There is a popularly held myth about art. This myth is grounded in the perceived privilege of an artist's despotic authority over the construction of his artistic outputs. Within this misperception, artistic constructions are considered immune to the myriad of external factors which inform all non-artistic human constructions. However, art is not created, nor does it exist in a vacuum. The relationship between artist and work is not analogous to that of God and Creation or of Form and representation. Artists and their works are subject to networks of conceptual and physical structures which define the phenomenal world. Art, like all other human creations, is human artifact. It reflects its author's concerns, dispositions, and prejudices; like all reflections it distorts through a power constitutive of its own character.

Art then exists in the dialectic space created by two conflicting tendencies. One is the artist's desire to grapple for unattainable God-like authority over an artistic work. The other is the tendency of a chaotic and fragmented reality to frustrate all attempts to construct in an orderly and sensible fashion. Fellini's cinema addresses the dual obligations created by an awareness of this dialectic. Also, it embodies the manner in which this dialectic, which is the centerpiece of Western aesthetics, is in a widely unacknowledged sense an oblique discourse on gender and sexuality.

Fellini makes no attempt to mask the manner in which aesthetic and gender discourses operate with intermingled symbolic currencies. Fellini's films deal in sensory representations of a traditional western schematic which associates with masculinity: objectivity, reason, rationality, order, civilization, and society; and with femininity: subjectivity, fragmented reality, irrationality, chaos, and nature*. While they vary in significant ways from film to film, Fellini's characters gravitate towards these traditional aestheticized constructions of male and female. Women, categorized as mothers and whores, are presented as enigmatic, furtive, mysterious, and natural. They are simultaneously alluring and threatening. Inexperienced women are presented as virgin nature waiting on male exploration; experienced women as decadent urban centers, jaded by their prolific use. Fellini's self-reflexive position within gender discourse is manifested in his male protagonists' sense of guilt in the recognition of their own misogynies. This is the fundamental conundrum of Fellini's male protagonists.

*This schematic is evidenced in western aesthetics in the distinction of the beautiful and the sublime in Kant's critiques, in the Apollian and Dionysian figures of Nietzche's Death Of Tragedy, and Heidegger's notions of World and Being.

Eli Ping Weinberg
Four Italian Filmmakers
October 1998