Fellini and Anima Husbandry

I spent a lovely evening alone at a local movie revival house that was showing two Fellini classics: "La Strada" and "Juliet of the Spirits." Both starred Fellini's real life wife Giulietta Masina, and together they offer complementary perspectives on the road to spiritual consciousness.

"La Strada" (The Road) is the earlier of the two films and also the simpler. In it, Gelsomina (Masina) is a poor, uneducated girl from a seaside town who is sold in marriage to a wandering carnival strongman named Zampano (Anthony Quinn). He is brutish, quiet and unfaithful. Gelsomina struggles to connect with him and love him. Though she is offered opportunities to leave, she can never quite do so. The pair encounter a trickster in the form of a circus clown called il Matto who lives to undermine Zampano's act. Zampano's conflict with il Matto ends in an accidental murder. Zampano must flee. Though Gelsomina wishes to stay with him, he must abandon her. Later, Zampano returns to the place by the sea where he left Gelsomina. He is told she is dead, and the final image is of Zampano at the beach, grieving in the shallow waves.

"Juliet of the Spirits" (Giulietta Degli Spiriti) is a later work by Master Fellini. In this story, Masina plays Giulietta Boldrini, a wealthy housewife who enjoys holding seances and speaking with the dead. She surrounds herself with psychics, artists and other eclectic characters in a pursuit of spiritual knowledge. Her husband, a successful man, is also unfaithful. When Giulietta's suspicions about her husband are confirmed by a private investigator, she takes the advice of a hermaphrodite mystic who tells her to pursue the pleasures of the flesh. For assistance, she turns to the expertise of her neighbor Suzy, a high-priced call girl with a zest for living. Suzy exposes Giulietta to many opportunities to indulge. In one scene, Giulietta comes very close to giving in to the seductive powers of a beautiful young man. In the end, however, Giulietta chooses to hold her desires in check. She returns to her house, where all the characters in her mind, past and present, swarm her. In the end, she looks inward, and confronts a shameful memory from her childhood involving her participation in a Catholic school play. In it, she played a Christian martyr who is burned and ascends to heaven. By rescuing her inner child from damnation, she returns to the present and is able to dispel the phantoms that plague her. As she leaves her house to walk alone in the woods, she hears for the first time the voices of the true spirits that can now finally speak to her.

The two films make an excellent pair, as many of the issues raised in the simple, poetic "La Strada" are more maturely explored in the carnivalesque spectacle of "Juliet of The Spirits." In each film, the cheating husband can be seen as the ego, unable to face it's failure and unwilling to relent to the spiritual. Giulietta Masina, Fellini's own partner in life, can be taken as his on-screen anima.

In "La Strada," this anima is neglected and denied. Much like the witches in Macbeth, the trickster helps the ego play out its own folly. Thus, the ego's triumph causes permanent separation from the anima. In the end, the victory is utterly Pyrrhic. The ego is left at the shore of consciousness, unable to immerse itself in the refreshing waters.

In contrast, "Juliet of the Spirits" refocuses on the anima as protagonist. The cheating husband here is a distant, almost secondary character. It is Juliet who must take the journey and heal herself. And there are many tricksters, indeed the whole population, that will act as a catalyst for her to do so. By pursuing but not being engulfed by the flame of her desire, Juliet gains spiritual power and is able to integrate and become whole. She is opened up to a wider world of infinite spiritual potential.

Taken together, it seems possible that Fellini was struggling with the problem of ego in 1954 when he made "La Strada," and had transcended to a higher level of psychological interest by 1965 when he made "Juliet of the Spirits." Death looms as the great teacher in both films. While Gelsomina must literally die in "La Strada" to teach Zampano a simple life lesson, Giulietta must speak with the dead to learn her lesson and get the chance to truly live.