The dream of a carnival night. The grotesque miracles of Valle-Inclán and Fellini

Abstract

In 1948, a young screenwriter named Federico Fellini wrote the main argument on which Rossellini based his medium-length film Il Miracolo. After the screening, an accusation of plagiarism was brought upon the film. The many thematic and tonal similarities with a novel written by a Spanish author, Ramón del Valle-Inclán, provoked an enraged review written by a Spanish-born critic in an Argentinian journal. Even though we doubt the true presence of an appropriation by the film, it is uncanny how their worlds, that of Valle-Inclán’s esperpento and the future director’s farce, intersect through the aesthetics of the grotesque. This paper focuses on some of the interesting parallels that connected these two great creators.