Federico Fellini
I Vitelloni

Fellini: I vitelloni.(1953)

A few evenings ago, on a very obscure Roman local TV channel, I happened to rewatch after many years one of Fellini’s early films, "I Vitelloni".
The film, alas, was one of those unrestored ones, with a dreamy black and white, dulled, globular, and as silvery as a rotten mackerel,
and even the muffled audio, but who knows for what sound virtues, had transformed from mono into a sort of old tellye surround: in short, this old reel was alien compared to modern DVDs, and this TV-something-or-other was perhaps broadcasting from a base on the moon.

Yet, I don't know, that beguiling movie emanating from my 16:9 screen captivated me, and I watched it all the way to the end.
I'll skip the plot and rush to the finale....
Fellini's journey to Rimini begins the very moment he leaves it, like Moraldo, the protagonist of I Vitelloni. Everyone will remember the final sequence where Moraldo from the train window, gaining speed, "sees" inside the intimate different bedrooms the friends asleep in their provincial slumber. The imagined "interiors" sway as if they too were lifted onto the train, effectively suggesting the sensation of a "moving of memories" about to take over reality.

It's the "gap" in memory that has already begun to provide for the poetic re-arrangement of the past. Moraldo, departing, finds himself already in a position to "remember" the friends he is leaving behind. This is the first inkling of a Fellini system that deviates, derails from the lesson of neorealism: memory must travel light-years away, in time and space, distancing itself from the places of existence to reconstruct them through true fantasy and distorted recollection, creating a monstrous hybrid, between the pre-diluvian dinosaur and the futuristic android. Only in this way can one recreate their own experience in cinematic fiction.

The recovery of Rimini is thus realized through the opposing laws of oblivion: it is a confused place, halfway between the memory that redeems it and the oblivion that suppresses it. From the expressive generality of his early films, Rimini progressively expands until it becomes, in Amarcord, the ideal homeland of memories and creation.
And indeed, in reality it is the sea of Fregene and not of Rimini, where his "Vitelloni" go to vent the melancholies of a life that feels too confined to them. 

Fake, plastic, cardboard, fabric: Federico Fellini's sea has always been a falsification. Yet, one way or another, he almost always put it in his films because he carried it in his heart, because by the sea, in Rimini, he was born.
He often ended up there, spending part of the year, in Fregene, because for him it was a "truer Rimini than the true Rimini." "I Vitelloni", which might seem like memories of his youth as a provincial, become a work still current and timeless. The Maestro has left us, leaving an indelible and unmistakable mark on the Imaginary of the 20th century, constructing nonexistent worlds yet so similar to our own, always carrying an emblematic image within him: "The Vitelloni from behind, on that pier venturing into the sea, an oily, grey, winter sea, with a low, dense, cloudy sky, the sound of the surf, the screeching of the seagulls. 

And now I bid you farewell, a special greeting to iside and paolo. And then a little toast: despite the euro-dollar crisis, long live the Italian good fortune, and...
Buon Ferragosto to todos los vitellones torones and manzones nostranos!