By Michael Atkinson

The natural evolution of the film culture canon over the last 30 years has not been kind to Federico Fellini, who in the middle of the century was rivalled only by Kurosawa as the populist icon of supremely “other” art-film profundity. Today, he is rarely looked to as anything but a postwar-era curiosity. Truth be told, Fellini, rarely less than bludgeoningly gauche, was the Italian film genius for people who didn’t like Italian film geniuses, and today his decades-long hold on the minds of international moviegoers looks like a protracted grift, a carnival dazzle so frantic and over-designed that no one noticed their pockets being picked. Only 8½ (1963), a misogynist yet self-crucifying dream-trip into narcissistic despair, seems integral now. His other beloved monsters, from La Strada (1954) to Amarcord (1973), probably still have their aging devotees, but The Clowns (1970), new to DVD from Raro Video, never accumulated much of a profile, and was usually dismissed as a navel-absorbed trinket Fellini fashioned for Italian TV in the wake of Fellini Satyricon (1969), exploiting the filmmaker’s lifelong but uninterrogated interest in the “half magic, half slaughterhouse” paradigm of the circus. Which it absolutely is, but it’s also more interesting, ambivalent, and mysterious than most of Fellini’s once-celebrated blockbusters, perhaps despite his intentions.

The Clowns is ostensibly a documentary, but of course it’s not (it’s post-dubbed, for one thing), coming off more like a fiction about a film crew with a famous maestro trying to make a film about the dying art of clowning, and failing not due to a Duck Amuck (1953) diegetic disconnect but because of the subject’s own ephemeral absurdity. Fellini is famous for his decadent spectacle constructions, sometimes (as in 8½) encouraging a metafictional slippage between camera and subject, but only in The Clowns did he manifestly nudge the trouble of filmmaking into the film itself. The Godardisms are thick on the ground: a female assistant is commanded occasionally to read historical exposition directly at the camera and is frequently interrupted by bustle; all of the interviews are clearly orchestrated and intercut with traditional historical scenes; crew members are routinely glimpsed (even the boom man gets a glass of wine during a toast, in his own cutaway). This all tap-dances lightly around the film’s central conundrum: the lost phenomenon of the clowns themselves, old and retired or middle-aged and still defiantly performing for Fellini in a fake big top in which the audience beyond the third row are, spookily, cardboard cutouts. The film’s very subject is a decidedly arthritic, antiquated form of peasant performance, and Fellini heaps it on, questioning the nature of the beast with an unblinking camera.

What emerges from The Clowns, arguably for the first time in explicit terms, is the simple fact that since the advent of mass media in the late 19th century, clowns are not the engines of guileless humour they once were. (The distance between audience and circus clown in the 18th and 19th centuries doubtlessly enabled this particular style of comedy in a way that the objectified intimacy of film and television do not.) For more than a century, clowns simply have not been funny, and as Fellini implicitly suggests, perhaps comedy ceased to be their purpose for at least that long. Who (or what) are these strange men, painted like primitives and dressed like parade horses, cavorting and brawling like spastic toddlers in the sawdust? There’s little laughter in Fellini’s film, and at least one terrified child, the film’s narrational voice, who is brought home and beaten by his mother. (A new word for clown-dread, “coulrophobia,” has recently been coined, but not yet accepted by dictionaries.)

By the time Fellini made his film, the innocence and preindustrial glamour of the clown had been thoroughly neutered, and something more chilling has circumstantially taken its place. Though fond and full of showbizzy nostalgia, the film is decidedly funereal. Love him or not, Fellini was awake as no other filmmaker ever has been to the circus’ essentially depraved surreality, its contrapuntal relationship to normal life as a mythic spectacle of chaos, venting the pressure of organized society like a travelling carnival or Halloween eruption. These ruined ghosts gambol through their faux-assault routines, exploiting lower-class fears, prejudices, desires and schadenfreude, but ending up, almost inevitably, with a melancholic weirdness so acute it begs to be read metaphorically. As it is, Fellini evokes his own supposed memories of his childhood village’s array of madmen, drunks and oddities (including a dwarf nun), who served as only sources of gossip and entertainment for the villagers—suggesting the clowns, too, were always impaired, pathetic repositories for our cruellest enjoyments, and their acts were therein closer to car wrecks and public hangings than to comedy per se.

At its most nonfictional, The Clowns sits down for interviews with elderly clowns in their apartments and retirement homes, and with them tours the previous century or so as it’s been mythified in the subculture’s consciousness, complete with legendary icons and schticks handed down like sacred rituals. But just as the thrust of their reminiscences is far creepier than merely historical, Fellini manages to imbue even the sit-downs with a staged, oddly artificial ambience no less bizarre, in the end, than the flashback sequences in which 19th-century clowns, flying on wires, vainly struggle to enrapture the inmates of a cement-grey asylum. In the genuinely nightmarish, climactic big-top performance—a eulogy in more ways than one—there’s no audience at all, just the darkness of empty seats. The aging clowns scramble through their bizarre rites like mutants in a post-apocalyptic hinterland, or Beckettian lost ones dwelling only in the past, expressing themselves the only way they can, with absurd, repetitive gestures that once had some vaguely remembered meaning but now clearly have none.

Fellini saw no humour in this, that is clear: his fascination with the circus is not, as this film shows, just a cheap love of the bizarre, but a grim questioning of the freakish and unsalvageable past, the understanding of which always lies just beyond reach. This new DVD edition comes with, among other things, a slick booklet consisting largely of the “director’s notebook” Fellini kept during production (with sketches), and, rather arbitrarily, his short 1953 contribution to the omnibus film Love in the City, “Un agenzia matrimoniale”, which follows an investigative filmmaker subjecting himself to an Italian matchmaking agency and interviewing a prospective wife.

Michael Atkinson