If we were to single out one quality that distinguishes Fellini's career-long imaginative evolution, it would be the drive for individuation, the search for ever more authentic ways of rendering growth in his world. Even his early movies—films of increasing alienation—reveal growing pressure for individuation within his imagination and his characters. (His characters individuate themselves from, rather than through, their world; hence their ultimate alienation.) And as Fellini's imagination refines its capacity to create unique and singular creatures, it also evolves beyond stories of individuation-through-alienation to stories of individuation-through-integration: the stories of unitive individuality which inform his movies from The Nights of Cabiria through Fellini's Roma. (p. 68)

[The] evolution from accommodation to breakout within Fellini's first three films seems to usher his imagination into a realm of near-total alienation which becomes visible in his next two feature films, La Strada … and Il Bidone or The Swindle …, which are both of them creatures of extreme dissociation and estrangement. (p. 70)

[While] Fellini's imagination becomes seemingly more alienated, and increasingly sophisticated in its capacity to envision alienation, as it moves from Variety Lights through Il Bidone, it becomes at the same time immensely more sophisticated in its capacity to envision individuals. The process of its evolution is, in effect, a process of individuation….

In rendering the attempted … reintegration of a main character and his world, Fellini's imagination begins to evolve a vision of individuation-through-integration which supplants the vision of alienated individuality that prevails in the earlier films. And in moving from Cabiria to 8 1/2 Fellini also profoundly alters his relationship to his art. He evolves beyond the relative detachment from his films that had characterized his work prior to 8 1/2, and develops the much more intimate interrelationship between his imagination and his movies that is evident in his films from 8 1/2 to the present. (p. 71)

The Nights of Cabiria is the least autobiographical of the three features following Bidone, centering as it does on a prostitute as the main character. Nevertheless, it does return Fellini's imagination to the familiar world of Rome, a world present only sporadically in Bidone. In Cabiria, Fellini images a process of breakout, alienation, and reintegration which carries his imagination through and beyond the estrangement that gave birth to the two preceding movies…. Cabiria ushers Fellini's imagination back from the hillside, or brink, of total estrangement where, in Il Bidone, Augusto surrenders his moral and physical existence, and reunites it with a world of human connection whose presence and energy are essential to imaginative vision and growth. The evidence that Cabiria has indeed effected a creative connection between Fellini's imagination and its world lies in the film's final shot, in which Cabiria looks vibrantly and acceptingly into the camera eye—binding lover and loved, creator and created, in rich and total harmony.

In La Dolce Vita … we have precisely the same kind of pattern as in Cabiria. (p. 72)

[Like Cabiria, Marcello] concludes his odyssey to disillusionment with reintegration of sorts; for as the movie ends, he is being led back into the community of revelers with whom he has just spent the night. It is clear, however, from his behavior during the night's festivities—dedicated to celebrating the annulment of a marriage—that Marcello's reintegration is not affirmative, as was Cabiria's….

Of vital importance, however, to the film and to the evolution of Fellini's imagination is the fact that La Dolce Vita does not conclude with the false reintegration of Marcello and his world…. Like the marriage of the camera eye and Cabiria, the wedding of the camera and Paola constitutes the marriage of Fellini's imagination with its own feminine powers, an act of total integration wherein the imagination encounters the visible manifestation of its own capacity for love, connection, and wholeness—its own capacity to transcend alienation.

What has happened in the course of La Dolce Vita is that Marcello, having annulled everything in his world (including himself), has annulled all the alienation and distance that pervade it. He has annulled the unauthentic process of reintegration he has undergone; he has annulled the failure or death of love in his world; and he has annulled mediation, the principal deterrent to love in that world. (As a reporter, he functions as the film's prime example of mediation.) In so doing, he clears the way for an entirely new world and mode of relationship, the world and relationship of love implicit in the final shots of the movie. So, while reintegration doesn't work for him, it clearly works for Fellini's imagination. (p. 73)

Having discovered in his three preceding films both reintegration and the annulment of distance as viable stories, Fellini employs both in 8 1/2….

In 8 1/2, Guido's greatest challenge in the course of his growth toward integration is to eliminate the distance that separates him from his world, and consequently from his art. The film's major motif is that of directing; Guido's function as a movie director is the focal point of his principal weakness—his inclination to direct his life from outside rather than to connect intimately and completely with the life process. (p. 74)

In the course of his moral and imaginative evolution, Guido in effect resolves the problems of the protagonists of each of Fellini's three prior films. The problem of feminine individuation encountered by Cabiria is resolved through Guido's growing integration of and marriage to the feminine powers within him (embodied by all the women in his life, including the dream woman or anima personified by Claudia Cardinale). This process of integration and marriage culminates with his total acceptance of the principal females in his life: Luisa, Carla, and, in the film's final scene, his mother. The problem of detachment represented by Marcello is resolved through Guido's gradual abandonment of his impulse to direct, an impulse which mediates his relationship to his world. The problem of censorious, critical distance as expressed by Dr. Antonio is resolved by Guido's mock hanging of the critic and script consultant Daumier, and by his assimilation of Daumier's critical impulses as the power of creative conscience. And the problem of connection encountered by the camera eye, the real protagonist of Fellini's earlier movies and the embodiment of Fellini's imagination, is resolved through Guido's attainment of creative vision in the film's closing moments. In engaging Fellini's camera-eye imagination in the perception and cocreation of the harmonic dance that concludes 8 1/2, Guido enables that imagination to marry the visible evidence of its own powers of love and creativity as it had done in uniting its vision to that of Cabiria, Paola, and Cupid at the ends of Fellini's three preceding films. (pp. 74-5)

Another major act in Fellini's career, begun in Dr. Antonio, is also completed in Juliet of the Spirits—the movement from black and white to color. This is not just a cinematographic movement, but a moral-aesthetic one as well, rooted in the fact that black and white movies offer a radically different vision of life and its possibilities than do color films….

A color movie … particularly one in which color is used as lavishly as it is in Juliet of the Spirits, offers a world that is pluralistic rather than dualistic. It assaults one with its infinite variety of concrete, individual entities, no one of which exists in a strictly polar relationship to another, no one of which asserts its priority over any other, and no one of which demands choice-and-rejection as a mode of relating to it. (p. 76)

In Juliet of the Spirits Fellini makes his first authentic color film. Not only does he make Juliet in color of his own moral/aesthetic volition …; he also completes in Juliet what Guido began to evolve at the end of 8 1/2: a "Love for Everybody" morality of color….

At the end of Juliet of the Spirits, having struggled successfully to attain integration and having made peace with her "spirits," Juliet breaks out. She leaves behind the boxlike house that has been both image and source of her imprisonment, and walks out into the world a liberated creature in a liberated universe. Fellini's imagination has achieved a breakout or breakthrough, as it did at the end of I Vitelloni. (p. 77)

With the evolution in [Fellini: A Director's Notebook] of a new, more open way of dealing with human images, Fellini enters a new phase of film-making which will last through Amarcord, in which none of his major figures will be stars, and most will be people with little or no acting experience, whose personal rather than professional powers have ignited his imagination. This shift constitutes a movement by Fellini from character to human image—from a theatrical, symbolic, and relatively static notion of players-in-their-roles to a much more dynamic phenomenon of vital, concrete images creating their own reality in a world of cinematic motion and change. (p. 79)

For two short and often overlooked movies, Toby Dammit and Director's Notebook did a great deal for Fellini, enabling him to (1) move beyond his post-Juliet crisis; (2) eliminate the actor and move to the center of his own work; (3) leave behind characterization for what might be called "image-generation" as a mode of creating human images; and (4) move beyond stories of personal, psychological individuation to stories about the refinement of his own movie-making. The fruit of all this is Fellini-Satyricon …, which capitalizes on the first three achievements of the two previous films and propels Fellini's imagination beyond the fourth….

But perhaps the most interesting thing about Fellini-Satyricon is the fact that it moves Fellini beyond the consideration of his own art to the consideration of art itself. Here Fellini addresses himself to individuation as not a personal or movie-making phenomenon but rather an as aesthetic one. Fellini-Satyricon is primarily a rendering of the way art generates art and life transforms itself into art. The generation of art from art is pointed to in the movie's title, which suggests the evolution of Fellini's film art from the literary art of Petronius. (p. 80)

Living in a world of boundless aesthetic energy, indicated by all the theatrical art, poetry, music, painting, and literary and mythic narrative that surround him, Encolpio himself is less a person than an aesthetic force. He certainly is not a human "character" in a traditional theatrical (dramatic) or humanist sense—a creature with person-ality or "essence" possessed of stable and definable qualities which give him depth, substance, and a consistent, predictable mode of behavior. (pp. 80-1)

Like Fellini-Satyricon, The Clowns … is a work of aesthetic individuation. Taking the art of the clown as its point of departure, it not only generates movie art, but also resurrects the seemingly dead art of the clown as the movie draws to a close. It employs the art of the clown (particularly the White Clown-Auguste relationship which is the film's central structuring device) to organize personal experience and to enhance the growth of Fellini himself. But more than that, its ultimate end is to provide aesthetic form to experience and growth, to turn life into art. (p. 81)

Having moved from stories of personal growth through stories about the growth of his own art to stories of the growth of art itself, Fellini then creates in Fellini's Roma … a movie which incorporates all these aspects of individuation and includes yet another, the historical. Roma is, first of all, a story of Fellini's growth…. Second, Roma is a film about the growth of Fellini's art, as is clear from his emphasis on his attempts to make a movie. Third, it is a film about the evolution of art itself, with its incorporation and use of sculpture, architecture, Roman painting, the theater, photographic slides, the music hall, and movies. Finally, it is a film which, within the context of these other growth processes, examines in all its richness the cultural, religious, and political history of Rome. (pp. 81-2)

By weaving all this into a single film of individuation, Fellini has made by far his most imaginatively sophisticated, complexly integrated work of art. (Its complexity, as might be expected, earned it total lack of comprehension at the hands of critics, who saw it as either a travelogue or a meaningless work of Fellinian self-indulgence.) By focusing on Rome as a vital microcosm of himself and his world, an image of his personal and cultural heritage and creative power, Fellini has been able to weave the individuation of Western civilization into his own personal growth toward wholeness. (p. 82)

[At the end of Fellini's Roma] Fellini emerges as both child and potent partner of the creative life forces, seemingly prepared to encounter the future and transform it into visions of creative change.

Unfortunately the future has, in a sense, not yet come for Fellini. After the incredible act of integration he performed in Roma, after "putting it all together" and then breaking out, he has entered yet another period of alienation. Instead of encountering a future pregnant with creative possibility, he has, with Amarcord … and Fellini's Casanova …, moved back into the past…. Amarcord, for all its charm and magic, is about people who never grow up; Casanova is about a figure whose dissociation from his own powers of love (his "feminine" powers) is so radical that those powers ultimately atrophy to a state of total mechanical (f)rigidity.

Because Amarcord and Casanova do not deal with Fellini's capacity to work toward individuation and integration, they seem to signal the end of his journey toward wholeness, a journey which began with 8 1/2, and culminated brilliantly in Roma…. It might be best, however, to view them more as detours on his journey than as signals of its end. (pp. 82-3)

Frank Burke, "Fellini's Drive for Individuation," in Southwest Review (© 1979 by Southern Methodist University Press), Vol. 64, No. 1, Winter, 1979, pp. 68-85.