There is a parenthesis in the history of cultural journalism in which the language of television, the depth of thought and the seduction of cinema have hooked, creating something that goes beyond the documentary: It is 1965, e Sergio Zavoli interviews Federico Fellini. The result is “Zoom on Fellini”a story for images and words, shot during the processing of “Giulietta degli Spiri”, in which the journalist and the director confront each other not only on art, but on what it represents for life, for society, for freedom. This is where Fellini pronounces one of his most emblematic phrases: “reality is a trap, imagination is freedom. Dreaming is a form of resistance”. A sentence that contains the throbbing essence of his poetics and, at the same time, the fulcrum of the meeting with Zavoli.
The documentary is therefore not a simple interview, but a passenger side trip to the director’s inner space. Zavoli – refined interpreter of the investigation as a narrative form – does not impose, does not judge, but set up the conditions to bring out the most authentic voice of his interlocutor. Fellini, free from formalities and conventions, grants himself to a deep dialogue, within which the invention becomes truth and fiction a cognitive act. “I never knew how to tell the reality for as it is. When I try, I feel it immediately false”says. For him, realism is a form of mystification, while the dream, the symbol and the invention represent the way to access a more intimate and significant reality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h63rwz1jgxm
At ease on the chair, Fellini confirms that he is an explorer of the inner cavities. During the interview he says that Each film is a kind of “Autotherapy”a need to tell each other through characters who are parts of him. But it is also a gesture of collective liberation: “We all need to feel told, but not literally. We need someone to give us back our fears, our desires, in an understandable form, but not obvious.” Thus, his sets become places of passage between the visible and the invisible, and the cinema a deforming mirror which, for this reason, reflects better.
Zavoli, with his calm and penetrating voice, lets the master’s words unfold like a script. He asked him about his childhood, of his obsessions, of religion, of politics. Fellini responds as a narrator, never as an intellectual; Avoid judgments, prefers images, analogies, stories. But every anecdote is a fragment of thought on the artist’s profession, on the role of culture, on the crisis of the imagination. In a television that still believed in the possibility of educating and amaze, Zavoli gives voice to an artist who made refusal of conformism his mission.
The title of the documentary, “Zoom on Fellini”, is programmatic: the zoom is not only the approach of the goal, but The search for a focus On the face, on the voice, on thought. Fellini is not explained, it is approached. And what is discovered is not an egocentric or distracted man, as has often been told, but a conscious author, full of restlessness, in love with ambiguity and deeply human.
The movie ends without rhetoric, with images of the set and fragments of dialogue that remain suspended.
As if Zavoli wanted to remember that Not everything can be understoodand that perhaps the task of cultural journalism is not to explain the artist, but to create the conditions for the public to meet him. Fellini, for his part, gives a less current lesson: in the time of the obsessive news, of the urgency of reality, the real subversive gesture is to imagine.