L’arte della visione

«I need a completely reconstructed reality. This is the key of my work, if I had to identify an aesthetic or a compass rather, a criteria or a psychological itinerary. I cannot escape the need to create a world, as if it could be able to live by itself. A complete creation, carried out in great detail, with an almost maniacal attention and with a scientific, not solely expressive, rigour. Weights, volumes and colours. Then I am tempted to abandon it. Instead, seeing that I’ve created it, I am curious to tell its story with the camera».

The result of a series of conversations carried out in 1993 with Gianni Volpi and Goffredo Fofi, who has written the new introduction, The Art of Seeing, is a sort of confession by Fellini on his life and his cinema. Now, over twenty years since his passing, it has become increasingly valuable. Federico Fellini received Goffredi Fofi and Gianni Volpi numerous times in his study in Corso d’Italia, for a long and memorable interview. The topic of conversation was not so much Fellini’s cinema, but cinema in general that, as Fellini claimed, had taken over his whole life. In the presence of these two unusual interviewers Fellini revealed a sequence of recollections, digressions and reflections on himself and his art. As Volpi writes in the introduction: “He would switch with absolute nonchalance from Kafka to Jung, from Rossellini to Calvino. In certain fascinating and lengthy answers he expertly wove together the most disparate projects, visions and readings”. A charisma that allowed Fellini to seduce everyone he spoke to, and behind which, as Fofi points out, it was impossible not to glimpse the extraordinary ability to research the human soul: “There aren’t that many artists who explored so deeply in order to tell us who we are, us Italians, how we are and how we think. The Italian character is something that many have discussed in the past, but who better than Fellini has been able to show it to us? Especially in his later films, the more melancholic ones, where he gradually achieved a, dare I say, Leopardi-like level of tone and depth”.

The book also includes brief and unique comments by Fellini on his films, which according to his instructions should have accompanied the text, as well as excerpts of interviews with American directors or European directors working in America. A splendid insert of photographs prepared with the Istituto Luce completes the volume.