[Taken by themselves the] reels of dazzling visual images [in Giulietta degli Spiriti] may well come to seem gratuitous and even tiresome. A terribly earnest and pathetically ingenuous wife makes her psychological journey through facts and hallucinations in sequences of astonishing exoticism. The scenes are often not so much in color as coloristic, and the settings, both actual and hallucinated—with no particularly insistent demarcation—are not so much extravagant as extravaganza-ed. Virtually every shot has a contrived air, to the spent and twitching point of mannerism. Hence the frequent characterization of the film as "baroque." But the dialogue, precisely by being just as "frou-frou," just as "spumone," as the visual style, does something other than provide information and develop a story. Dialogue turns out to be a way of life in Giulietta's milieu, or more exactly, a way of escape from a genuine life of action for the people who surround her. (p. 22)
Fellini's strategy for accomplishing this mutual reinforcement of dialogue and image is not to emphasize to any abnormal degree what things are said, but to emphasize more than usual the ways in which they are said…. When the visual exoticism is thus taken in conjunction with the unremitting dialogue, it ceases to look gratuitously mannered or exaggerated; for together they are the warp and the woof of a major theme of Fellini's work: the incessant conflict between the comparative concreteness of Giulietta's responses, however ingenuous and even hallucinatory they may sometimes be, and the triviality of her milieu….
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