Friday - er, Wednesday Musical Interlude: La Saraghina!
Written by Lesley
Wednesday, 06 February 2008
I would have put this up on Friday, but I'm going to be out of town, so this week your Musical Interlude comes on a Wednesday instead.
Many years ago in a former life, I was a film student and aspiring screenwriter. This is actually the field in which I got my Bachelor's degree.
At the time, I'd had zero exposure to any kind of organized or established fat activism. I knew that I was done dieting forever when I was 18, because not only did it not work, but the attendant obsession with food, and resentment over that obsession, made me a miserable and unpleasant person. I knew that I needed to come to some kind of a truce with my body and with food. That was the extent of my fat consciousness at the time.
I was taking a class on the films of Federico Fellini. One of the films I had to watch for this class was, of course, the phenomenal 8 1/2, starring the preternaturally handsome Marcello Mastroianni, upon whom I will likely indulge a schoolgirl crush until I die.
I'm coming to the important part.
The important part is La Saraghina.
Saraghina represents the fat town prostitute who inspired some of Fellini's nascent sexual feelings in boyhood. In the film, Saraghina is a literal cave-dwelling monster who emerges to dance suggestively on the beach for the young lads who offer her a coin or two.
Saraghina's overt, unbashed sexuality blew my freaking mind. I'd never seen anything like it in a film before. There is a definite element of humor in this scene, but it's not making Saraghina the butt of a joke. Even the humor of it is deadly serious.
Lots of folks think Fellini is just weird. And he is. And his movies are not for everyone. But for me, seeing Saraghina for the first time was a major turning point, in how I thought about myself, and how I thought about my body, and what my body represents, and how bodies like mine are represented in culture.
Edit: for comparison purposes, see also French & Saunders' comic take on the same scene:
I saw Fellini Satyricon about 22 years ago, and the one of the few things I remember about that movie is one of the lead male characters going to a fat priestess (or maybe it was a prostitute— but I think it was a priestess) in an attempt to cure his impotence. It was mind-blowing and revelatory and even, dare I say, empowering. I remember thinking “YES!! It takes a fat priestess to cure impotence!”
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About
Fatshionista is a full-fat and diet-free blog dealing with body politics and cultural criticism. It is mostly written by Lesley Kinzel, who can be reached via email at lesley@fatshionista.com. More info on Lesley and the occasional contributors can be found here. Until we have a formal FAQ page, some questions and answers can be found here.
