| La Strada | |
|---|---|
 Original theatrical poster |
|
| Directed by | Federico Fellini |
| Produced by | Dino De Laurentiis Carlo Ponti |
| Written by | Screenplay: Federico Fellini Ennio Flaiano Tullio Pinelli Story: Federico Fellini Tullio Pinelli |
| Starring | Anthony Quinn Giulietta Masina Richard Basehart |
| Music by | Nino Rota |
| Cinematography | Otello Martelli Carlo Carlini |
| Editing by | Leo Cattozzo |
| Distributed by | Trans Lux Inc. |
| Release date(s) | September 6, 1954 (premiere at VFF) September 22, 1954 (Italy) July 16, 1956 (United States) |
| Running time | 104 minutes |
| Country | Italy |
| Language | Italian |
La Strada (English: The Road) is a 1954 Italian neorealist drama directed by Federico Fellini in which a naive young woman (Giulietta Masina) is sold to a brutish man (Anthony Quinn) and goes on the road as a part of his itinerant show.
La Strada won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1956.[1]
Contents |
Gelsomina (Fellini's wife Giulietta Masina), a fey young woman, is sold for 10,000 lira by her impoverished mother to the Gypsy Zampanò (Anthony Quinn), to take the place of her now dead sister Rosa. Zampanò makes a living as an itinerant strongman, entertaining crowds by breaking an iron chain just by expanding his chest, and then passing around a hat for tips.
In short order Gelsomina's naive and clownish instinct emerges, although Zampanò's methods present her with a callous foil. He trains her to play the snare drum and trumpet, dance a bit, and clown for the audience. Despite her willingness to please, he relies on intimidation and even cruelty at times to maintain his dominion.
Finally, she 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 (Richard Basehart). When Zampanò finds her there, he forcibly takes her back. They join a ragtag traveling circus, and find Il Matto already working there. For reasons he himself cannot understand, Il Matto maliciously teases the strongman at every opportunity. After getting drenched by a pail of water, Zampanò chases after his tormentor with his knife drawn; both men are put in jail.
Il Matto is released first. He shows Gelsomina that there are alternatives to her servitude. Despite this, he talks her out of leaving Zampanò, imparting to her his philosophy that everything and everyone has a purpose, even a pebble, even her. She decides that hers is to take care of her unappreciative master. After Zampanò is freed, she asks if he wants to marry her, but he brushes her off.
Both men are fired from the circus. During the course of his travels, Zampanò comes upon Il Matto, fixing a flat tire on an empty stretch of road. He punches the clown several times and, satisfied with his revenge, starts to leave. Il Matto complains that his watch has been broken, then unexpectedly collapses and dies. Zampanò hides the body and pushes his car off the road.
Zampanò is relieved to get away unseen, but the killing breaks Gelsomina's spirit. After ten days, she is still unable to deal with her grief. When he cannot bear it any longer, he abandons her while she is taking a nap.
Four or five years later, he is drawn to a woman singing a tune Gelsomina often played. He learns that the woman's father had found Gelsomina on the beach and kindly taken her in. However, she wasted away and died. Zampanò gets drunk and wanders to the beach, where he breaks down and cries uncontrollably.
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."[2] 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."[3]
The picture was shot in Bagnoregio, Viterbo, Lazio, Ovindoli, L'Aquila, and Abruzzo.[4]
The theme music, composed by Nino Rota, contains a wistful tune which appears in the story line as a melody played by the Fool on a miniature violin, and later by Gelsomina after she teaches herself to play the trumpet.
The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 6, 1954 and won the Silver Lion. It opened wide in Italy on September 22, 1954, and in the United States on July 16, 1956.
Italy and France
Tullio Cicciarelli of Il Lavoro nuovo saw the film as
"an unfinished poem, but one deliberately unfinished for fear that its essence be lost in the callousness of critical definition, or in the ambiguity of classification. La strada cannot be classified nor does it sustain the weight of rational discussion and comparison (when the film was shown at the Venice Film Festival, many critics saw in it suggestions of Chaplin). The film should be accepted for its strange fragility and its often too colorful, almost artificial moments, or else totally rejected. If we try to analyze Fellini's film, its fragmentary quality becomes immediately evident and we are obliged to treat each fragment, each personal comment, each secret confession separately".[5]
In Il Secolo XIX, Ermanno Contini 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".[6]
Released in France in 1955, Dominique Aubier of Les Cahiers du cinéma thought La strada
“belongs to the mythological class, a class intended to captivate the critics more perhaps than the general public. Fellini attains a summit rarely reached by other film directors: style at the service of the artist’s mythological universe. This example once more proves that the cinema has less need of technicians - there are too many already - than of creative intelligence. To create such a film, the author must have had not only a considerable gift for expression but also a deep understanding of certain spiritual problems".[7]
A musical based on the film opened on Broadway on December 14, 1969, but closed after one performance.
Serbian rock band La Strada took their name from the film.
La Strada won more than fifty international awards, including an Oscar in 1956 for Best Foreign Language Film, the first prize ever given in that category.[8]
Wins
Nominations
| Awards | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto |
Academy Award
for Best Foreign Language Film 1956 |
Succeeded by Nights of Cabiria |
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  | Criterion Collection essay - La Strada (1954) - The Criterion Collection |
| | Criterion Collection essay by Peter Matthews - La Strada (1954) - The Criterion Collection |
| | ''La strada'' - BrokenProjector.com » Blog Archive » Italian Neo-realism: La Strada by Federico Fellini projector Italian Neo-realism: La Strada by Federico Fellini |
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