Fellini's Archetype of the Large, Voluptuous Woman
by Dr.Natick Plaza
Federico Fellini, in an interview with Charlotte Chandler, explains the physical images of women that most often surface from his subconscious:
Sometimes when I am casting, or in pre-production, or writing, my hand seems to draw without me. In those moments, I am most likely to do enormous female breasts. My second most frequent doodle is excessively large women's behinds ... In my sketchbooks, most of the women I draw look like they are bursting out of their clothes -- if they are wearing any [Chandler 162].
These images, admittedly bawdy, and uncouth, tend to permeate Fellini's films after La Dolce Vita (1959) and his subsequent shift to introspection. In films such as 8 1/2, La Citta Del Donne, and Amarcord, among countless others, we see many women with large breasts, big behinds, tumescent bodies, some exaggerated to proportions of caricature, licking their lips and undulating in less-than-subtle gestures of sexual availability. While, on the surface, these women seem to be portrayed in a purely sexist manner, as visual-concubines for the eyes of lustful Italian men, further scrutiny reveals other motivations. Fellini portrays these women deliberately as unrealistic constructs; as glorified fantasies, for the most part, of pre-pubescent male sexual experience -- primarily, his own -- and dreams, thus providing, in his opinion, a greater universal significance.
Before continuing, we must first take into account the various difficulties of analyzing the archetype of the voluptuous woman in Fellini's films. Since the physical representation of such women relies ostensibly on the psychology and dreams of men, in general, and specifically of the director himself, we run into a meta-cinematic problem: only the director, ultimately, can comment on his own dreams and subconscious as they influence the representations of his female archetypes. Yet, as we know from the field of psychology, and from various twentieth-century modes of aesthetic interpretation, the director is often incapable of (and aversive to) commenting effectively on his own films, let alone his psyche. This is complicated when a film relies heavily on fantasy, dreams, and subconscious, which, as techniques, are enigmatic and very difficult to analyze. We must proceed, then, utilizing both Fellini's comments and the comments of outside critics, taking both, as the proverb goes, with a grain of salt.
Fellini's archetype of the large, voluptuous woman begins as early as La Dolce Vita, if not earlier, in which Fellini casts Anita Ekburg, a voluptuous Swedish actress, to play the key role of Sylvia, a Hollywood star pursued by an insatiable Marcello Mastroianni. The archetype continues in 8 1/2, in which we encounter La Saraghina, an enormous prostitute, who, for a meager price, performs a sexual dance in front of her crumbling beach-front shack. In Amarcord we see a tobacconist women of immense proportions; in Roma , a grotesquely obese, bed-ridden woman referred to as 'Mama'; in La Citta Del Donne, a Motorcyclist Woman who, because of her large and robust features, resembles a man; and countless others.
This archetype of profuse voluptuousness can be attributed, for the most part, to a glorified image that Fellini, and many men, acquire at a pre-pubescent age, when a woman seems mysterious and larger-than-life. Fellini, in the Chandler interview, affirms:
I do not believe there is anything deep in my [portrayal of women], just the obvious ... Little boys have the advantage of seeing female nudity in their formative period, because some women tend to equate inability to verbalize with inability to see and inability to have sexual feelings ... I became aware of women at an extremely young age well before I could talk, and I was curious about their difference from me. I enjoyed [their] bodies even before I had the words in mind to describe what I was seeing ... After that ... [my friends and I] would go to the beach and see the ... German and Scandinavian women who had come for the sun" [Chandler 162].
Judging by this, and by the quotation in the first paragraph, Fellini feels that his pre-pubescent experience with women had a lasting impact on his perception, solidifying a fantasy image in his subconscious that he would carry with him into adult life.
It is not exactly clear, however, as it can never be clear with any psychological phenomenon, the exact experiences that led Fellini, as a pre-pubescent, to solidify an image of woman as large and voluptuous. As Fellini hints both in the Chandler interview and in his films, the best explanation lies perhaps in his early sexual encounters. In 8 1/2, for instance, the first of a series of meta-cinematic films wherein the life of the protagonist resembles closely the life of Fellini himself, the flashback to La Saraghina and her "abandoned pillbox on the beach" serves to explain Guido's (and possibly Fellini's) adult perception of women. Saraghina, by performing an erotic dance, then pulling Guido to join her, imprints in the boy's memory a fantasy vision of femininity that will cause him to return over and over to the beach, "fascinated by [Saraghina's] strange appeal" [Bondanella 167]. In Amarcord, we see a teenage Fellini (Titta), who has his first sexual encounter with an obese tobacconist, which reinforces his already-established fantasy of big-breasted women. A Freudian interpretation would go even further, pointing to the Oedipus complex and a son's early attachment to the mother. Perhaps it was Fellini's relative size, a Freudian might argue, compared to the size of his mother, perceived through infant eyes, that caused his preoccupation with large women. In any case, it is not as important which experiences led to Fellini's archetype of the large, voluptuous woman, but why he utilizes this archetype in his films.
This question can be answered through Fellini's own film philosophy, coupled with the psychology of Carl Gustav Jung. "[My] personal reality," Fellini explains, is "absolute reality, which can be the truest reality. This translation of my vision is what I try to do on the screen ... I make a film only for myself" [Chandler 161 -- italics added]. Fellini is referring to the philosophy he developed after La Dolce Vita, which emphasizes, like the books of Proust, Joyce, or Woolf, a discourse of subconscious and dreams, and allows subconscious representations, no matter how seemingly uncouth, to surface among a backdrop of meta-cinema. Moreover, the validity of this philosophy was affirmed, shortly after its invention, by the psychology of Jung, which ...
Fellini had begun to read under the guidance of a Jungian psychoanalyst [Bondanella 151]. Jung's theories, which hypothesize a 'collective unconscious' of images and dreams, as well as offer a female archetype, played a major role in projecting Fellini's archetype of the large, voluptuous woman into his cinema. "Jung helped to convince [Fellini]," explains Peter Bondanella, "that the dreams and fantasies that he had experienced since childhood," which "he had considered an infantile manifestation of adult immaturity were, instead, a means of gaining access to an imaginative world of far greater significance" [Bondanella 152]. Moreover, Jung offered the idea of the 'animus,' an eternal and primordial archetype of woman -- much like Fellini's archetype -- which man projects onto other women [Bondanella 300]. Fellini then had every reason at his disposal to portray women as excessively large and voluptuous; as unreal, glorified fantasies stemming from the subconscious.
The archetype of the large, voluptuous woman, as we have seen, derives from Fellini's pre-pubescent experiences with women, either sexual, or otherwise. While Fellini also utilizes such archetypes to point out the cinema's traditional, sexist depictions of women -- another topic of fascination since childhood [Bondanella 297] -- it is mostly to represent his own subconscious and dreams. It is evident that Fellini employs this archetype consciously and deliberately, exposing a non-realistic fantasy as a means of gaining greater universal significance. "Of course there isn't ... one real woman," he says ofLa Citta Del Donne. "There wd at as a conscious commentary on man's, and especially his own, inadvertent, subconscious exaltation of women.asn't meant to be. Because if there was a real woman, it would have been useless to make the film" [Bondanella 324]. Rather than being viewed as sexist, then, Fellini's archetype of the large, voluptuous woman can be looked at as a conscious commentary on man's, and especially his own, inadvertent, subconscious exaltation of women.
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Copyright 2000. All rights reserved. Contents herein are not to be reproduced without written consent of the author, Dr. Plaza.

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