Fellini-Roma : sur les bords du Léthé. Un usage fellinien de la métalepse

In Fellini’s Roma, the famous sequence in which ancient frescoes are discovered during the construction of the subway is a key scene and an allegory of his filmic and artistic approach. But Fellini’s boldness goes further. During the sequence, the filmmaker, using a somewhat fantastic shortcut, breaks through the wall that separates the world of the living and the forgotten world of ancient figures. He thus uses metalepsis at the heart of the film. Figures who were about to fade away under the effect of the outside world come again to life in his film, just as, in Virgil, the souls of the dead, grouped on the banks of the river Lethe, are waiting in the hope of returning to the world of the living. The film has often been compared to a patchwork, or a mosaic, imaging a complex and stratified city. But rather than a mosaic, we should speak of threshold crossings, that is to say rhetorical effects, amongst which the main one could be metalepsis. Fellini’s Roma is not only a melancholic and hectic fresco of a visionary director, but also an ever-moving network of initiatory paths. Through the Fellinian shifts and transgressions, it is the incessant renewal of Rome which is shown.