La Strada

Plot

Gelsomina, a simple-minded, dreamy young woman, learns that her sister Rosa has died after going on the road with the strongman Zampanò. Zampanò has returned a year later to ask her mother if Gelsomina will take Rosa's place. The impoverished mother, with other mouths to feed, accepts 10,000 lire (about $20), and her daughter tearfully departs the same day.

Zampanò makes his living as an itinerant street performer, traveling in a covered "Motocarro" three-wheel-motorcycle-truck, entertaining crowds by breaking an iron chain bound tightly across his chest, then passing a hat for tips. In short order, Gelsomina's naïve and antic nature emerges, with Zampanò's brutish methods presenting a callous foil. Presenting her as his wife (which she is not), he teaches her to play the snare drum and trumpet, dance a bit, and clown for the audience. Despite her willingness to please, he intimidates her, forces himself upon her, and treats her cruelly at times. She develops a tenderness for him that is betrayed when he goes off with another woman one evening, leaving Gelsomina abandoned in the street. However, even in her wretchedness she manages to find beauty and wonder, aided by some local children.

Gelsomina finally rebels and leaves, making her way into town. There she watches the act of another street entertainer, Il Matto ("The Fool"), a talented high wire artist and clown. When Zampanò finds her, he forcibly takes her back. They join a ragtag travelling circus where Il Matto already works. Il Matto teases the strongman at every opportunity, though he cannot explain what motivates him to do so. After Il Matto drenches Zampanò with a pail of water, Zampanò chases after his tormentor with his knife drawn. As a result, he is briefly jailed, and both men are fired from the travelling circus.

Before Zampanò's release from prison, Il Matto proposes to Gelsomina that there are alternatives to her servitude and imparts his philosophy that everything and everyone has a purpose – even a pebble, even she. A nun suggests that Gelsomina's purpose in life is comparable to her own. But when Gelsomina offers Zampanò marriage, he brushes her off.

On an empty stretch of road, Zampanò comes upon Il Matto fixing a flat tire. As Gelsomina watches in horror, the two men begin to fight; it ends after the strongman punches the clown on the head several times, causing the fool to hit his head on the corner of his car's roof. As Zampanò walks back to his motocarro with a warning for the man to watch his mouth in the future, Il Matto complains that his watch has stopped, then stumbles into a field, collapses, and dies. Zampanò hides the body and pushes the car off the road, where it bursts into flames.

Cast

Giulietta Masina as Gelsomina

Anthony Quinn as Zampanò

Richard Basehart as Il Matto ("The Fool")

Aldo Silvani as Giraffa, the circus owner

Marcella Rovere as the widow

Livia Venturini as the nun

Production

Background

Fellini's creative process for La Strada began with vague feelings, "a kind of tone," he said, "that lurked, which made me melancholy and gave me a diffused sense of guilt, like a shadow hanging over me. This feeling suggested two people who stay together, although it will be fatal, and they don't know why." These feelings evolved into certain images: snow silently falling on the ocean, various compositions of clouds, and a singing nightingale. At that point, Fellini sketched these images, a habitual tendency that he claimed he had learned early in his career when he had worked in provincial music halls and had to draw the characters and sets. Finally, he reported that the idea first "became real" to him when he drew a circle on a piece of paper to depict Gelsomina's head, and he decided to base the character on the actual character of Giulietta Masina, his wife of five years at the time: "I utilized the real Giulietta, but as I saw her. I was influenced by her childhood photographs, so elements of Gelsomina reflect a ten-year-old Giulietta."

The idea for the character Zampanò came from Fellini's youth in the coastal town of Rimini. A pig castrator lived there who was known as a womanizer: according to Fellini, "This man took all the girls in town to bed with him; once he left a poor idiot girl pregnant and everyone said the baby was the devil's child." In 1992, Fellini told Canadian director Damian Pettigrew that he had conceived the film at the same time as co-scenarist Tullio Pinelli in a kind of "orgiastic synchronicity":

I was directing I vitelloni, and Tullio had gone to see his family in Turin. At that time, there was no autostrada between Rome and the north and so you had to drive through the mountains. Along one of the tortuous winding roads, he saw a man pulling a carretta, a sort of cart covered in tarpaulin ... A tiny woman was pushing the cart from behind. When he returned to Rome, he told me what he'd seen and his desire to narrate their hard lives on the road. 'It would make the ideal scenario for your next film,' he said. It was the same story I'd imagined but with a crucial difference: mine focused on a little traveling circus with a slow-witted young woman named Gelsomina. So we merged my flea-bitten circus characters with his smoky campfire mountain vagabonds. We named Zampanò after the owners of two small circuses in Rome: Zamperla and Saltano.

Fellini wrote the script with collaborators Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli and brought it first to Luigi Rovere, Fellini's producer for The White Sheik (1952). When Rovere read the script for La Strada, he began to weep, raising Fellini's hopes, only to have them dashed when the producer announced that the screenplay was like great literature, but that "as a film this wouldn't make a lira. It's not cinema." By the time it was fully complete, Fellini's shooting script was nearly 600 pages long, with every shot and camera angle detailed and filled with notes reflecting intensive research. Producer Lorenzo Pegoraro was impressed enough to give Fellini a cash advance, but would not agree to Fellini's demand that Giulietta Masina play Gelsomina.

Casting

Fellini secured financing through the producers Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti, who wanted to cast Silvana Mangano (De Laurentiis's wife) as Gelsomina and Burt Lancaster as Zampanò, but Fellini refused these choices. Giulietta Masina had been the inspiration for the entire project, so Fellini was determined never to accept an alternative to her. For Zampanò, Fellini had hoped to cast a nonprofessional and, to that end, he tested a number of circus strongmen, to no avail. He also had trouble finding the right person for the role of Il Matto. His first choice was the actor Moraldo Rossi, who was a member of Fellini's social circle and had the right type of personality and athletic physique, but Rossi wanted to be the assistant director, not a performer. Alberto Sordi, the star of Fellini's earlier films The White Sheik and I Vitelloni, was eager to take the role, and was bitterly disappointed when Fellini rejected him after a tryout in costume.

Ultimately, Fellini drew his three leading players from people associated with the 1954 film Donne Proibite (Angels of Darkness), directed by Giuseppe Amato, in which Masina played the very different role of a madam. Anthony Quinn was also acting in the film, while Richard Basehart was often on the set visiting his wife, actress Valentina Cortese. When Masina introduced Quinn to her husband, the actor was disconcerted by Fellini's insistence that the director had found his Zampanò, later remembering: "I thought he was a little bit crazy, and I told him I wasn't interested in the picture, but he kept hounding me for days." Not long afterwards, Quinn spent the evening with Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman, and after dinner they watched Fellini's 1953 Italian comedy–drama I Vitelloni. According to Quinn: "I was thunderstruck by it. I told them the film was a masterpiece, and that the same director was the man who had been chasing me for weeks."

Fellini was particularly taken with Basehart, who reminded the director of Charlie Chaplin. Upon being introduced to Basehart by Cortese, Fellini invited the actor to lunch, at which he was offered the role of Il Matto. When asked why by the surprised Basehart, who had never before played the part of a clown, Fellini responded: "Because, if you did what you did in Fourteen Hours you can do anything." A great success in Italy, the 1951 Hollywood drama starred Basehart as a would-be suicide on a hotel balcony. Basehart, too, had been greatly impressed by I Vitelloni, and agreed to take the role for much less than his usual salary, in part because he was very attracted by Fellini's personality, saying: "It was his zest for living, and his humor."

Filming

The film was shot in Bagnoregio, Viterbo, Lazio, and Ovindoli, L'Aquila, Abruzzo. On Sundays, Fellini and Basehart drove around the countryside, scouting locations and looking for places to eat, sometimes trying as many as six restaurants and venturing as far away as Rimini before Fellini found the desired ambiance and menu.

Production started in October 1953, but had to be halted within weeks when Masina dislocated her ankle during the convent scene with Quinn. With shooting suspended, De Laurentiis saw an opportunity to replace Masina, whom he had never wanted for the part and who had not yet been signed to a contract. This changed as soon as executives at Paramount viewed the rushes of the scene and lauded Masina's performance, resulting in De Laurentiis announcing that he had her on an exclusive and ordering her to sign a hastily prepared contract, at approximately a third of Quinn's salary.

The delay caused the entire production schedule to be revised, and cinematographer Carlo Carlini, who had a prior commitment, had to be replaced by Otello Martelli, a long-time favorite of Fellini's. When filming resumed in February 1954, it was winter. The temperature had dropped to −5 °C, often resulting in no heat or hot water, necessitating more delays and forcing the cast and crew to sleep fully dressed and wear hats to keep warm.

The new schedule caused a conflict for Anthony Quinn, who was signed to play the title role in Attila, a 1954 epic, also produced by De Laurentiis and directed by Pietro Francisci. At first, Quinn considered withdrawing from La Strada, but Fellini convinced him to work on both films simultaneously—shooting La Strada in the morning and Attila in the afternoon and evening. The plan often required the actor to get up at 3:30 am to capture the "bleak early light" that Fellini insisted on, and then leave at 10:30 to drive to Rome in his Zampanò outfit so he could be on the set in time to transform into Attila the Hun for afternoon shooting. Quinn recalled: "This schedule accounted for the haggard look I had in both films, a look that was perfect for Zampanò but scarcely OK for Attila the Hun."

Despite an extremely tight budget, production supervisor Luigi Giacosi was able to rent a small circus run by a man named Savitri, a strongman and fire-eater who coached Quinn on circus jargon and the technical aspects of chain-breaking. Giacosi also secured the services of the Zamperla Circus, which supplied a number of stuntmen who could play themselves, including Basehart's double, a high-wire artist who refused to perform when firemen arrived with a safety net.

Sound

As was the common practice for Italian films at the time, shooting was done without sound; dialogue was added later along with music and sound effects. As a consequence, cast members generally spoke in their native language during filming: Quinn and Basehart in English, Masina and the others in Italian. Liliana Betti, Fellini's long-time assistant, has described the director's typical procedure regarding dialogue during filming, a technique he called the "number system" or "numerological diction": "Instead of lines, the actor has to count off numbers in their normal order. For instance, a line of fifteen words equals an enumeration of up to thirty. The actor merely counts till thirty: 1-2-3-4-5-6-7. etc." Biographer John Baxter has commented on the usefulness of such a system: "It helps pinpoint an instant in the speech where he [Fellini] wants a different reaction. 'Go back to 27,' he'll tell an actor, 'but this time, smile.'" Since he didn't need to worry about noise while shooting a scene, Fellini kept up a running commentary during filming, a practice that scandalized more traditional filmmakers, like Elia Kazan: "He talked through each take, in fact yelled at the actors. 'No, there, stop, turn, look at her, look at her. See how sad she is, see her tears? Oh, the poor wretch! You want to comfort her? Don't turn away; go to her. Ah, she doesn't want you, does she? What? Go to her anyway!' ... That's how he's able ... to use performers from many countries. He does part of the acting for the actors."

Since Quinn and Basehart did not speak Italian, both were dubbed in the original release. Unhappy with the actor who initially dubbed Zampanò, Fellini remembered being impressed by the work done by Arnoldo Foà in dubbing the Toshiro Mifune character in the Italian version of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, and was able to secure Foà's services at the very last moment. Composer Michel Chion has observed that Fellini particularly exploited the tendency of Italian films of the post-war period to allow considerable freedom in the synching of voices to lip movements, especially in contrast to Hollywood's perceived "obsessive fixation" with the matching of voices to mouths: "In Fellinian extremes, when all those post-synched voices float around bodies, we reach a point where voices—even if we continue to attribute them to the bodies they're assigned—begin to acquire a sort of autonomy, in a baroque and decentered fashion." In the Italian version of La Strada, there are even instances when a character is heard to speak while the actor's mouth is shut tight.

Fellini scholar Thomas Van Order has pointed out that Fellini is equally free in the treatment of ambient sound in his films, preferring to cultivate what Chion called "a subjective sense of point of audition", in which what is heard on screen mirrors a particular character's perceptions, as opposed to the visible reality of the scene. As an example, ducks and chickens appear on the screen throughout Gelsomina's conversation with the nun, but, reflecting the girl's growing sense of enlightenment concerning her place in the world, the quacking and clucking of barnyard fowl dissolves into the chirping of songbirds.

Music

The entire score for La Strada was written by Nino Rota after principal photography was completed. The main theme is a wistful tune that appears first as a melody played by the Fool on a kit violin and later by Gelsomina on her trumpet. Its last cue in the penultimate scene is sung by the woman who tells Zampanò the fate of Gelsomina after he abandoned her. This is one of three primary themes that are introduced during the titles at the beginning of La Strada and that recur regularly throughout the film. To these are added a fourth recurring theme that appears in the very first sequence, after Gelsomina meets Zampanò, and is often interrupted or silenced in his presence, occurring less and less frequently and at increasingly lower volumes as the film progresses. Claudia Gorbman has commented on the use of these themes, which she deems true leitmotifs, each of which is not simply an illustrative or redundant identifying tag, but "a true signifier that accumulates and communicates meaning not explicit in the images or dialogue".

In practice, Fellini shot his films while playing taped music because, as he explained in a 1972 interview, "it puts you in a strange dimension in which your fantasy stimulates you". For La Strada, Fellini used a variation by Arcangelo Corelli that he planned to use on the sound track. Rota, unhappy with that plan, wrote an original motif (with echoes of the "Larghetto" from Dvořák's Opus 22 Serenade for Strings in E major) with rhythmic lines matched to Corelli's piece that synchronize with Gelsomina's movements with the trumpet and Il Matto's with the violin.

Release

The film premiered at the 15th Venice International Film Festival on 6 September 1954 and won the Silver Lion. It was released in Italy on 22 September 1954, and in the United States on 16 July 1956.

In 1994, a new print was financed by filmmaker Martin Scorsese, who has acknowledged that since childhood he has related to the character of Zampanò, bringing elements of the self-destructive brute into his films Taxi Driver and Raging Bull.

Reception

Critical response

Tullio Cicciarelli of Il Lavoro nuovo saw the film as "an unfinished poem," left unfinished deliberately by the filmmaker for fear that "its essence be lost in the callousness of critical definition, or in the ambiguity of classification," while Ermanno Continin of Il Secolo XIX praised Fellini as "a master story-teller":

The narrative is light and harmonious, drawing its essence, resilience, uniformity and purpose from small details, subtle annotations and soft tones that slip naturally into the humble plot of a story apparently void of action. But how much meaning, how much ferment enrich this apparent simplicity. It is all there although not always clearly evident, not always interpreted with full poetical and human eloquence: it is suggested with considerable delicacy and sustained by a subtle emotive force.

Others saw it differently. When the 1954 Venice Film Festival jury awarded La Strada the Silver Lion while ignoring Luchino Visconti's Senso, a brawl broke out when Visconti's assistant Franco Zeffirelli blew a whistle during Fellini's acceptance speech, only to be attacked by Moraldo Rossi. The disturbance left Fellini pale and shaken and Masina in tears.

The Venice premiere began "in an inexplicably chilly atmosphere," according to Tino Ranieri, and "the audience, who rather disliked it as the screening began, seemed to change opinion slightly toward the end, yet the movie didn't receive—in any sense of the word—the response that it deserved."

Reviewing for Corriere della Sera, Arturo Lanocita argued that the film "gives the impression of being a rough copy that merely hints at the main points of the story ... Fellini seems to have preferred shadow where marked contrast would have been more effective." Nino Ghelli of Bianco e Nero regretted that after "an excellent beginning, the style of the film remains harmonious for some time until the moment when the two main characters are separated, at which point the tone becomes increasingly artificial and literary, the pace increasingly fragmentary and incoherent."

Fellini biographer Tullio Kezich observed that Italian critics "make every effort to find faults with [Fellini's] movie after the opening in Venice. Some say that it starts out okay but then the story completely unravels. Others recognize the pathos in the end, but don't like the first half."

Awards and nominations

La Strada won more than fifty international awards, including an Oscar in 1957 for Best Foreign Language Film, the first recipient in that category.

Legacy

During Fellini's early film career, he was closely associated with the movement known as neorealism, a set of films produced by the Italian film industry during the post-World War II period, particularly 1945–1952, and characterized by close attention to social context, a sense of historical immediacy, political commitment to progressive social change, and an anti-Fascist ideology. Although there were glimpses of certain lapses in neorealistic orthodoxy in some of his first films as a director, La Strada has been widely viewed as a definitive break with the ideological demands of neorealist theorists to follow a particular political slant or embody a specific "realist" style. This resulted in certain critics vilifying Fellini for, as they saw it, reverting to prewar attitudes of individualism, mysticism and preoccupation with "pure style". Fellini vigorously responded to this criticism: "Certain people still think neorealism is fit to show only certain kinds of reality, and they insist that this is social reality. It is a program, to show only certain aspects of life". Film critic Millicent Marcus wrote that "La Strada remains a film indifferent to the social and historical concerns of orthodox neorealism". Soon, other Italian filmmakers, including Michelangelo Antonioni and even Fellini's mentor and early collaborator Roberto Rossellini were to follow Fellini's lead and, in the words of critic Peter Bondanella, "pass beyond a dogmatic approach to social reality, dealing poetically with other equally compelling personal or emotional problems". As film scholar Mark Shiel has pointed out, when it won the first Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1957, La Strada became the first film to win international success as an example of a new brand of neorealism, "bittersweet and self-conscious".

International film directors who have named La Strada as one of their favorite films include Stanley Kwan, Anton Corbijn, Gillies MacKinnon, Andreas Dresen, Jiří Menzel, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Mike Newell, Rajko Grlić, Laila Pakalniņa, Ann Hui, Akira Kurosawa, Kazuhiro Soda, Julian Jarrold, Krzysztof Zanussi, and Andrey Konchalovsky. David Cronenberg credits La Strada for opening his eyes to the possibilities of cinema when, as a child, he saw adults leave a showing of the film openly weeping.

The film has found its way into popular music, too. Bob Dylan and Kris Kristofferson have mentioned the film as an inspiration for their songs "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Me and Bobby McGee", respectively, and a Serbian rock band took the film's name as their own.