Political Fellini: Journey to the End of Italy is the English translation of the book Andrea Minuz published in 2012 with the inverted title Viaggio al termine dell’Italia. Fellini politico (Rubettino). The Berghahn edition differs only in the addition of a ‘Preface’ titled After the Great Beauty, with an explicit reference to Paolo Sorrentino’s film, which, coincidentally, was released after the publication of the Italian volume, and which now acts as an apt cinematic addendum to Minuz’s main argument. Following the footsteps of Fellini, Sorrentino’s film in fact ‘reaches into the depths of the Italian unconscious’, and displays ‘a strong political dimension despite the fact that — unlike Il divo — it does not address Italian politics’ (ix). By pivoting on Giulio Bollati’s, Silvana Patriarca’s and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg’s works on the character and vices of Italians, Minuz’s argument hinges on the idea that Fellini channeled, metamorphosed, and aestheticised his political outlook through his representations of the many idiosyncratic aspects of the Italian mentality (or socio-anthropological ideology), particularly embodied by male characters. These men are seen as childish, egocentric, lacking any form of discipline and sense of responsibility, and neurotically or archetypically attached to variously transfigured mother figures. Rather than being simply autobiographic exercises, Fellini’s films are seen as a ‘mythical biography of a nation’, while the idea of ‘Italianness’ is constantly implicated through forms of self-deprecating reflexivity. From a methodological standpoint, Minuz’s reconsideration of Fellini’s cinema in political terms is put forward against the backdrop of its critical reception in Italy through the years, which seemed to converge on a conventional reading of Fellini’s oeuvre (this is done by examining a large variety of sources: from newspaper and journal reviews to interviews, director’s notes, and personal letters, including an interesting appendix on the exchange between Fellini and Giulio Andreotti). The underlying assumption and Minuz’s rhetorical starting point is that the Italian critical context tends to adopt hasty critical simplifications, which are subsequently repeated and then crystallised either as explicatory passe-partouts or brisk ideological pigeonholing. This seems to echo what Fredric Jameson argued in The Political Unconscious, in which he argues that much criticism merely ‘rewrites’ selected texts into a form that (unselfconsciously) reflects a critic’s own aesthetics and concepts of language. The result is an exercise in allegory, in which the text is simply recoded in an already accepted and recognized narrative. Such a perspective sounds less surprising in the context of Anglo-American criticism, which has wider boundaries in respect to what ‘political cinema’ might mean (beyond the usual remit of an ideologically charged critical strategy to inform or to agitate the spectator), and how a text might put forward effective political argument in spite of its apparent apolitical perspective. Nonetheless, Minuz’s book is a welcome contribution in the context of Italian film criticism as an example of burgeoning exercises that try to complexify the critical vocabulary and perspectives used in film studies in Italy, and to broaden the scope of political analysis of films. In Fellini’s films specifically, the political is not the product of an ideological adherence, but of a deeply felt belonging to, and personal and emotional implication with, a society, a polis, a specific socio-cultural make-up. Through the prism of Minuz’s analysis, Fellini emerges as an intellectual ‘civile’, who lived through a period of radical changes in Italian society, and who was able to intercept and represent, but also anticipate, its complex metamorphosis. Cinema was used as a probe to auscultate his personal and collective unconscious in order to diagnose and respond to many of the Italian socio-cultural and political impasses. He employed a form of imaginative and psychoanalytically charged self-reflection to speak about all Italians, who, as a result, were disturbed to find themselves represented in such a way (Goffredo Fofi’s critical reversal, discussed by Minuz, is quite eloquent in this respect).

The book grapples first of all with films that invited most immediately a political reading at the time of their releases, like Amarcord, with the discussion of the emotional and nostalgic elements of Italian personal experience of Fascism (chapter 2); La dolce vita, and its examining of the ethical vacuum left by the economic boom (chapter 3); Prova d’orchestra defined as an example of ‘filmed political philosophy in images’ (150); Ginger and Fred and Fellini’s parodic look at the new language of Berlusconi’s television, that eventually turned into an actual legal battle between Fellini and the Italian tycoon (chapter 7). More interesting and original are Minuz’s analyses of films like Roma in which the capital (‘the sum of all our errors’) is portrayed as a palimpsest, a synecdoche of the collective unconscious, in which the conflict between antiquity and progress epitomises ‘the traumatic background of Italian modernity, a modernity that fails to expunge anti-modernity because […] it is unable to leave the past behind or resolve its problems, but simply superimposes itself over antiquity and mixes with it, producing only incongruities and inefficiencies’ (94). Chapter 5 is then devoted to the reception by the Italian feminist movement of 1970s films like Giulietta degli spiriti, Il Casanova, and La città delle donne. Minuz here rightly undermines the common understanding of Fellini (and Fellini’s explicit position on this) as a precursor or supporter of feminism, which was in fact ‘entirely absent in the so-called social and engaged cinema of the period’ (120). A closer analysis shows the ambiguities in his films, in which women are still objectified or mythologised and framed by ancestral fears, but also Fellini’s political and philosophical superficiality in addressing gender issues from an emancipatory perspective. In the vast scholarship on Fellini, Minuz’s work is a welcome reconsideration of some key aspects of the product of the Italian director which have not been systematically examined, while providing a fresh, retrospective look at coeval critical discussion, which is the most interesting contribution of this volume to the field of Italian film studies.