The Voice of the Moon | |
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![]() Italian theatrical release poster | |
Directed by | Federico Fellini |
Screenplay by |
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Based on | Il poema dei lunatici by Ermano Cavazzoni |
Produced by | Mario and Vittorio Cecchi Gori |
Starring |
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Cinematography | Tonino Delli Colli |
Edited by | Nino Baragli |
Music by | Nicola Piovani |
Distributed by | Penta |
Release date |
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Running time | 120 minutes |
Country | Italy |
Language | Italian |
Box office | $5.1 million (Italy) [1] |
The Voice of the Moon (Italian : La voce della luna) is a 1990 Italian dramatic comedy film directed and written by Federico Fellini and starring Roberto Benigni, Paolo Villaggio, and Nadia Ottaviani. [2] Based on the novel Il poema dei lunatici by Ermano Cavazzoni, and revisiting themes Fellini first explored in La strada (1954), the film is about a fake inspector of wells and a former prefect who wander through the Emilia-Romagna countryside of Fellini's childhood and discover a dystopia of television commercials, fascism, beauty pageants, rock music, Catholicism, and pagan ritual.
The film received David di Donatello Awards for Best Actor, Best Editing, and Best Production Design, and nominations for Best Director, Best Film, Best Cinematography, Best Music, and Best Producer. [3] The Voice of the Moon was Fellini's last film before his death in 1993.
With a nod to the lunar-obsessed lyrics of Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, [4] the acerbic tale focuses on the capture of the moon by the Micheluzzi brothers while Ivo, newly released from a mental hospital, tries to seduce Aldina Ferruzzi with whom he's infatuated. Although she wants nothing to do with him, Ivo equates her blond beauty with the moon, the origin of his madness and frustration. During the attempts to woo her, he meets various madcap characters including an oboist who sleeps in the local cemetery, a man whose hobby is meditating on rooftops, and Gonnella, the ex-prefect fired for his rising paranoia. Gonnella makes Ivo his lieutenant and together they investigate the "wild conspiracies" going on around them.
The oddball pair attends a farcical beauty pageant where Aldina is crowned "Miss Flour of 1989" and ends up lost in the farmlands among graceful African women chanting in the moonlight. Inside an abandoned warehouse, they discover an Inferno-like disco of fashion victims dancing and bopping deliriously to Michael Jackson's "The Way You Make Me Feel". Ivo realises that Aldina's shoe, obtained surreptitiously, fits every Cinderella who tries it on. To the dancers' stupefaction, Gonnella orchestrates a waltz but is thrown out after smashing the disc jockey's cache of records.
Meanwhile, the three demented Micheluzzi brothers have caught the moon using gigantic farming equipment and roped it down in a stable. What ought to be a sacred event becomes a squandered opportunity as priests and politicians turn it into a conference for official propaganda voiced to the assembled public. The conference rapidly degenerates into violence by a madman with a pistol screaming, "What am I doing here? Why was I put here in the first place?", leaving Ivo Salvini with the film's last words: "If we all quieted down a little, maybe we'd understand something."
In Ermanno Cavazzoni's 1987 novel, Il poema dei lunatici (The Lunatics' Poem) on which the film is loosely based, Fellini recognized an abandoned project about filming the natural world: "the soil, the seasons, sun and rain, day and night. He likes the notion that at night the water in the well is awakened by the moon and starts uttering faint messages" [6] to those prepared to listen. Unfortunately, few are permitted - let alone prepared - to listen in the infernal uproar of a postmodern world where blaring television commercials and beeping satellites drown out poetry, silence, and the voice of the moon.
The consumer society critiqued in the Rome of La Dolce Vita has moved to the suburbs where incommunicability, selfishness, voyeurism, and spiritual poverty characterise the chaos of mass media existence. In his twilight years (three years before he died of a heart attack at the age of 73), Fellini mounts an energetic assault on media moguls like Silvio Berlusconi and the pandemonium of contemporary society by suggesting the escape into silence as a means to heal the psyche, the source of all true wisdom.
After writing a short treatment in two weeks with Tullio Pinelli, Fellini began scouting locations on the Po in September 1988 where he visited Reggiòlo, the hometown of the gifted Italian caricaturist Nino Za, his adolescent idol; the memories evoked reinforced his idea of returning to the provincial atmosphere of his early films. [7] Although Fellini was still unsure about what he wanted to film, producers Mario and Vittorio Cecchi Gori agreed to finance his project to the tune of fifteen billion lire. [8] Pietro Notarianni, the production manager, and Danilo Donati, Oscar-winning Set and Costume Designer, engaged in a heated dispute over costs. Donati quit and was replaced by Dante Ferretti.
To help organise his ideas, Fellini decided to build a town outside Rome on the via Pontina near Dinocittà, the former film studio of producer Dino De Laurentiis. With Dante Ferretti, he constructed a church, a piazza, apartment blocks, shops, and a hairdresser's boutique, all designed in a parody of styles. Although no genuine script was ever completed, Fellini managed to conceive entire scenes each day by observing his actors improvising on the set, rather like puppets in a doll's house. [9]
Principal photography started on 22 February 1989. According to biographer Tullio Kezich, the film "will be remembered as one of the most serenely uninhibited of Fellini's sets... At the final dinner in mid-June, the last time that the troupe will convene, Benigni outdoes himself and recites a wonderful poem in ottava rima, [10] recounting everything that had happened and been felt over the last months". [8]
Aided by the immense popularity in Italy of comic actors Benigni and Villaggio, the film was one of the highest-grossing Italian films of the year with a gross of $5.1 million. It received enthusiastic reviews from Alberto Moravia, Tullio Kezich, and Aldo Tassone along with a few outright pans. [11] Although it did poor business in France, it was acclaimed in Le Monde and Positif , and was featured on the cover of Les Cahiers du Cinéma which saw it as a winning diatribe on the excesses of Guy Debord's "society of spectacle". [12]
The film screened out of competition at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival, [13] where it was panned or ignored by the majority of North American critics. One critic boasted, "Absolutely ravishing. I've never been so bored in my life". [14]
Federico Fellini was an Italian film director and screenwriter. He is known for his distinctive style, which blends fantasy and baroque images with earthiness. He is recognized as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time. His films have ranked highly in critical polls such as that of Cahiers du Cinéma and Sight & Sound, which lists his 1963 film 8+1⁄2 as the 10th-greatest film.
Amarcord is a 1973 comedy-drama film directed by Federico Fellini, a semi-autobiographical tale about Titta, an adolescent boy growing up among an eccentric cast of characters in the village of Borgo San Giuliano in 1930s Fascist Italy. The film's title is a univerbation of the Romagnol phrase a m'arcôrd. The title then became a neologism of the Italian language, with the meaning of "nostalgic revocation". The central role of Titta is based on Fellini's childhood friend from Rimini, Luigi Titta Benzi. Benzi became a lawyer and remained in close contact with Fellini throughout his life.
8+1⁄2 is a 1963 comedy-drama film directed and co-written by Federico Fellini. The metafictional narrative centers on Guido Anselmi, a famous Italian film director who suffers from stifled creativity as he attempts to direct an epic science fiction film. Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimée, Sandra Milo, Rossella Falk, Barbara Steele, and Eddra Gale portray the various women in Guido's life. The film is shot in black and white by cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo and features a score by Nino Rota, with costume and set designs by Piero Gherardi.
La dolce vita is a 1960 satirical comedy-drama film directed and co-written by Federico Fellini. The film stars Marcello Mastroianni as Marcello Rubini, a tabloid journalist who, over seven days and nights, journeys through the "sweet life" of Rome in a fruitless search for love and happiness. The screenplay can be divided into a prologue, seven major episodes interrupted by an intermezzo, and an epilogue, according to the most common interpretation.
Nights of Cabiria is a 1957 drama film co-written and directed by Federico Fellini. It stars Giulietta Masina as Cabiria, a prostitute living in Rome. The cast also features François Périer and Amedeo Nazzari. The film is based on a story by Fellini, who expanded it into a screenplay along with his co-writers Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli and Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Giulia Anna "Giulietta" Masina was an Italian film actress best known for her performances as Gelsomina in La Strada (1954) and Cabiria in Nights of Cabiria (1957), for which she won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival.
Paolo Villaggio was an Italian actor, writer, director and comedian. He is noted for the characters he created with paradoxical and grotesque characteristics: Professor Kranz, the ultra-timid Giandomenico Fracchia, and the obsequious and meek accountant Ugo Fantozzi, perhaps the favourite character in Italian comedy. He wrote several books, usually of satirical character. He also acted in dramatic roles, and appeared in several movies.
La strada is a 1954 Italian drama film directed by Federico Fellini and co-written by Fellini, Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano. The film tells the story of Gelsomina, a simple-minded young woman bought from her mother by Zampanò, a brutish strongman who takes her with him on the road.
I vitelloni is a 1953 Italian comedy drama film directed by Federico Fellini from a screenplay written by himself, Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli. It stars Franco Interlenghi, Alberto Sordi, Franco Fabrizi, Leopoldo Trieste, and Riccardo Fellini as five young Italian men at crucial turning points in their small town lives. Recognized as a pivotal work in the director's artistic evolution, the film has distinct autobiographical elements that mirror important societal changes in 1950s Italy.
Fellini's Casanova is a 1976 Italian film directed by Federico Fellini from a screenplay he co-wrote with Bernardino Zapponi, adapted from the autobiography of 18th-century Venetian adventurer and writer Giacomo Casanova, played by Donald Sutherland. The film depicts Casanova's life as a journey into sexual abandonment, and his relationship with the "love of his life" Henriette. The narrative presents Casanova's adventures in a detached, methodical fashion, as the respect for which he yearns is constantly undermined by his more basic urges.
Gianni Di Venanzo, was an Italian cinematographer.
Nicola Piovani is an Italian light-classical musician, theater and film score composer. In 1998, he won the Academy Award for Best Original Dramatic Score for Roberto Benigni's film Life Is Beautiful (1997).
The Nastro d'Argento for Best Director is a film award bestowed annually as part of the Nastro d'Argento awards since 1946, organized by the Italian National Association of Film Journalists, the national association of Italian film critics.
DamianPettigrew (1963) is a Canadian filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, author, and multimedia artist, best known for his cinematic portraits of Balthus, Federico Fellini, and Jean Giraud.
Tullio Kezich was an Italian screenwriter and playwright, best known as the film critic for Corriere della Sera and for his award-winning biography of Italian director Federico Fellini.
Fellini: I'm a Born Liar is a 2002 French documentary film written and directed by Damian Pettigrew. Based on Federico Fellini's last confessions filmed by Pettigrew in Rome in 1991 and 1992, the film eschews straightforward biography to highlight the Italian director's unorthodox working methods, conscience, and philosophy.
I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon is a book combining film stills and photographs with transcripts of the last filmed interviews with Federico Fellini conducted by Canadian filmmaker Damian Pettigrew in Rome in 1991 and 1992. The interviews are edited and introduced by Pettigrew with a preface by Italian film critic and Fellini biographer Tullio Kezich.
Francesca Dellera is an Italian actress and model.
The Nastro d'Argento is a film award assigned each year, since 1948, by Sindacato Nazionale dei Giornalisti Cinematografici Italiani, the association of Italian film critics.
Ermanno Cavazzoni is an Italian writer and screenwriter.