Cinema Paradiso

There’s something ironic about staging a film festival in a place that already feels like the most over-the-top film set ever constructed. It’s like making a movie about making a movie.

Oh wait. That was Federico’s Fellini’s “8½”.

For 80 years now, September in Italy means the summer tourists exit and the stars come out, as the Venice International Film Festival rolls out the red carpet. Kicking off at the beginning of the month, La Biennale Cinema 2023  is the one European festival that rivals Cannes in both prestige and glamour.

Though the ongoing writer and actor union strike in America added an unwelcome plot twist this year, Italy is hardly a place to be stymied by strikes  (which arrive at the train stations and taxi stands more regularly than the vehicles themselves). Bradley Cooper and Zendaya were no-shows, but there was still Adam Driver and Penélope Cruz touting their film “Ferrari”, (which seems a good bet for success in Northern Italy at least), and directors like Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson, and Ava DuVernay, who became the first Black woman to have a film compete in the festival.

Perhaps it comes from growing up in a land where art and life are inextricably tangled, or where emotions run hot and hotter, or where even the smallest medieval town has the makings of a costume drama somewhere in its history. Maybe cinema is just the ultimate expression of la bella figura, the Italian idea that looking good is always the best revenge.  Whether by nature or nurture, Italians love the movies.

Much like Americans, the cine camera is the lens through which they have defined their own culture and understood the world beyond their experience. Having hosted my share of Italian visitors to New York, I know that their reaction on first arriving in Manhattan will inevitably be the same as a New Yorker floating into Venice:

“Ahhh! It’s just like in the movies…”

Not long ago, during an impromptu tour of a 500-year-old acqueduct in the lost-in-time village of Montottone, I discovered that the only exit from the underground cavern led through a building where in earlier days the town would gather to watch movies.

The cramped projection cubicle was not so much preserved as untouched: a metal film reel still on the table, a crumpled pack of cigarettes tossed on the floor beneath the “No Smoking” sign. In the room below,  a small crucifix hung in a corner and five rows of wooden benches faced the whitewashed wall that served as a screen. The scene was something from “Cinema Paradiso”. It was easy to imagine the miraculous escape that movies must have offered these remote, rural villages.

But of course, Italians are not only fans of the cinema but a driving creative force as well.  In fact, Italy is credited by some as the birthplace of the “feature film”, with the release of Giovanni Pastrone’s 1914 movie “Cabiria”, a two-hour epic that influenced American David W. Griffith and ushered in a golden period in early film history.  Mussolini built the famed Roman studio Cinecittà in 1932, only to see the industry crash in the devastation of World War II.

But by the mid-Fifties it was already rising from the ashes. Hard-edged neorealist directors like Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, and Vittorio De Sica opened the door for the next generation of filmmakers who would turn Rome into “Hollywood On The Tiber”: Bernardo Bertolucci, Michelangelo Antonioni and the most iconic of all, Federico Fellini.

This past summer, we made a pilgrimage to the new Fellini Museum in his hometown of Rimini, a faded, seldom celebrated seaside town a few hours south of Venice. Housed in the Castel Sismondo, a 15th century fortress designed by Brunelleschi, the museum is a masterpiece of production design, capturing every element of the director’s phantasmagorical universe.

Like a madcap carnival funhouse dropped inside a Renaissance castle, it’s at once a feverish hallucination and a reverent meditation.  There’s a giant sculpture of actress Anita Ekberg made from plush—you can sit on it while you watch scenes from “La Dolce Vita”. Or you can enter a Catholic confessional, where you’ll hear interviews with Fellini.

Appropriately for an artist who pushed technical boundaries, there are magical interactive elements— blow on a feather and images from the director’s “Book of Dreams” come to life on the walls. At the same time, the collection also includes some of his homemade, amateur-theatrical solutions: a crane perched on a small truck to get his famous tracking shots, or a bedsheet and a fan to evoke the languid ripples of the Adriatic sea.

Like the movies it celebrates, the museum is everything all at once— a mix of art, scholarship and showbiz razzle-dazzle worthy of the maestro. And yet, the best insight into Fellini’s singular style is not found inside the Castel Sismondo or the extension of the museum in the 18th century Palazzo Valloni. You’ll find it outside, in the surrounding square and the streets of Rimini.

Like many Americans, I knew the phrase Fellini-esque before I’d actually seen his movies. The phrase implied “strange”, “fantastical” or “surreal”. When I finally saw the films, it seemed an apt description.

But as we strolled the streets of Rimini on a mid-summer morning,  taking in the Roman bridge built in 1 AD, the lurid Vegas-aspiring hotels, the buzz of the motorbikes giving way to the grassy silence of the ancient amphitheater, the matron carrying groceries into her aging villa and the bulbous man in his bathing costume trundling inflatable beach toys along the lungomare, I realized:

Fellini wasn’t being surreal at all. He was just showing us his world, in all its bizarre contradictions. Perhaps if you grow up in Italy, everything is a little fantastic and strange.

In the Piazza Malatesta in front of the Fellini Museum, the architects have pulled off their most audacious effect: an infinity pool and fountain that sprays a mist every half-hour. It’s meant to evoke the ebb and flow of the sea and the salty fog, both of which were recurring elements in Fellini’s work.

The day we visited, a young girl played in the water, performing for her grandmother who watched, expressionless, from a nearby bench.  In the shadow of the castle walls, the girl splashed, posed, and held an arabesque in the mist.

Life imitating art imitating life. In Italy, it’s all beautifully, wonderfully confused. Just like in the movies.