Federico Fellini and the influences on his career

After Ingmar Bergman and Orson Welles, I’m now reading about Federico Fellini by Angel Quintana, in the Masters of Cinema series of Cahiers du Cinema. 

“Caricature makes it possible to convey psychological traits with just a few broad strokes. Fellini, the inventor of highly arresting worlds, saw images not in purely pictorial terms but as expressions of cartoonish aggression. This approach would eventually come to fruition by unleashing a visual dream-world.” 

Angel Quintana writes about the early influences on Fellini, from his childhood love of cartoons, comic strips, caricatures, carnivals, and the circus (the elements that make up his style) to neorealism and the collaborations with Rosselini. 

“Fellini learned then from Rossellini, as Gianni Rondolino has observed, that looking at the world means going beyond appearances, ‘introducing a new and original dramatic dimension and discovering the motivations hidden behind the facts’. […] A human being is not merely a social creature, as he or she is also subject to existential problems. Fellini came to realize that our understanding of reality is devoid of any sense if we ignore the constitutive elements of culture, and more especially the elements involved in the construction of the personality.” 

Quintana later writes about the influence of Carl Jung: 

“Unsettled by the success of La Dolce Vita and the scandal it provoked in some conservative quarters, Fellini went into psychoanalysis. Dr Ernst Bernhard introduced him to the theories of Carl Gustav Jung and made him understand that, contrary to the Freudian notion that symbols in dreams are merely a translation of repression, the unconscious can also be a repository for a richly poetic imaginary world. Reading Jung enabled Fellini to explore the symbolism of the collective unconscious and convinced that irrational images can be emotionally captivating. Fellini himself acknowledged that it was Jung who allowed him to make his cinema ‘a meeting point between science and magic, between rationality and imagination.’ He started to envisage a cinema with no borders between the real and the imaginary, a cinema immersed in the psyche. The influence of Jungian psychiatry led Fellini to analyse his own male ego in 8 ½ (1963) and reflect on femininity as a complex otherness in Juliet of the Spirits (1965).” 

I believe that Ingmar Bergman was also influenced by Jung—look at Persona*. 
I should read Jung. 


*: Here is a Jungian interpretation of Persona: http://www.iveybarr.com/persona-shadow-jungian-archetype-as-character/