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Masina's character is perfectly suited to her round clown's face and wide, innocent eyes in one way or another, in "Juliet of the Spirits," "Ginger and Fred" and most of her other films, she was always playing Gelsomina. To some degree he is responsible for his own end.
#Federico fellini la strada free#
The film intends us to take him as a free and cheerful spirit (the embodiment of Mind, Pauline Kael tells us, with Zampano as Body and Gelsomina as Soul).īut he has a mean, sarcastic streak I had not really registered before, and his taunting of the dim Zampano is sadistic. Seeing the film again after several years, I found myself struck first of all by new ideas about the Fool. But Zampano's jealousy and rage return he kills the Fool Gelsomina goes mad, and all is in place for one of Fellini's favorite endings, in which a defeated man turns to the sea, which has no answers. The Fool is attracted to Gelsomina, but sees that she has formed a strong bond with the strongman, and leaves so they can be together. He mocks Zampano, who attacks him in a rage, and is jailed.
![federico fellini la strada federico fellini la strada](http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/10/22/1413973660535/i-clowns-010.jpg)
Zampano signs up with an itinerant circus, where the Fool ( Richard Basehart) is employed. In a provincial town, Gelsomina is struck breathless by the Fool, a high-wire artist who works high above the city street. He is cruel to the young woman, but she has a Chaplinesque innocence that somehow shields her from the worst of life, and she is proud of his accomplishments, such as learning to play his signature tune on a trumpet. He needs an assistant for his act, and from a poor widow at the seaside he purchases her slow-witted daughter Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina). A brutish strongman named Zampano ( Anthony Quinn) tours Italy, living in a ramshackle caravan pulled by a motorcycle.
![federico fellini la strada federico fellini la strada](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81rl3kQeNSL.jpg)
The story is one of the most familiar in cinema. "La Strada" is the first film that can be called entirely "Felliniesque." It is being re-released, in a restored print presented by Martin Scorsese, at a poignant moment: Fellini received an honorary Oscar at the 1993 Academy Awards, with his wife Giulietta Masina applauding tearfully in the front row. I think "La Strada" is part of a process of discovery that led to the masterpieces " La Dolce Vita" (1960), " 8 1/2" (1963) and " Amarcord" (1974), and to the bewitching films he made in between, like " Juliet of the Spirits" (1965) and " Fellini's Roma" (1972). It is fashionable to call it his best work - to see the rest of his career as a long slide into self-indulgence.
#Federico fellini la strada movie#
The movie is the bridge between the postwar Italian neorealism which shaped Fellini, and the fanciful autobiographical extravaganzas which followed. Like a painter with a few favorite themes, Fellini would rework these images until the end of his life. Federico Fellini's "La Strada" (1954) tells a fable that is simple by his later standards, but contains many of the obsessive visual trademarks that he would return to again and again: the circus, and parades, and a figure suspended between earth and sky, and one woman who is a waif and another who is a carnal monster, and of course the seashore.