Notes on Federico Fellini’s "The Voice of The Moon"

[I'm posting these scattered notes as I have originally written them: in English]

This last movie by Fellini is difficult. Apparently he wanted us to pay a lot of attention in watching it, going beyond its first, immediate level. We need to have a constantly divided attention between the main scene in the foreground and the details in the background. We are never given a comfortable amount of time to study what is happening behind the main characters, yet if we fail to register those details, we may miss the main theme of the movie: the contrast between the craziness of the lunatics and the foolishness of the “ordinary” people. Sometimes we even have to stop the film: for example, to read the plaque under the monument – there is no other way to know that the movie is set in Reggiolo, Emilia-Romagna.

The main characters are the lunatics, but dividing our attention as I said we see them in the right context: the craziness of “normal” people, who are often in the background listening to music in their headphones and dancing with neurotic movements – not only in the disco, but in the main square and in the barber shop, too. Other signs of Reggiolo’s craziness are the walls covered with many layers of  probably illegal posters; Japanese tourists always taking pictures, never really looking at anything; the roofs hosting an improbable crowd of ugly antennas, and so on.

Only lunatics seem able to speak, to show affection to each other, and to spontaneously intone amazing poetic lines. Ordinary people never say anything poetic. Lunatic people are very vulnerable amongst ordinary people: see Nestore sweating at his own wedding. But in a few scenes, lunatics apparently find people with whom they are at ease: people of a pre-modern world, full of magic – for example, when Ivo meets African and rural women, in what appears to be an harvesting night.

Of course lunatics are the last ones, the poorest people in Reggiolo: Nestore is deprived of all his belongings and lives in an empty house – yet his heart, lit by Marisa’s particular way of making love (“I owe a lot to her” – and notice that the most intense lovemaking happens with a full moon), can sense poetry even in a washing-machine: it is a siren chanting for him (Elémire Zolla, Le potenze dell’anima: “Being religious means to see inner metaphors everywhere”).

Every detail seems meaningful in this movie. Just a pair of examples from the same episode: in the first meeting between Salvini and Gonnella, Salvini is asked to look for some secret agent spying on them. While doing this, he is offered a pair of sunglasses by a street vendor: this may be a reference to the magic glasses of the movie “They live” by Carpenter, released the year before. Thanks to those glasses, the protagonist could detect the extraterrestrials amongst the humans. “They live” was not an ordinary movie: Carlos Castaneda greatly praised it, and Castaneda was a friend and a source of inspiration for Fellini’s last movies. Immediately after, we see behind Salvini an “Indaco” (Indigo) sign, maybe a reference to the theory of the so called Indigo children, possibly implying that Ivo himself was one of them.

But what about the craziness of the lunatics? Ivo hears voices from the wells, that is, deeper than superficial ones. He also finds the hole of the world (it is above his head, in a graveyard). Nestore’s vocation seems the opposite: not the underground, but the roofs – living in the air. He achieves it when his heart opens its petals like a lotus flower, after having been close to Marisa's overwhelming energy.

The lovemaking scene between Nestore and Marisa is perhaps the best one in the movie, but notice: Marisa is able to help Nestore, not herself. She is “ordinary” and will end up leaving Nestore for a butcher. In the end, there are no doubts that Fellini and his screenwriter Cavazzoni have a liking for lunatics. For them, they are the people closer to truth, beauty, love.

“If we had more silence”, are the final lines, “we would begin to understand more things.”

That is not light, which comes not from the Sky

which never clouds itself