LABIRINTO FELLINI

MACRO Testaccio

30 October 2010 - 30 January 2011

www.macro.roma.museum

Samantha Lana

On the 29th of October the ‘MACRO Testaccio La Pelanda’ inaugurated the show ‘Labirinto Fellini – Invenzioni di Dante Ferretti e Francesca Loschiavo / Mostra La Grande Parata’. Part of the ‘Festival del Cinema di Roma’, it celebrates the 90^th anniversary of the birth of the movie director, and the 50^th anniversary of the creation of “La Dolce Vita”, a milestone of his filmography. Federico Fellini, commonly known to be one of the most prominent movie directors of the 20^th century, brought Italian cinema to the international forefront. He is an eccentric personality that aimed to revolutionize the dynamics of movie making through an absurd and surreal representation of life that belongs mostly to dreams. Starting a new era for the Italian cinema, the union of actual facts to purely imaginary ones creates a new reality that has never existed before. The choice of the location of the exhibition is not casual. Indeed, Fellini himself had used this space for the presentation of his ‘Block Notes di un Regista’, a movie on the backstage of his works. The characteristics of this location resemble aspects that the movie director favored in his films: the large spaces and the consequent allowing of excessively dilated measures of everything in them. Thanks to this spaciousness it was also possible to create an effective realization of the labyrinth. The idea of this kind of structure is fundamental in the successful development of the show, as it symbolizes the fantastic nature Fellini unveiled in his works. As the mirror of our conscience, it is a complicated tangle that seeks to be unfolded. It is here materialized through a precise and intricate path the viewer has to follow. Immerged in the intimate reality of Fellini’s mind, he walks through these spaces that constantly change in nature, each area reserved to a different theme, a precise memory from the artist’s legendary career with its annexed explanation and reconstruction. The exhibition is made up of two parts. The first is titled “La Grande Parata”, curated by Sam Stourdzé, and the second, “Invenzioni”, curated by Dante Ferretti and Francesca Loschiavo, that have been two close collaborators of Fellini. “La Grande Parata” is a vast collection of documents, drawings, pictures, videos, newspaper articles and much more that bombard the spectator, amazed and confused by this fantastic world of ideas. All these repertories reconstruct the development of Fellini’s career, exposing his most personal traits. The main sections of Stourdzé’s show are “Cultura Popolare”, “Fellini al Lavoro”, “La città delle Donne”, and “Invenzione Biografica”. Commencing his career as a caricaturist, the show exhibits many of his drawings, a passion he will continue to cultivate for all his life. An important part is dedicated to Fellini’s dreams which he transcribed on paper after the advice of the psychoanalyst Ernst Bernhard. This magnificent documentation, taken from his ‘Il Libro dei Sogni’, explains the movie director’s obsessions, perversions, and fears, that often inspire his own movies. Two aspects that are fundamental in both Fellini’s work and life, are the female figure and the popular culture that so strongly marked the society of the time. They are here presented both through the use of paper documents and pictures, and the use of screens showing newsreels, and movie extracts on these matters. Overlapping sounds from the five projection screens fill the space with constant repeating phrases from Fellini’s films. Audio, video, photographs, and drawings mix with one another to create a harmonious and absurd atmosphere. The show continues with the “Invenzioni” by Ferretti and Loschiavo, a mysterious path through images and installations recall the movie director’s greatest films. The spectators are led through a series of projection screens, and, as children who play in between hanging linens, they wander surrounded and trapped by Fellini’s magic. The thousand lights that stud this space, recall the interior of a circus tent, and the symbols of many of Fellini’s films are scattered around, beginning with the rhinoceros floating in the air that belongs to the movie ‘E la nave va’. The atmosphere reproduced is thus a contradiction between game and anxiety, emotions that are found in all of Fellini’s movies. The illusionistic nature of this whole exhibition therefore catapults the viewers in Fellini’s universe, effectively recreating the magical atmosphere that overwhelmed it.