Fellini, Federico

born Jan. 20, 1920, Rimini, Italy

died Oct. 31, 1993, Rome

Italian film director.

After collaborating with Roberto Rossellini on the screenplays for Open City (1945) and Paisan (1946), Fellini undertook his first solo venture in 1952. It failed, but his next film, I vitelloni (1953), was a critical success. He won international acclaim with La strada (1954, Academy Award), The Nights of Cabiria (1957, Academy Award), and La dolce vita (1960). He continued his distinctive autobiographical style of filmmaking

one that displayed a sympathetic fascination with the bizarre

in 812 (1963, Academy Award) but turned to gaudy spectacle in Juliet of the Spirits (1965) and Satyricon (1969). The best of his later films are Amarcord (1973, Academy Award) and the nostalgic Ginger and Fred (1985). His wife, Giulietta Masina (1920–94), starred in several of his films.

Federico Fellini, 1965.

Paris Match

Pictorial Parade

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▪ 1994

      Italian film director (b. Jan. 20, 1920, Rimini, Italy—d. Oct. 31, 1993, Rome, Italy), created motion pictures with a landscape so unique that the term Felliniesque was used to describe any scene in which a hallucinatory image invaded an otherwise ordinary situation. His films were deeply personal and often portrayed people at their most bizarre. Fellini moved to Florence (1938) and then to Rome (1939), where in 1943 he met and, four months later, married the actress Giulietta Masina, who would later star in many of his movies. With several friends he opened (1944) the Funny Face Shop, where Allied soldiers purchased photos, caricatures, portraits, and voice recordings to send home. He became acquainted with the director Roberto Rossellini there and was asked to collaborate on Roma città aperta (1945; Open City), which became the best-known example of Italian Neorealism. They collaborated further on such films as Paisà (1946; Paisan) and Il miracolo (1948; The Miracle). Fellini made his directorial debut when he codirected Luci del varietà (1951; Variety Lights) with Alberto Lattuada. His first solo effort came in 1952 with Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik), and he followed that with I vitelloni (1953), which won a Venice Film Festival award. For his next film, La strada (1954; "The Road"), Fellini won the first of his four Academy Awards for best foreign-language film. His other Oscars were for Le notti di Cabiria (1957; The Nights of Cabiria), Otto e mezzo (1963; 8 1/2), and Amarcord (1974; "I Remember"). La dolce vita (1960; "The Sweet Life") was Fellini's first "phenomenon." Starring Marcello Mastroianni—often referred to as Fellini's alter ego—it was a satire of the decadence of contemporary jet-set society and became an immediate sensation. Both the Italian government and the Roman Catholic Church attacked it, but it went on to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. With Otto e mezzo came the style to which Fellini would remain faithful for the rest of his career: fantasy indiscriminately intermingled with reality. The film, blatantly autobiographical, portrayed a moviemaker reviewing his life in the face of self-doubts and a creative block. Then Giulietta degli spiriti (1965; Juliet of the Spirits) explored the fantasies of a bored housewife obsessed by spirits. Other notable films were Fellini Satyricon (1969), inspired by the ancient Roman writer Petronius; Roma (1972); Amarcord, a memoir of Fellini's youth; Casanova (1976); and Ginger e Fred (1986; Ginger and Fred), which centred on the reunion of former dance partners who had modeled themselves on Rogers and Astaire. In 1993 Fellini was given a special Academy Award for lifetime achievement.

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▪ Italian filmmaker

Introduction

born January 20, 1920, Rimini, Italy

died October 31, 1993, Rome

 Italian film director who was one of the most celebrated and distinctive filmmakers of the period after World War II. Early in his career he helped inaugurate the Neorealist (Neorealism) cinema movement, but he soon developed his own distinctive style of typically autobiographical films that imposed dreamlike or hallucinatory imagery upon ordinary situations and portrayed people at their most bizarre.

Early life and influences

      After an uneventful provincial childhood during which he developed a talent as a cartoonist, Fellini at age 19 moved to Rome, where he contributed cartoons, gags, and stories to the humour magazine Marc'Aurelio. During World War II, Fellini worked as a scriptwriter for the radio program Cico e Pallina, starring Giulietta Masina (Masina, Giulietta), the actress who became Fellini's wife in 1943 and who went on to star in several of the director's greatest films during the course of their 50-year marriage. In 1944 Fellini met director Roberto Rossellini (Rossellini, Roberto), who engaged him as one of a team of writers who created Roma, città aperta (1945; Open City or Rome, Open City), often cited as the seminal film of the Italian Neorealist movement. Fellini's contribution to the screenplay earned him his first Oscar nomination.

      Fellini quickly became one of Italy's most successful screenwriters. Although he wrote a number of important scripts for such directors as Pietro Germi (Il cammino della speranza [1950; The Path of Hope]), Alberto Lattuada (Senza pietá [1948; Without Pity]), and Luigi Comencini (Persiane chiuse [1951; Drawn Shutters]), his scripts for Rossellini are most important to the history of the Italian cinema. These include Paisà (1946; Paisan), perhaps the purest example of Italian Neorealism; Il miracolo (1948; “The Miracle,” an episode of the film L'Amore), a controversial work on the meaning of sainthood; and Europa '51 (1952; The Greatest Love), one of the first films in postwar Italy that began to move beyond the documentary realism of the Neorealist period toward an examination of psychological problems and Existentialist themes.

      Fellini made his debut as director in collaboration with Lattuada on Luci del varietà (1951; Variety Lights). This was the first in a series of works dealing with provincial life and was followed by Lo sceicco bianco (1951; The White Sheik) and I vitelloni (1953; Spivs or The Young and the Passionate), his first critically and commercially successful work. This film, a bitterly sarcastic look at the idle “mama's boys” of the provinces, is still considered by some critics to be Fellini's masterpiece.

Major works

 Fellini's next films formed a trilogy that dealt with salvation and the fate of innocence in a cruel and unsentimental world. One of Fellini's best-known works, the heavily symbolic La strada (1954; “The Road”), stars Anthony Quinn as a cruel, animalistic circus strongman and Masina as the pathetic waif who loves him. The film was shot on location in the desolate countryside between Viterbo and Abruzzo, with the great empty spaces reflecting the virtual inhumanity of the relationship between the principal characters. Although it was criticized by the left-wing press in Italy, the film was highly praised abroad, winning an Academy Award for best foreign film. Il bidone (1955; The Swindle), which starred Broderick Crawford in a role intended for Humphrey Bogart, was a rather unpleasant tale of petty swindlers who disguise themselves as priests in order to rob the peasantry. Garnering a second foreign film Oscar for Fellini was the more successful Le notti di Cabiria (1957; The Nights of Cabiria), again starring Masina, this time as a simple, eternally optimistic Roman prostitute. Although not usually considered among Fellini's greatest works, Le notti de Cabiria (upon which the Broadway musical comedy Sweet Charity was based) remains a critical favourite and one of Fellini's most immediately likable films.

  Fellini's next film, La dolce vita (1960; “The Sweet Life”), was his first collaboration with Marcello Mastroianni (Mastroianni, Marcello), the actor who would come to represent Fellini's alter ego in several films throughout the next two decades. The film—for which Fellini had Rome's main thoroughfare, the Via Veneto, rebuilt as a set—proved to be a panorama of the times, rife with surreal imagery, and a compelling indictment of popular media, decadent intellectuals, and aristocrats. Immediately hailed as one of the most important films ever made, La dolce vita contributed the word paparazzi (unscrupulous yellow-press photographers) to the English language and the adjective “Felliniesque” to the lexicon of film critics.

      Regarded as a perfect blend of symbolism and realism, Otto e mezzo (1963; 2), is perhaps Fellini's most widely praised film and earned the director his third Oscar for best foreign film. Entitled 8 ¹/₂ for the number of films Fellini had made to that time (seven features and three shorts), the work shows the plight of a famous director (based on Fellini, portrayed by Mastroianni) in creative paralysis. The high modernist aesthetics of the film became emblematic of the very notion of free, uninhibited artistic creativity, and in 1987 a panel of motion picture scholars from 18 European nations named 8 ¹/₂ the best European film ever made.

      In the wake of 8 ¹/₂ Fellini's name became firmly linked to the vogue of the postwar European art film. He began to deal with the myth of Rome, the cinema, and, especially, the director's own life and fantasy world, all of which Fellini considered interrelated themes in his works. His films of the late 1960s combine dreamlike images with original uses of colour photography. Satyricon (1969), inspired by such ancient Roman writers as Petronius and Apuleius, tells of the wanderings of a group of aimless young men in the world of antiquity. Fellini, who was unconcerned with historical accuracy, attempted to explore the human condition in an age before Christianity and the concept of original sin. A bizarre, flamboyant work, Satyricon remains a film on which critical opinion is heatedly divided. Roma (1971; Fellini's Roma) is the director's personal portrait of the Eternal City, and Amarcord (1973), which won Fellini a fourth Oscar for best foreign film, offers a nostalgic remembrance of Fellini's provincial adolescence during the Fascist period.

Mature years

      Many of Fellini's later films were less successful commercially and encountered critical resistance. The sumptuous Casanova (1976), praised by some as a visual masterpiece and derided by others as a hollow confection, was a brooding, melancholy meditation on the meaning of sex and death. Such works as La città delle donne (1980; City of Women), E la nave va (1983; And the Ship Sails On), Ginger e Fred (1985; Ginger and Fred), Intervista (1987; Interview), and La voce della luna (1989; The Voice of the Moon), his last feature film, reflect the complex evolution of Fellini's mature cinematic style and treat a variety of postmodern topics: the role of the male in an increasingly feminist society, the effects of television on contemporary life, the nature of artistic creativity, and the growing homogenization of popular culture. During the last years of his life, Fellini produced television commercials for Barilla pasta, Campari Soda, and the Banco di Roma that are regarded as extraordinary lessons in cinematography revealing the director's deep grasp of popular culture. He also exhibited his sketches and cartoons, many of which were taken from his private dream notebooks, thus uncovering the source of much of his artistic creativity, the unconscious.

Assessment

      Although the subject of derision from some revisionist critics, Fellini assured for himself a place of prime importance in the history of filmmaking. His best films, all of which were partially written by him, are freely structured tales in which dream and reality, as well as autobiography and fantasy, mingle in a world of symbolism. Breaking with traditional techniques of motion picture production, he succeeded in making the film such a personal medium that his own creative and personal problems became legendary. He received numerous honours during his lifetime, including 8 Oscars, 23 Oscar nominations, a career achievement Oscar in 1993, the Golden Lion career award from the Venice Film Festival in 1985, and dozens of prizes from the world's most prestigious film festivals. A poll of international film directors conducted in 1992 by Sight and Sound magazine ranked Fellini as the most significant film director of all time and cited two of Fellini's works (La strada and 8 ¹/₂) in a list of the 10 most influential films of all time.

Additional Reading

Peter Bondanella and Cristina Degli-Esposti (eds.), Perspectives on Federico Fellini (1993). Peter Bondanella, The Cinema of Federico Fellini (1992); Costanzo Costantini (ed.), Conversations with Fellini (1996).

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