FOOD IN FEDERICO FELLINI'S CINEMA

In the cinema of Fellini, and also to some extent in his graphic work, taste emerges as a very important sense closely bordering on eros, often interwoven with it. The act of dining is a similarly significant ritual, even in its very different expressions.
In La strada, the wedding feast - a ritual inherently linked to eros - attended by Zampanò and Gelsomina is portrayed as a people's celebration (as is Gradisca’s marriage to the police officer in Amarcord), where Zampanò concentrates on satiating his appetite as a way of repressing his sexual desire.
These openly working class events are compared with the lunch at the court of Parma in Il Casanova di Fellini, where the Venetian adventurer accompanies fine food tastings with intellectual discourses about women. The social contrast arises above all in the restaurant in E la nave va. Here the luxurious and sumptuous backdrop to the activities of opera singers and their managers is compared with the hellish setting of the kitchens, where cooks and scullery boys are frantically at work. But taste and eros have crossed class boundaries throughout history, as has the search for their gratification: both the banquet of Trimalcione in Satyricon, and the popular ‘trattoria’ with its street tables in Roma express the same orgiastic atmosphere, even though they are two thousand years apart.
The lunch date between Guido and his lover in 8½ is very significant: she picks the meat off a chicken leg slowly, but with great relish, while he watches her, totally off his food. A perfect description of a difficult erotic relationship.  But even more enlightening - and in my opinion, decisive - is the understanding of what becomes of the union between eros and food in the television dominated, consumer society. In Ginger and Fred, the food commercials freeze basic human instincts into stereotypes of an alienated life.
An artist’s intuition is more meaningful than a sociological essay.

Vittorio Boarini

Director of the Fondazione Federico Fellini