The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Federico Fellini · a film · 1960 · about three hours · written with Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli · in Italian, with some scenes in English
Mode
Episodic fresco of a city seen through one drifting witness; society chronicle, satire and lament in one film
Mythos
A descent night by night, set between a god carried in from the sky and a monster drawn from the sea; the pagan goddess, the angel of an Umbrian church, two ways out and both shut
Phase
A run of nights and days in Rome and on its coast, seven of the nights running into a dawn that undoes them, from a statue flown over the city to a dead creature on a beach
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, in a wide frame, about three hours; Otello Martelli’s photography, Piero Gherardi’s design and costumes, Nino Rota’s score; the Via Veneto rebuilt at Cinecittà, the Trevi Fountain filmed where it stands
Register
From a star’s press conference to the horror of a quiet flat; parties played at length, the dawns held still
Scale
One witness and one city: its Church, its press, its classes from a flooded basement to a castle, its families and its dead
Governing Proposition
A reporter in the Rome of the boom passes through night after night of the sweet life, among a film star, an heiress, a miracle staged for television, a friend’s salon and an aristocrats’ party, and every dawn returns him to where he began, until he can no longer hear the girl who calls to him across the water. The wager of the film is that a form of nights without consequence, set between a god carried in from the sky and a monster drawn out of the sea, can show a city in which every order of meaning is turned into spectacle by the apparatus that reports it, and the man who reports it loses the power to choose anything else.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins in the air. A helicopter carries a statue of Christ over Rome, past the ruins of an aqueduct and the new apartment blocks at the city’s edge, and its shadow crosses the ground below. A second helicopter follows with Marcello Rubini, played by Marcello Mastroianni, and the photographer Paparazzo, played by Walter Santesso. Over a roof where women are sunbathing Marcello leans out to ask them something, and his question is lost in the noise of the rotor. The statue goes on toward the dome of St Peter’s. The sacred arrives as cargo, followed by the men whose trade is to report it, and the first thing the hero says cannot be heard.
Federico Fellini was forty when it opened. He made it from a story and screenplay he wrote with Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli, and Giuseppe Amato produced it for Riama Film with Angelo Rizzoli. Behind it stood six features of the fifties, among them I vitelloni, La strada and Le notti di Cabiria, and behind those Fellini’s work as a writer for Rossellini. It was shot in 1959, largely at Cinecittà, where the Via Veneto was rebuilt on a stage; the Trevi Fountain was filmed where it stands. Otello Martelli photographed it in black and white in a wide frame, Piero Gherardi designed and dressed it, Leo Catozzo cut it, and Nino Rota wrote the score. It runs about three hours and has no plot of cause. After the first night no episode requires the one before it, and what carries across is Marcello, Emma, who wants a household of him, the photographers and the city.
The first night shows the method. In a nightclub Marcello meets Maddalena, an heiress, played by Anouk Aimée. In her Cadillac they drive a prostitute home to her basement room, which is flooded, and there the two of them spend the night. At dawn Emma, played by Yvonne Furneaux, is found after an overdose, and from the hospital Marcello telephones Maddalena. The night promised something, and the dawn returns him to where he was, with a debt. Seven times the film will run a night into a dawn that undoes it.
Movement II
A film star arrives. Sylvia, played by Anita Ekberg, steps down at the airport into a crowd of photographers and gives a press conference. Then, in a costume like a priest’s, she climbs the dome of St Peter’s and stands above Rome, the wind in her hat. She speaks English, as does Robert, played by Lex Barker, and so do some of the guests Marcello will later meet at Steiner’s. The film’s Rome is a city of several languages, and the star is a visitor to it, taken up for a day by everyone whose living is to watch.
At night she dances at the Baths of Caracalla. Later, wandering the dark with Marcello, she howls back at the dogs, and a kitten is found. The night brings them to the Trevi Fountain. Sylvia walks into the water and calls to him, in English, “Marcello, come here! Hurry up!”, and he wades in toward her. Then, as dawn comes, the water stops. The film’s most famous image is its pattern at full height: the goddess crowned in water, the man reaching for her, and the morning turning it off.
At the hotel Robert is waiting, and the night ends in blows. Sylvia is the film’s pagan goddess, and it makes the figure rather than naming it: a priest’s costume on the dome of Christendom, a howl answered by dogs, a crown of water at night. She is the life at its most radiant, and the life gives Marcello nothing he can keep. What he takes from her night is what he takes from every night in the film: a dawn, and the same man in it.
Movement III
Marcello has one friend who seems to have escaped. Steiner, played by Alain Cuny, is first seen in a church, playing Bach on its organ: a man of culture at ease with the sacred and with music, with a wife, two children and a salon. To Marcello, who has let his own writing go, he is one way out of the life. Cuny plays him almost without movement, and the stillness is the promise.
Two children claim to have seen the Madonna in a field outside Rome. By dusk the field is lit for television and crowds have come, the sick among them, and Emma prays with them. A storm breaks. The children run this way and that through the crowd, changing their story, and the crowd runs after them under the floodlights. In the confusion a sick man dies. At dawn the tree in the field has been stripped for relics. The sacred has become a broadcast, staged for the cameras, and its one real event is a death the cameras did not come for.
At Steiner’s party the cultivated talk: writers, a poet, a guitarist. Steiner plays his guests tapes of thunder and of birdsong, nature recorded and replayed in a drawing room, and shows Marcello his two children asleep. Then, apart, he speaks to Marcello of fear, and of an order outside the passions. They are the only speeches in the film that sound like a philosophy, and the film gives them to the man whose house is most in order. Marcello listens as he listens to everyone.
Movement IV
By day Marcello goes to a seaside trattoria to write. A jukebox plays. The waitress, Paola, played by Valeria Ciangottini, is a young girl from Umbria, and he tells her that she looks like the angels in the churches of Umbria. The scene is short and plain. Paola is the second way out the film offers, set beside Steiner’s: not a life of culture but a plain one, and a face that Marcello can only describe by an image from the churches.
Marcello’s father, played by Annibale Ninchi, comes to Rome, and Marcello takes him out along the Via Veneto. At a cabaret a clown with a trumpet and balloons, played by Polidor, holds the room, and a dancer, Fanny, played by Magali Noël, takes the old man up to her flat. There the father is taken ill. At dawn he leaves for the train home. It is the one night on which Marcello tries to share the life with where he came from, and it fails in a heart’s flutter at dawn.
At an aristocrats’ party in a country house, Maddalena, in a ruined room, speaks to Marcello through an echo in the walls and asks him to marry her, and then kisses another man. The guests hunt for ghosts through the dark rooms. At dawn the old princess crosses the courtyard to Mass with her priest. Then, on an empty road at night, Marcello and Emma quarrel in the car, and he leaves her there. At dawn he comes back for her, and the film gives the return no words.
Movement V
Steiner has shot his two children and himself. Marcello comes to the flat, where the police are at work. The film does not explain the act; it has only the talk of fear and order to set around it. Steiner’s wife is met off a bus, not yet told, and the photographers surround her before anyone has spoken. The cultivated life, the way out that seemed to hold, has ended in the worst act the film contains, and the apparatus is waiting for it at the bus.
At Fregene, in a villa by the sea, a party celebrates an annulment. Nadia, played by Nadia Gray, performs a striptease. Marcello rides a drunk woman like a horse and pelts her with feathers, and the owner of the villa returns and turns them all out. Here the watcher acts, and acts cruelly, and the film’s register turns from observation to disgust. The descent has reached the bottom it has been moving toward since the first night, and it is a room of feathers.
At dawn the party goes down to the beach. Fishermen haul a dead sea creature onto the sand, and its eye stays open. Across a channel of water Paola calls to Marcello and waves. He cannot hear her over the wind and the surf; he shrugs, and goes with the party. Paola turns her face toward the camera. The film ends as it began, with words failing to carry across a distance, a god flown in from the sky at one end and a monster drawn from the sea at the other. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May 1960, the year L’avventura was given a jury prize there, and Gherardi’s costumes won the Academy Award. The photographer’s name gave paparazzi to many languages, the title became an idiom, and three years later Fellini built 8½ on its figure and its method.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure, with the small verbal part of Steiner’s speeches and the party talk. Some movements are required beyond argument. The prologue sets the law, the sacred carried as cargo and the question lost in the noise. Sylvia is the life at its most radiant; the miracle is the sacred as broadcast; Steiner’s three appearances are one argument, and the last cannot stand without the first two; the father’s night, Fregene and the beach close the circuit. What gives is in the middle: the castle’s ghost hunt adds little the Maddalena night had not set, and the miracle’s crowds, the dance at Caracalla and Steiner’s salon run past what they argue. That holds the axis lowest: in a form where no episode causes the next, the parts are required in kind more than in length.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. In the Rome of the boom every order of meaning, the sacred, love, art, the family and grief, is turned into spectacle by the apparatus that reports it, and the man who reports it loses the power to choose anything else. The mechanism is shown in action, not as a mood: the Christ arrives as a delivery; the miracle is staged for television; Steiner’s widow is photographed before she has been told her children are dead. Steiner, who seemed to have escaped, shows the cultivated life to be the same emptiness in a better room. Held at the figure by the film’s own pleasure in what it shows, which blurs whether it condemns or adores, and by a disclosure about women that is mostly the film’s own gaze.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The elevation is real and it recurs, but the film’s method is to raise it and deflate it, and the deflation costs height. The Christ crosses the city by air. Sylvia stands on the dome of St Peter’s with the wind in her hat. At night in the Trevi Fountain she calls, in English, “Marcello, come here! Hurry up!”, and he wades toward her as the water stops for the dawn. The miracle rises in storm and floodlight; on the beach the creature’s eye stays open and Paola turns her face. The fountain reaches the top, and little else does. Most rises are cut off at their peak, and the long nights of party between them are flat by design, so frequency is good and height is held a step down.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Myth partly built. The frame is construction: a god carried in from the sky, a monster drawn out of the sea, an icon and then a corpse with an open eye, the whole life set between a dead heaven and a dead deep. The descent is built too, night by night into the worse, ending in feathers and humiliation. Sylvia is made a pagan goddess, not only named one: in a costume like a priest’s on the dome, howling with the dogs, crowned in the fountain’s water. Paola is named the angel of an Umbrian church, and her two scenes carry the name. Held a tenth above the gate because much else is evoked: the Dantean descent often read into the film is not stated by it, and Steiner as a false guide is a reading.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance was Italian neorealism, which Fellini knew from inside as a writer for Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (1945) and Paisà (1946), and his own films of the fifties, which still told a story. The film turns from both: three hours with no plot of cause, held by a man, a city and the repetition of nights; a street built in the studio in place of the location; the rich and the famous in place of the poor. Its length and shape went against every commercial rule of its day. Held below the top because the turn was shared: L’avventura came to the same festival and À bout de souffle in the same season, Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (1954) had already made drift a structure, and I vitelloni had made episodes a life.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows, which is that this life does not accumulate: every night promises a revelation and every dawn returns the same man. Only repetition without consequence can say that; a plot would make the nights lead somewhere. Seven times a night runs into a dawn that undoes it, and that shape is the instrument. The frame, sky to sea, with the words lost to noise at both ends, makes the last scene a return rather than an end. Steiner and Paola alternate as two ways out, and both are shut. Held below the top because an additive form does not compel the order of its middle: the castle and the miracle could change places without the film knowing less, and there the form is a container.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence over promise, and sixty-six years of it. The questions the film opened remain open, and they are its own: whether it condemns the life or loves it, and whether the two can be told apart; why Steiner kills his children and himself, which the film never explains and only surrounds with his talk of fear and order; what Paola calls across the water, and what her look toward the camera means; what the creature is, and whose eye it is. The critical literature on the film is large and continuous. The formal yield holds on return, in the run of dawns and in the words lost at the two ends. Held a step below the top because part of the openness is length and looseness, which invite projection.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Released in 1960, so force and reach are scored together. The force is real: the film made the long, episodic portrait of a society through a drifting witness into a form for a feature, and gave the modern city of celebrity its image before the thing had a name. It is held below the reach because its year also brought L’avventura and À bout de souffle, which moved the grammar of film further. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection is documented, and it runs outside cinema. Fellini’s own 8½ (1963) is built on its figure and its method; Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza (2013) openly remakes its form and its Rome; and the photographer’s name gave paparazzi to many languages, as the title became an idiom.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Survival is demonstrated across sixty-six years of exhibition, restoration and re-release. Nothing that makes the work is lost: the form is wholly legible and the presence continuous. The Trevi Fountain has outlived the film as an image in the common mind, and the film’s subject, celebrity as a system that consumes what it photographs, is more present now than in 1960. The cost is the surface, which is more fixed to its moment than the subject: the Via Veneto of 1959, the clothes, the rock and roll at Caracalla, the cars, the manners of a Rome that has gone. These read now as period, and the film is partly watched as the document of a season. It survives, with some conversion.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. Otello Martelli’s black and white uses the wide frame both ways, composing crowds across it at the press conference and the miracle and isolating figures in it at the dawns and on the beach. Piero Gherardi rebuilt the Via Veneto at Cinecittà so that the street could be shot as a stage, and dressed the film. The camera travels with the parties. Nino Rota’s themes are worn and returned like the nights themselves, against the popular music of bands and jukeboxes. Marcello Mastroianni carries three hours of watching with very little action, and Alain Cuny’s stillness makes Steiner. The costs: the cutting is slack in the long parties, and a few performances are types.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the farce of the miracle, children who change their story and a crowd led by the cameras, and the horror of Steiner’s flat. One law governs both. Everything that promises meaning is taken up by the apparatus and returned empty, and Marcello watches: the miracle is the sacred taken up by television, Steiner’s death the cultivated life taken up by the photographers, who wait for the widow. The law holds across a wide range, until Fregene. There Marcello stops watching and acts, cruelly, and the register turns from observation to disgust. The feathers sit uneasily with the sympathy that came before them. They may be the law’s last term, or a second law, the film losing its patience, and the doubt counts against the whole.
Score: 8.6 / 10
A three-hour fresco holds many orders; the question is how firmly. The sacred: the flown Christ, the miracle, the church and its organ, the princess at Mass. The media: press, photographers, television. Class: the aristocrats at the castle, the cultivated at Steiner’s, the rich at Fregene, the prostitute in her flooded room, the waitress. The family: the father, Emma’s demand for a household, Steiner’s children. Love and sex, from Maddalena to Nadia. Art and thought, in the salon. Death, from the man in the crowd to the creature. They are integrated, not listed, but through one witness and one city, and much of what the film holds it holds as one man’s nights. Labour is held weakly, as Marcello’s trade and Paola’s service, and the state appears only as police at a door.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 9.0, then The Made at 8.9, then The Bottomless Well and The Imperishable at 8.8. A form for the long portrait of a society through a drifting witness that ran on into Fellini’s next film, Sorrentino’s Rome and the common languages; a making in which photography, design, score and the central performance bear weight; questions the film opened sixty-six years ago and has not closed; and a subject more present now than in 1960.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.0: the prologue, Sylvia, Steiner, the father, Fregene and the beach are required, but the castle, the miracle’s crowds, the dance at Caracalla and Steiner’s salon run past what they argue, and in a form where no episode causes the next the parts are required in kind more than in length. Above it, The Encompassed at 8.4: the sacred, the media, class, the family, love, art and death are held, but through one witness and one city, with labour and the state held weakly. Then The Sublime, The Archetypal Deep, The Living Form and The Inner Law at 8.6: rises cut off at their peak, much of the myth evoked rather than built, an additive middle whose order is not compelled, and a law that wavers at Fregene.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: Pressure on Tradition at 9.0, The Imperishable at 8.8, The Unconcealment at 8.7 and The Swerve at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clears it by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.0, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.4. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, 8.6 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of La dolce vita as released in Italy in 1960, in its Italian version, black and white and in a wide frame, from the statue over the aqueduct to Paola’s face on the beach: directed by Federico Fellini from a story and screenplay by Fellini, Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli, produced by Giuseppe Amato for Riama Film with Angelo Rizzoli, photographed by Otello Martelli, designed and costumed by Piero Gherardi, edited by Leo Catozzo, with music by Nino Rota. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. The film speaks several languages, Italian for the most part and English for Sylvia, Robert and some of Steiner’s guests; every axis is judged on the original, and the shortfall of any subtitle or dub is not charged to it. No Italian line is held to the word with certainty, so the Italian dialogue is described rather than quoted; the one line quoted is spoken in English in the original. The music is described and no song is named. Figures that could not be verified, among them the exact running time, the day of the Rome opening and the details of the film’s reception on release, are not given.