Note: This is part of the Invitation to the Dance Blogathon at Ferdy on Films.

To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a dance is just a dance . . . but sometimes it’s not. And among the more entertaining celluloid examples of when it’s not are by Federico Fellini. Actually, Freud doesn’t quite fit — Fellini was a devotee of Jung, who proposed that our lives are structured by innate archetypes, and that these express themselves in dreams and through the arts. As Fellini’s films became more “Felliniesque,” as they came to derive more and more from his dreams, these archetypal images seemed to gain prominence.

Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in his use of dance, which encodes his versions of the archetypal images to various effect. Here’s a famous example, the dance of Saraghina from 8½:


By the way, you get no extra credit if you guess from which archetype Saraghina is derived. Just for yucks, here’s a send-up of Saraghina’s dance by Dawn French of the British comedy team French and Saunders:

Fellini used type (archetype?) scenes that were repeated in various forms throughout his filmography. In “the nightclub scene,” and it’s variations, he indulged his Janus-headed envy/contempt relationship with the Roman glitterati. Here’s an hilarious example–my favorite–from Nights of Cabiria. Note the total dissipation, the total boredom of the night-club denizens (including the guy who spends the whole time picking lent off his jacket). Compare it to the life-force embodied in the joyous dance of the prostitute Cabiria (Giulietta Masina). Fellini’s love and respect for the marginalized are nowhere more sharply delineated. [The nightclub scene is in the first two minutes or so of the clip, but by all means watch the entire thing -- you can never get enough Fellini.]

Finally, the nightclub scene from La Dolce Vita, featuring Anita Ekberg as the archetypal figure of woman and Fellini avatar Marcello Mastroianni. The dancing is highly stylized, and the Americans are appropriately gauche and over-the-top. Only Marcello is cool, at least on the surface, though we know he’s dying to bed Ekberg all the while. Enjoy!

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