A Film Canon

This charming film draws a common denominator between petit bourgeois and cinematic credulity, in terms of their shared tendency to exoticise, iterate and circulate cultural detritus. To this end, Fellini splits a newlywed couple into two divergent consumption-lines. The first describes the husband's (Leopoldo Trieste) anxiety at finding his wife (Brunella Bovo) missing from a day of economic legitimation, and his subsequent conflict between the trajectories of his family, and the frenetic, overwhelming vertical and lateral pans that might disclose her whereabouts. The second describes the wife's encounter with, and gradual integration into, the cast and crew of a romance tabloid - especially its star, 'The White Sheik' (Albert Sordi) - culminating with her sequestration on a marooned boat; a literal vision of the fantastic, cinematic insularity that haunts Variety Lights, as well as a poetic vision of Fellini's shimmering, enscreened subjectivities: "I always feel the same way when I'm on the water. A strange, melancholy joy takes over my entire being, the joy of remembering an afterlife...or previous life." As the slapstick overtones to the husband's narrative might suggest, this cinematic incredulity is effectively silent, the Sheik playing like a comic version of Valentino, and the romance tabloid itself little more than a combination of pictures and intertitles. The result is a yearning for the most primal cinematic spectatorship, as well as a differentiation of cinema from other forms of detritus in terms of its prescience for the melancholy dimensions of trash; or, alternatively, a recognition that realism inheres in the medium to an extent that offsets and undercuts any fantasies it might depict. From this perspective, the petit bourgeois tendency to collapse low and high art comes full circle, imbuing both with sublimity as much as banality, as evinced in the progression of credulity, to paranoia, to insanity, to institutionalisation and, eventually, to a kind of holiness, as a final consumption-line leads straight into the Vatican.