Il Casanova di Federico Fellini
During the Venetian carnival Giacomo Casanova agrees to show his amorous valor with Sister Magdalena and thus please the woman’s voyeur lover, the French ambassador from whom Casanova hopes to gain benefits. But he is arrested by the Inquisition on charges of black magic. He escapes from the Piombi prison and is in Paris as a guest of the Marquise d’Urfé who wants to obtain from him the secret of immortality. Then Casanova leaves Paris and resumes his frenzied activities as a seducer. Among his loves is the unhappy one with Henriette, who makes him despair and abandons him. In Rome he participates in an amatory contest with a Pololano, winning it. In Rome he also meets the pope and his mother, who by then has little interest in his fortunes. Finally, old age, employment as a librarian, his charm fading, the oblivion of the courts, until the loneliness of a dance with a mechanical doll, a memory of an increasingly distant past.
Crew
Director: Federico Fellini
Subject: loosely based on “Storie della mia vita” by Giacomo Casanova
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Bernardino Zapponi
Photography: Giuseppe Rotunno (Technicolor)
Cameraman: Massimo Di Venanzo
Assistant Cameraman: Wolfgango Soldati, Bruno Garbuglia
Music: Nino Rota
Conductor: Carlo Savina
Songs: “La grande mouna” by Tonino Guerra, “La mantide religiosa” by Antonio Amurri, “Il cacciatore di Wurtemberg” by Carl A. Walken
Verses in Venetian dialect: Andrea Zanzotto
Set design: Federico Fellini
Set design: Danilo Donati
Costumes: Danilo Donati
Assistant costumes: Gloria Mussetta, Raimonda Gaetani, Rita Giacchero
Architect: Giantito Burchiellaro, Giorgio Giovannini
Set design assistant: Antonello Geleng
Editing: Ruggero Mastroianni
Editing assistant: Adriana Olasio, Marcello Olasio, Ugo De Rossi
Assistant directors: Maurizio Mein, Liliana Betti, Gerard Morin
Editing secretary: Norma Giacchero
Production inspector: Gilberto Scarpellini, Alessandro Gori, Fernando Rossi
Furniture: Emio D’Andria
Sound: Oscar De Arcangelis
Sound assistants: Franco De Arcangelis, Massimo De Arcangelis
Mixage: Fausto Ancillai
Choreography: Gino Landi
Choreography assistant: Mirella Agujaro
Scenotechnician: Italo Tomassi
Paintings: Rinaldo Geleng, Giuliano Geleng
Drawings for the magic lantern: Roland Topor
Sculptures: Giovanni Giannesi
Makeup: Rino Carboni (Giannetto De Rossi and Fabrizio Sforza for Donald Sutherland)
Hairstyling: Vitaliana Patacca
Assistant hairstylists: Gabriella Borzelli, Paolo Borzelli, Vincenzo Cardella
Special effects: Adriano Pischiutta
Producer: Alberto Grimaldi
General Organization: Giorgio Morra
Production Manager: Lamberto Pippia
Production assistant: Alessandro von Normann, Mario Di Biase
Production secretary: Titti Pesaro, Luciano Bonomi
Cast
Donald Sutherland : Giacomo Casanova
Tina Aumont : Henriette
Cicely Browne : the Marquise Durfé
Carmen Scarpitta : Mrs. Charpillon
Diane Kourys : Mrs. Charpillon
Clara Algranti : Marcolina
Daniela Gatti : Giselda
Margareth Clementi : Sister Magdalena
Mario Cencelli : Dr. Mobius the entomologist
Silvana Fusacchia : another daughter of the entomologist
Chesty Morgan : Barberina
Adele Angela Lojodice : the mechanical doll
Sandra Elanie Allen : the giantess
Clarissa Maryè Roll : Annamaria
Alessandra Belloni : the princess
Marika Rivera : Astrodi
Angelica Hansen : hunchback actress
Marjorie Belle : countess of Waldestein
Marie Marquet : the mother of Casaova
Daniel Emilfork-Berestein : Du Bois
Luigi Zerbinati : the Pope
Awards
1976
Oscar for best costume design
1977
Silver Ribbon for best cinematography
1976-1977
Silver Ribbon for best set design
1976
Silver Ribbon for best costumes
1977
David di Donatello for best music
1977
Oscar nomination for best non-original screenplay
BAFTA Award (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) for best set design
BAFTA Award (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) for best costume design
BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards) nomination for best cinematography
Peculiarites
“At first I had thought of casting Gian Maria Volonté in the role of Casanova. It would have been beneficial to the Italian actor, after so many tormented figures who had made humanity leap forward, to play a character destined, by contrast, to make it leap backward, but successive postponements had led to a breakdown of contracts. I had thus entrusted the role of Casanova to Donald Sutherland, a sperm candelon with a masturbator’s eye, as far removed as one could imagine from an adventurer and ladies’ man like Casanova, but a serious, trained, professional actor.”
(Fellini. Telling about myself, conversations with Costanzo Costantini, Editori Riuniti, Rome, 1996, p. 138)
Reviews
Casanova as he was never interested Fellini in the least. What he saw was another of the ghosts, the dreamlike projections, that habitually filled his imagination. Monster among monsters, disturbing larva among the many that crowd his reveries as an artist who grew up amid the religious conditioning of a small Adriatic town and landed in a Rome that always spoke to him especially as the privileged seat of an ecclesiastical society and custom.
(Mauro Manciotti, “Il Secolo XIX,” Dec. 22, 1976)
Casanova is, perhaps, Fellini’s best film since Otto e mezzo, probably the most free from Fellinism, certainly the most unified and compact (and there is little point in arguing whether it was really necessary to reach the 2 hours and 43 minutes in length) for richness and genius of figurative inventions, narrative tightness, wisdom in balancing the horrific with the tender and the fabulous with the ironic, ability to move from the caricatural to the visionary. It has always been one of the peculiarities of his talent, but here, even with some repetition, it is maintained at a high level of homogeneity, resting on a phonic fabric that, in its refined mystilinguism, is as admirable as the stupendous color palette of Rotunno’s photography.
(Morando Morandini, “Il Giorno,” Dec. 11, 1976)
Casanova is not a cinematic novel; it has no logical progression or real narrative links. The connections between the nine or ten chapters are quick and precarious, reminiscent of captions in “comics.” Federico Fellini’s grand circus belongs to the avant-garde, as the American filmmakers of the “underground” have well understood since the days of Eight and a Half. Despite the billions spent lavishly, we are not in the parts of what Flaubert called “industrial art”; we are closer to the monolithic, “privatism” and brazenness of an Andy Warhol. Therefore, the comparison that current events suggest between Barry Lindon and Casanova registers more dissimilarities than convergences. Kubrick takes seriously the nineteenth-century novel and the eighteenth-century setting, the sociological and political connotations of the affair: he has the air of having read and annotated an entire library, of having his own moral judgment about the era and the character. Fellini has flipped through the Casanovian Histoire like the phone book, has on the surface to offer nothing but impressions, resentments, mockery. However… There is a though here, too: if Kubrik’s re-enacted 1700s has its own deep cultural motivations, Fellini’s dreamed-up 1700s has the alarming and mysterious quality of a prophetic vision. Perhaps Jung would have said that Il Casanova is a prophecy about the past.
(Tullio Kezich, “La Repubblica,” Dec. 11, 1976)
Rich, multifaceted, varied in tone, perhaps not immune to some slackening of rhythm, Il Casanova imposes itself on our admiration especially in the parts in which its protagonist, as he grows older, acquires a humanity that was previously avariciously denied him, and thus engages us.
(Dario Zanelli, “Il Resto del Carlino,” Dec. 19, 1976)