Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | C | Cineaste

Juliet of the Spirits. (Homevideo).

Article Excerpt
Directed by Federico Fellini; screenplay by Federico Fellini, Tulilo Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano and Brunello Rondi; cinematography by Gianni di Venanzo; edited by Ruggero Mastrolanni; production and costume design by Piero Gherardi; starring Giulietta Masina, Sandra Milo, Mario Pisuand Sylva Koscina. Color, 137 mins. A Criterion Collection release distributed by Home Vision Entertainment, www.homevision.com.

Juliet of the Spirits (1965) was Fellini's first feature-length film in color. Three years earlier, Fellini had produced a single color episode entitled The Temptations of Doctor Antonio for Boccaccio '70, joining his own phantasmagoric foray into the unconscious with less interesting episodes contributed to the work by two other major Italian directors of the era, Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica. Felllini did not choose to work in color on this production but was required to do so by the producer of the film and was quoted on the set as having declared that there were only two colors in cinematography: black and white! His faith in his own creative powers working in the relatively unfamiliar medium of color photography at that point in his career was weak, and in fact his subsequent work, 8 1/2 (1963), revealed just how masterful was his understanding of black-and-white photography. A recent Criterion DVD of 8 1/2 reproduces the stupendous photography of Gianni di Venanzo (the photographer of Juliet o f the Spirits), and underlines how Fellini, unsurpassed in creating artistic effects with his expressionistic black-and-white cinema, might well have had doubts about his ability to match these skills with a then unfamiliar color process.

Although often attacked by feminist critics for his exuberant portrayal of wellendowed women who populate a fantasy world of Fellini's own creation, Fellini's attitude toward women is, in reality, far more complex than this stereotype of the Italian male chauvinist would allow. Fellini did little to improve his reputation with feminist critics in The City of Women (1980), a film containing a merciless...