A Film Canon

This extraordinary film condenses the letter, spirit and deity of Fellini's cinephilic universe - cinematic pleasure, cinematic discipline and the cinematic spectacle itself - to three bodies - gypsy Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina), trainer Zampano (Anthony Quinn) and acrobat 'Il Matto' (Richard Baseheart). As Gelsomina, Masina transforms herself into an amorphous, anarchic bundle of sensations, simultaneously attuned to the entire spectrum of living organisms, the workings of the inanimate world, and a holy, noumenal intensity that culminates with her interminable wandering being framed in explicitly religious terms: "You can grow fond of where you live...you risk forgetting your most important attachment, which is to God." This intensity represents the challenge posed to Zampano, whose attempt to discipline it never quite succeeds, and certainly never approaches his own act, which consists of mercilessly submitting his optic nerve to iron bondage. This is partly due to 'Il Matto', whose tightrope display, and rapid, playful dodgings transform him into a mere concatenation of light and sound, making his death particularly traumatic, insofar as it is unclear whether he was really capable of death in the first place, and producing the breakdown in cinematic fantasy that returns the narrative to the beach where it began, drawing on The White Sheik and The Young And The Passionate to cement that vast, wintry waste as the limit of Fellini's cinephilia, and his cipher for continuing, neorealist desecration.