I encountered the films of Federico Fellini in the evenings of my first year of graduate school, 1976-1977, when by day I was crawling at a snail’s pace through Sidney’s New Arcadia and Spenser’s Faerie Queene. My thinking about Spenser and about allegory more generally has been informed since by those early, intense, and repeated viewings, notebook on knee, of Fellini’s “mythopoeic” (new word!) films, amazed at their imaginative freedom and improvisatory brio. It's to the credit of Toronto’s film scene in those days, long before private streaming, that it was possible to see pretty much everything in screening rooms that sprang up all over downtown like mushrooms after rain, from La dolce vita (1960) and 8 ½ (1963) to Giulietta degli spiriti (“Juliet of the Spirits” 1965), Satiricon (1969), Roma (1972), Amarcord (1973), and Casanova (1976). Fellini’s earlier, more conventional films seemed not so much like The Faerie Queene as capable of going into it, especially the airy tempter of The White Sheik (Lo sceicco bianco 1953), who descends on his prey from a giant swing, his robes fluttering about him, crooning in her general direction. The second-hand orientalism isn’t as fierce as Spenser’s, owing more to the silent movie sheiks of Rudolf Valentino.

Among my acquaintances in Italy (readers all of the two Antonios, Gramsci and Negri), the line on Fellini was that he was self-indulgently apolitical, betraying the postwar Italian neorealists who took him into their nest like a cuckoo. In Roma Fellini actually stages such a scene of censure, in faux-documentary style, in the Borghese gardens, under those towering parasol pines, where bell-bottomed students clutching their university texts urge him to take up workers’ revolution, or at a minimum, workers’ rights.

He answers he’s not trying to change society, about which he knows little: he’s trying to understand himself. His art is confined to what he has seen or can imagine, never venturing, as he would have us suppose, into speculative regions. That is another question: the extent to which Fellini’s style, incoherent, replete with symbols, and arousing hermeneutic anxiety, is allegorical. But his sheer exuberance created the adjective, Felliniano, “Felliniesque,” a snowball of meanings I’ll attempt to define here: grotesque, energetic, extravagantly whimsical, allegorical to some degree but more in love with spectacle than meaning. Spenserians: does that sound like anyone you know?