THE VALUE OF BEING THERE: LA STRADA

Night on the big screen. Before us, ocean waves arriving at a beach. We follow a man who staggers on the sand, suffocating under the effects of liquor. He is veteran touring artist, Zampanò, his suit visibly broken and his face bruised. He comes from a bar, having left a fight affirming he doesn’t need of anyone and wants to be alone. However, nearly two minutes afterwards in film time, our subject collapses in tears by the shore, with only the spectator as a witness and no one to offer him a hand.

Such is the scene that closes Federico Fellini’s film, La Strada (1954). The movie follows the experiences of young Gelsomina, calm and innocent, with the temperamental Zampanò, whose final solitude reflects the absence of his partner, who has passed away. The force of this moment, channeled in the emotion with which Anthony Quinn portrays the afflicted circus actor, is effectively transmitted to us observing from the screen by the different elements of film language that, charged with meaning during the story, are at work in the ending.

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Firstly, regarding the place where the action happens, it isn’t a casualty that the tragic narration would take us there. The beach brings us back to two key moments in the story. The first one is the beginning of the movie, when a tranquil and quiet Gelsomina lives by the seashore with her mother and sisters. It is here that the action which sets the story of this film in motion occurs: Gelsomina’s mother, affected by the death of her daughter Rosa (who had left them to work with Zampanò) and driven by the scarce resources of her family, sells Gelsomina to the street artist.

In the second moment, Zampanò, out of prison after threatening the life of the derisive Il Matto, stops his vehicle beside a beach. Gelsomina, who had decided to remain with him in spite of his aggressiveness, runs excited towards the sea, asking where her family’s house is. With these scenes, the beach becomes a visual and narrative reference associated to home, a destination which stayed in her objectives, initially as the return to her family, then as a pleasant life with Zampanò and, finally, as a place she never managed to arrive at in either of these two ways in spite of illusions and promises, a burden that ends up being felt through Zampanò.

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On another note, Gelsomina’s visual absence at the end, having Zampanò found out of her decease three scenes earlier and after having abandoned her, brings the same kind of attention. The story presents a particular structure where the figure of the protagonist we follow seems to move from Gelsomina to Zampanò. Both are part of the action from the beginning of the plot – Gelsomina even more so if we go to the very first shot-scene of the movie – and no scene we see onscreen stops following her until Zampanò and her part ways.

The opposite happens with Zampanò, the cinematic view opting to follow Gelsomina’s journey when she escapes from him the first time and, later, while he is in prison. He is in the beginning as early as the second scene, where he watches, almost without participating, how Gelsomina’s mother tries to persuade her of the good in the idea of leaving with him (a case could be made that he is the true and only protagonist all along, but that would be a stand to explore on its own).

If this story were to be considered Gelsomina’s as much as Zampanò’s, one could trace a relationship of an active and a passive protagonist that is reversed by the end of the tale. In it, Gelsomina starts by observing and learning from Zampanò, asking him questions and trying to develop a sentimental relationship with him. However, from the moment she becomes absorbed in herself following the accidental demise of Il Matto in Zampanò’s hands, it is the latter who observes her, checks in on her wellbeing, offers her food and decides to abandon her while she sleeps.

Leaving her behind, Zampanò begins to reflect about what it was to have Gelsomina by his side and, at the end, while he contemplates the night at the beach, the different questions his traveling companion posed during their shared experience are made manifest from the absence: death, her purpose as a human being in the world and keeping him company as a possible answer, the nature of his feelings towards her, what she understood of the world, and how maybe what she understood was simply the essential and often overlooked of human relationships.

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The musical theme, composed by Nino Rota, also plays an evocative role in transmitting the emotion of this ending. It is a melody that goes along with us from the opening titles and that operates on a diegetic and non-diegetic level in the film story: as a tune Il Mato interprets on violin, a tune that Gelsomina has heard before and likes, which awakens a desire to learn melodies in her trumpet contrary to Zampanò’s interests; but also, as a musical companion piece to moments where Gelsomina tries to become closer to Zampanò, and others where she questions her value in the world in speaking to Il Matto.

When the melody is played within the world of the story, Zampanò shows apathy and even antipathy, associating it to Gelsomina’s interest in life details he sees of little importance or sense in the face of his nomad job, and to Il Matto, whom he despises because of his permanent mockery. Only in two uses of this music has he changed his reaction: when, years after abandoning Gelsomina, he meets a woman who humbles the melody and tells him of having crossed paths with her, already in bad health; and in the end at the beach.

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In this final scene, a silence precedes the melody as Zampanò realizes the absence of who would have been with him at the beach for that very moment, and the music seeming part of the diegesis is not without a good reason. Among the different instances of evoking his traveling companion, it would only be natural that the one of the melody he had ended up associating with her came up, as something left for him to hold on to in his solitude. In this last scene, Gelsomina is no longer around, but her referential imageries appear captured in the filmic receptacle. In her absence, she becomes present.

Cinematic montage does its magic when it registers the experience of feeling that a journey companion is no longer there. The (diegetic) universe collects the sensory images that symbolize this being’s mark to evoke its remembrance, at the same time awakening in memory those concepts by which they lived. Furthermore, empathy arises when the latter were questions that were eluded in the hustle of work by the person who carries on: a conversation about life and death, and company and loyalty as values that maybe suffice to be thought of as a mission in this life. It is a concern that, like this very type of film, turns timeless, and stays relevant today more than ever.

Originally written in Spanish on 11/09/2020 and published on 16/12/2020 at https://bienestaloquebienacaba.wordpress.com/2020/12/16/el-valor-de-la-presencia-la-strada/