La Strada

1954 Italian drama film directed by Federico Fellini

La strada (The Road) is a 1954 Italian drama film directed by Federico Fellini and co written by Fellini, Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano. The film tells the story of Gelsomina, a simple minded young woman (Giulietta Masina) bought from her mother by Zampanò (Anthony Quinn), a brutish strongman who takes her with him on the road. Fellini described La Strada as "a complete catalogue of my entire mythological world, a dangerous representation of my identity that was undertaken with no precedent whatsoever". As a result, the film demanded more time and effort than any of his other works, before or later. The development process was long and tortuous; there were problems during production, including insecure financial backing, problematic casting, and numerous delays. Finally, just before the production completed shooting, Fellini suffered a nervous breakdown that required medical treatment so that he could complete principal photography. Initial critical reaction was harsh, and the film's screening at the Venice Film Festival was the occasion of a bitter controversy that escalated into a public brawl between Fellini's supporters and detractors. Subsequently, however, La Strada has become "one of the most influential films ever made", according to the American Film Institute. It won the inaugural Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1957. It was placed fourth in the 1992 British Film Institute directors' list of cinema's top 10 films. In 2008, the film was included on the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage's 100 Italian films to be saved, a list of 100 films that "have changed the collective memory of the country between 1942 and 1978."

Gelsomina, an apparently somewhat simple minded, dreamy young woman, learns that her sister Rosa has died after going on the road with the strongman Zampanò. Now the man 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, and her daughter tearfully departs the same day. Zampanò makes his living as an itinerant street performer, entertaining crowds by breaking an iron chain bound tightly across his chest, then passing the hat for tips. In short order, Gelsomina's naïve and antic nature emerges, with Zampanò's brutish methods presenting a callous foil. 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. Yet here, as throughout the film, even in her wretchedness, she manages to find beauty and wonder, aided by some local children. 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. When Zampanò finds her there, 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 motorcycle with a warning for the man to watch his mouth in the future, Il Matto complains that his watch is broken, then stumbles into a field, collapses, and dies. Zampanò hides the body and pushes the car off the road, where it bursts into flames. The killing breaks Gelsomina's spirit and she becomes apathetic, constantly repeating, "The Fool is hurt." Zampanò makes a few small attempts to console her, but in vain. Fearful he will no longer be able to earn a living with Gelsomina, Zampanò abandons her while she sleeps, leaving her some clothes, money, and his trumpet. Some years later, he overhears a woman singing the very tune Gelsomina often played. He learns that the woman's father had found Gelsomina on the beach and kindly taken her in. However, she had wasted away and died. Zampanò gets drunk, gets in a fight with the locals, and wanders to the beach, where he breaks down in tears.

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." 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.]] Fellini secured financing through the producers Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti, who wanted to cast Silvana Mangano (De Laurentiis' wife) as Gelsomina and Burt Lancaster as Zampanò, but Fellini refused these choices. 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. Anthony Quinn was also acting in the film, while Richard Basehart was often on the set visiting his wife, actress Valentina Cortese. 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." 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."

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 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. [[File:La strada trailer screenshot. jpg|thumb|Screenshot from 1956 trailer. Circus owner Savitri provided the old car that Fellini destroyed in the scene following Zampanò's killing of Il Matto. Fellini was a notorious perfectionist, and this could be trying for his cast. At an American Film Institute student seminar, Quinn spoke of Fellini's intransigence over selecting a box in which Zampanò carries his cigarette butts, scrutinizing over 500 boxes before finding just the right one: "As for me, any of the boxes would have been satisfactory to carry the butts in, but not Federico". She complained: "You're so nice and sweet to the others in the cast. Why are you so hard on me?" He was able to complete the filming only upon receiving treatment by a prominent Freudian psychoanalyst.

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. 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. 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. Thomas Van Order has identified dozens of changes made in the English version, classifying the alterations into four categories: "1. lower volume of music relative to dialogue in the English version; 2. new musical selections and different editing of music in many scenes; 3. different ambient sound in some scenes, as well as changes in the editing of ambient sound; 4. elimination of some dialogue."

The entire score for La Strada was written by Nino Rota after principal photography was completed. 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. 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.

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.

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". 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. Rota's main theme was adapted into a 1954 single for Perry Como under the title "Love Theme from La Strada (Traveling Down a Lonely Road)", with Italian lyrics by Michele Galdieri and English lyrics by Don Raye. Twelve years later, the composer expanded the film music to create a ballet, also called La Strada. The New York stage has seen two productions derived from the film. A musical based on the film opened on Broadway on 14 December 1969, but closed after one performance. Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson, was so impressed by Giulietta Masina's work in La Strada that she tried to obtain theatrical rights to the film for a stage production in New York. After an unsuccessful attempt to meet with Fellini in Rome, she created a one woman play, In Search of Fellini. In 1991, writer Massimo Marconi and cartoonist Giorgio Cavazzano adapted La Strada into a comic book titled, Topolino presenta La strada : un omaggio a Federico Fellini (Mickey Mouse presents La Strada: A Tribute to Federico Fellini), featuring three Disney characters: Mickey Mouse as The Fool, Minnie as Gelsomina, and Pete as Zampanò. The storyline opens with Fellini dreaming he's on a plane with his wife to Los Angeles to receive an Academy Award and meet Walt Disney. The name Zampanò was used as a major character in Mark Z. Danielewski's novel, House of Leaves (2000), as an old man who wrote film critique while the protagonist's mother is named Pelafina, after Gelsomina.