The Clowns

by Michael Joshua Rowin

The Clowns introduces classic European circus routines and types of clowns

In 1970 Federico Fellini was coming off his largest and darkest production to date, Satyricon (1969), and was looking to work smaller and lighter. He thus struck a deal with television network RAI to direct The Clowns, to be released theatrically at the same time as its broadcast debut. The Clowns marked Federico Fellini’s second film produced for Italian television and, not coincidentally, his second mockumentary. Work in this genre evolved naturally out of the self-reflexive considerations and representations of image making in his earlier films, from Wanda’s illusion-shattering encounter with a crew producing a soap- opera photo strip in The White Sheik (1952) to Fellini-surrogate Guido’s famous, frustrated quest to direct his latest feature in 8½ (1963). During the late Sixties and early Seventies, however, such metainvestigations were explicitly informing the very structure and esthetic of Fellini’s films. In the rarely seen Fellini: A Director’s Notebook (1969) the Maestro first attempted to foreground the conventions of documentary cinema, a satiric move inspired by what he saw as television’s “ease and casualness”; in Satyricon (1969) characters at the periphery of the frame stare directly into the camera, returning the gaze and implicating viewers with their own consumption of bizarre and grotesque spectacle.

With The Clowns Fellini returned to the mockumentary strategies of A Director’s Notebook—though in a more focused vein than its scattershot predecessor—and at the same time continued the Brechtian grotesquerie of Satyricon, albeit tempering that film’s apocalyptic psychedelia. In doing so Fellini once again (after A Director’s Notebook) made himself a character in his own film by heading a (fictional) filmmaking team just as klutzy and foolish as the clowns they are supposed to document, while also illustrating the historical highlights of clowning with fantastical re-creations. The resulting playful, self-mocking tone lends itself to the very subject of the film and undercuts any claims to a humorless, impersonal “objectivity” often demanded and expected from the documentary form. Scenes of interviews with retired clowns and circus historians are offset by the slapstick antics of the crew; exaggerated imaginings of already exaggerated clown acts reassert the potency of creation and the primacy of artifice over dry, talking-head reportage.

Such distrust of traditional documentary filmmaking accounts for The Clowns’ other major stylistic trait: explicitly autobiographical material. Few directors of the postwar era employed more nakedly unabashed references to their personal lives as did Fellini, whose 8½ exemplified and raised to grand heights the expressionistic, autobiographical strain of art cinema. But The Clowns—now being released on DVD by Raro Video, from a digitally restored print and in a package that includes Fellini’s essay on clowns and his own clown-related sketches and cartoons—was something new in the sense that within an ostensible nonfiction format Fellini was incorporating reimaginings of his own experiences. It is no longer a surrogate character that stands in for Fellini and experiences his dreams, fantasies, and memories, but Fellini himself who directly addresses the audience and personally guides them through his inner world.

Before entering the mockumentary mode, the film opens with a young Fellini viewing from his bedroom window the midnight raising of a circus tent (the phallic overtones are impossible to ignore). The next day the child attends the circus and confronts a nonstop spectacle of wild beasts, death-defying stunts, freakish showcases, and lastly the anarchic, violent clowns; the scene is filmed in Fellini’s signature style of silhouetted lighting schemes, flamboyant tracking shots, and pantomime acting to suggest the larger-than-life impressions of a scared and fascinated boy. Fellini provides voice-over narration explaining his initial terrified reaction to the world encountered under the big top, the clowns recalling the “strange and troubled characters” populating his seaside hometown of Rimini. In the next sequence the clowns from the circus play these characters, including a village drunk literally carted home by his wife, a slightly touched stutterer who acts out battle scenes in the square, and a foot-tall dwarf nun who spends time in both the convent and the madhouse.

This second sequence is narrated as well, but just because he chooses to play MC doesn’t mean Fellini forsakes a complex, critical approach toward his material. As in 8½, the film’s heterogeneity offers an outlet and a metaphor for the artist besieged by doubts about his efficacy in evoking an interior, almost metaphysical “truth.” The successful hybridization and shift between genres and tones in The Clowns—mockumentary, memoir, and fantasy on one hand; edification, melancholy, and celebration on the other—proves Fellini’s ability to surmount the artistic frustration that might not only result from his creative crisis, but that might also mirror the film’s major theme: the death of the clown.

As the film progresses, Fellini’s fake documentary crew continually turns up signs that the circus, and the clown along with it, no longer has any place in contemporary culture. The grand Parisian circuses of the ninteenth century are almost entirely without permanent venues, the Medrano having been turned into a beer hall and the Cirque d’Hiver now open only three days a week. The cab driver chauffeuring Fellini’s crew seems to speak for modern audiences when he confesses to have “more important things to do” than be entertained by the circus. All the legendary clowns of yesteryear are elderly or dead. Even cinematic records of classic clowns fall prey to insufficient modern technology—burning up in a projector, a rare silent film proves the past literally incompatible with the present—or else amount to little more than inadequate mummifications of entertainment once bursting with chaotic life.

The white clown is the straight-man

But despite all the unavoidable evidence of the clown’s demise in a culture lacking the “naïve innocence” necessary to joyfully (rather than cynically) laugh at itself, Fellini refuses to give up hope. Whenever the old men of the circus’s glory days reenact gags for his camera, and whenever Fellini recreates them himself, The Clowns brings the lost art back to life. Nowhere is this more poignant than in the film’s penultimate, nearly twenty-minute long sequence, a Fellini-directed funeral for the “Augusto” clown—the disheveled, irreverent comic foil to his haughty, straight-man “White Clown” counterpart—that devolves into an increasingly frantic merry-go-round of inappropriate behavior and out-of-control pratfalls. The mayhem culminates in an Augusto swinging from the rafters amidst an ocean of streamers, his army of once mourning clown brethren cheering and dancing as he raucously ascends to heaven. But once the lights dim and the cast disperses, only a single Augusto remains—a geriatric who, like many of his cohorts, chooses to rest on the sidelines when the action proves too much for his exhausted body. In the empty tent he speaks to the camera of an old act in which he would try to revive White Clown partner Frou-Frou from the dead. The act is performed, the two clowns drawing closer together from opposite ends of the big top as they call and respond with trumpets (for this moment lifelong Fellini collaborator Nino Rota composed an especially haunting score) and then finally walk out of the ring side by side.

Critics have traditionally interpreted this scene according to Fellini’s Jungian preoccupations. The Augusto symbolizes the id, imagination, rebellion, the child, etc.; the White Clown the superego, practicality, authority, the parent. Their reunification at film’s end thus represents Fellini’s belief in the triumph of creativity—and the undying significance of the clown—through a harmony of opposites, the irrational paired with the rational, instinct paired with reason. It’s hard to disagree with such a reading, but it might also be fruitful to view the conclusion of The Clowns as reflecting Fellini’s personal mythology, with the dueling trumpets calling to mind the heartbreaking refrain played by childlike clown Gelsomina in La Strada (1954), and the big top exeunt echoing 8½’s closing “dance of life.” Thus the two artistic sides of Fellini converge in The Clowns: the wide-eyed young man who once worked as a reporter and started his cinematic career as part of the Italian Neorealism movement, and the world-famous Maestro whose beginnings as a caricaturist influenced his eye for grotesque characters and wild mise-en-scène, what would come to be known as the “Felliniesque”; the sensitive humanist behind Gelsomina and close cousin Cabiria, and the intellectual metacreator of autobiographical stand-in Guido and his own self-promoting, self-discovering screen presences. The two Fellinis—one the humble “naïve innocent,” the other the demanding, world-refashioning, larger-than-life ringleader—need each other to prosper.

 

Whether read as universal or personal (or both), The Clowns’ marriage of yin and yang is all the more impressive for embracing a pathos largely out of fashion amidst the heavily political, deconstructionist, and antispectacle art cinema of the late Sixties/early Seventies. This is where The Clowns fails for some: where La Strada and other earlier successes develop pathos from dramatic situations and fully rounded characters, The Clowns slips into sentimentality by turning to an unearned, last-second pathos that cancels out the film’s previous pluralistic and unresolved approaches toward its subject. Here it isn’t very hard to disagree. Fellini may not be working with three-dimensional characters or a conventionally structured narrative in The Clowns, but nonetheless understands his subject as a source and symbol of a pathos, one that can provide the proper counterweight to art cinema’s tendency toward purely intellectual concerns and methods. Perhaps that’s what makes The Clowns so powerful: it not only longs for but also enacts an amalgamation of low comedy and high experimentation, personal essay and documentary-like journalism that in a perfect world would be both popular and challenging, fun and thought-provoking. The Clowns is not only nostalgic for a lost world, but also excitedly proposes a utopian art.

 

Michael Joshua Rowin writes for The L Magazine, Artforum, and Reverse Shot.

 

To purchase The Clowns, click here

 

Copyright © 2011 by Cineaste Publishers, Inc.

Cineaste,Vol.XXXVI No.3 2011

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