Content area
Full Text
I
In fact, the end itself, if I wanted to apply a cheap form of symbolism, could be seen in this key: the tunnel, the uterus, and the train, the rigid thing, which wishes to enter but is instead sucked up by it. . . .
Federico Fellini, 1980
Writing from Cannes on the appearance of City of Women in 1980, Mary Corliss described the film's protagonist as a sort of "Phallus in Wonderland who falls asleep down the rabbit hole of the libido."1 There is little point in arguing that O'ry of Women amounts to much more than a fairly stale summation of Felliniesque themes and images, as his hero Snaporaz dreams himself into the midst of a feminist convention where the delegates run the gamut from political activists to strippers. The alter ego of a self-confessed "aging man who cannot help regarding feminism with fear and bewilderment,"2 Snaporaz tends to impose his fantasies of an orgiastic carnival upon the women's political reality until the film itself, wrote Jan Dawson from the festival, shifts "from the misogynistic to the plain misanthropic."3 When one recalls that Snaporaz's most spectacular effort to escape his own nightmare (via a hot-air ballon) is aborted by a burst of feminist machine-gun fire, one no doubt recalls also the opening of 8'h: the automobile cab in which film director Guido Anselmi is trapped is the enclosure of the womb, the rope which aborts his flight to freedom a diabolical umbilical cord. One's thoughts may also turn to Casanova and the episode of "Muna the Mystery Woman": at an English country fair, Casanova watches male spectacle-goers queue up to enter the orifice of a huge whale-like attraction which is at once a monstrous vulva and a precursory cinema.
The ramifications of the image had coalesced in Fellini's mind by the time of City of Women: the cinema, he explained to Gideon Bachmann,
is a woman by virtue of its ritualistic nature. This uterus which is the theater, the fetal darkness, the apparitions-all create a projected relationship, we project ourselves onto it, we become involved in a series of vicarious transpositions, and we make the screen assume the character of what we expect of it, just as we do with women, upon...