Sam Rohdie,
Fellini Lexicon.
London: BFI publishers, 2002.
ISBN: 0851709346 £13.99 (pb)
ISBN: 0851709338 £48.00 (hb)
159pp
(Review copy supplied by BFI publishing)

A note on the back cover of this handsome volume is indicative: “The Lexicon accompanies Fellini’s films, rather than seeking to possess them, taking pleasure in their incongruities, exaggerations, absurdities and surprises. The entries are reversible, overlapping, often unlikely, combining careful analysis of the films with a celebration of their richness”. Theoretical possession of films is something Rohdie seems always to have been at pains to avoid, even criticise. In his monograph on Antonioni (London, BFI, 1990), he had nailed his colours unequivocally to the mast of Barthesian textual pleasure, taking to task such semioticians as Christian Metz, whose tendency towards categorisation or systematisation Rohdie saw as a “‘theoretical’ mania to define”(5). If we couple this aversion to the more straitjacketing aspects of theory (and a concomitant and persistent propensity for the pleasure to be found in textual play), with the acknowledgement of the arbitrary and the personal made explicit in Rohdie’s introduction to the Lexicon, we have a clear idea of his approach in this latest book:

I have made choices in accord with what I believe to be structurally pertinent to Fellini’s films. The choices are also matters of chance, preference and association. An entry “conmen” can lead to “angels”, or “clowns”, and also to “trumpets”.

The lexicon is not scholarly nor [sic] scientific.

It is a play with meanings rather than with their definition.

Fellini’s films lend themselves to affiliation, overlap, superimposition (Introduction, 1).

Rohdie is true to his word, which some might find frustrating. Those scholars or students of Fellini who look for well-documented references, footnotes, endnotes or indices will be disappointed – though the volume does contain a basic filmography (155-9), and what Rohdie styles “a brief selective bibliography” of works that he has found to be “of particular interest”, or “extremely suggestive” (152-4). There can be no talk, either, of chronology, since the volume is exactly what it announces itself to be: a lexicon, set out alphabetically, rather than chronologically (or even, for that matter, thematically). This should, in any case, come as no surprise: the broadly chronological approach adopted for Antonioni (1990), had all but disappeared by the time of Rohdie’s subsequent monograph, The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini (London & Bloomington, BFI Publishing & Indiana University Press, 1995). Alphabetisation apart, however, how are we to consider Fellini Lexicon?

In 1985, Peter Greenaway made a charming and cheeky short film called Inside Rooms: 26 Bathrooms (U.K.). The figure of 26 was chosen for the number of letters in the alphabet, a scheme which sometimes saw Greenaway’s tongue almost piercing his cheek, rather than simply being placed in it. The “entry” for the letter A, for instance, was “A is for A bathroom”. It was irreverent, stylish and shamelessly ridiculed any attempt at formalism that the films’s title might invite us to apply.

Rohdie does something similar. His A is not for Amarcord (1973), but for “Angels” and for the (as he sees it) six aspects of the woman, performer and persona that are Anita Ekberg. It would be equally pointless to look for Il bidone (1955) under B, though its characters are at least placed (rather less unexpectedly this time) under C for “Conmen”. What we do find under B is an entry on ‘(The) Beyond’, in which we are regaled with a free-form drawing together of the elsewheres and beyonds in Cocteau, Godard (after Cocteau), Dante, Joyce and Pasolini. It is in passages such as this one, or in the entry on “Illusionism”, dealing with fiction and spectacle in E la nave va (1983), that Rohdie is at his best (70-75).

Where, then, to look for Amarcord, a film which, from its title onwards, is quintessentially Fellinian in its comprehensive exposition of the thematic triad at the heart of all Fellini’s films: memory, desire, and the dreams (fantasies) they generate? Where else but in the two entries for “Rimini” (97-102). These sections offer a loving and penetrating discussion of memory and desire, and of the difference between them as the narrative matrix of Fellini’s films. Nobody reading these pages could be left in any doubt of Rohdie’s intimate knowledge of, and profound admiration for, his subject.

Inevitably, and regrettably in this case, there is the odd reservation. In spite of his declaredly idiosyncratic and almost free-associative approach to his subject, Rohdie can be both prescriptive (“The rules of the lexicon are…”, he tells us in his introduction, with no hint of tongue in cheek); and surprisingly deictic: “Reality is there if only you can see it” (6), “To play oneself is to play with images of oneself. Reality and self can sometimes be hard to come by’ (7). We might agree with such statements; but, since they clearly move away from film text and spill over into what, for want of a better term, we might call “common experience”, they verge on the generalising, standing almost as captationes benevolentiae – something of which a writer of Rohdie’s calibre has no need.

Then, in “Rubini 1”, Rohdie’s otherwise engaging discussion of Intervista (1987) and Prova d’orchestra (1979) is marred by a statement of the obvious: “Fellini’s documentaries are false in the sense of being staged but true because the staging is acknowledged” (110). Either the present writer is missing something, or this is an overstated reference to self-reflexive techniques which had been present in Fellini’s work since La dolce vita (1960) and Otto e mezzo (1963).

Other cavils: “As he lays dying” (3 & 121) should read “As he lies dying”; the ferryman of the underworld is not “Geronte” (123), but “Charon” or, in Italian, “Caronte”; Pina does not die in Rossellini’s Paisà, but in Roma città aperta (66); and the sentence on pp.118-9 is not, in its present form, one sentence, but two: ‘Thus, [Guido] too, like Fellini in the other film and like the Fellini he is the double for in Otto e mezzo, enters another world, a beyond of images where the characters in his film live as images and await him there and who [sic], for most of Otto e mezzo, he cannot reach”.

Let me repeat that these last-listed elements are noted reluctantly. They could presumably have been eliminated with more conservative proofreading, and are but small detractions from what should stand as a set of elegant, knowledgeable and passionate reflections on the work of one of Italy’s (and not only Italy’s) greatest illusionists.

Dave Watson
Department of Film Studies
Australian National University
Created on: Friday, 30 April 2004 | Last Updated: 30-Apr-04