty streets. In the process, Fellini includes the five adolescents around whom the narrative revolves in the melancholy detritus eulogised by The White Sheik - products of a "dirty little rat hole" - while diagnosing adolescence itself as the wanderings of a lost generation, caught between war and imminent counter-culture, here only envisaged as a utopian horizon encompassing jazz, American literature and cinema, and sexual licentiousness, if not liberation. As a result, most of the characters are either relatively young or relatively old - creating a tangible sense of a missing, parental generation - while the metaphorical family structure is replaced by the metonymies of the street, culminating with the search for a missing wife. Similarly, history is reduced to a series of curios and costumes, as cinema takes over the traditional role of carnival and community, to the extent that the town only ultimately exists as a cinematised entity, all its romantic tendencies deflected into the autoeroticism of the cinephile; or, rather, the homosexuality that culminates this oppressive insularity, never presented as anything more than nostalgia for a mythical past.