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Federico Fellini Federico Fellini, (born January 20, 1920, Rimini, Italy—died October 31, 1993, Rome), Italian film director who was one of the most celebrated and singular filmmakers of the period after World War II. Influenced early in his career by the Neorealist movement, he developed his own distinctive methods that superimposed dreamlike or hallucinatory imagery upon ordinary situations. He added vastly to the vocabulary of the cinema and pioneered a personal style of filmmaking now integral to its practice.
EARLY LIFE AND INFLUENCES The son of a traveling salesman who sold foodstuffs and a mother who believed that, in marrying beneath her, she betrayed her links to Roman nobility, Fellini grew up believing he belonged in Rome. In the late 1930s he moved there with his mother and brother. Only Federico stayed on, however, surviving by selling cartoons, gags, and stories to the humour magazine Marc’Aurelio. During World War II Fellini wrote scripts for the radio serial Cico e Pallina, starring Giulietta Masina, who became his wife in 1943 and who appeared in several of his films during an often troubled 50year marriage. In 1944 Fellini met director Roberto Rossellini and became one of a team of writers for Roma, città aperta (1945; Open City or Rome, Open City), a pioneer film of Neorealism. Fellini’s contribution to the screenplay earned him his first Oscar nomination.
Fellini quickly became one of Italy’s most successful screenwriters. He collaborated on screenplays for such directors as Pietro Germi (Il cammino della speranza [1950; The Path of Hope]), Alberto Lattuada (Senza pietà [1948; Without Pity]), and Luigi Comencini (Persiane chiuse [1951; Behind Closed Shutters]); he was uncredited on the latter film. In addition, Fellini contributed to Rossellini’s Paisà (1946; Paisan) and Il miracolo (1948; “The Miracle”, an episode of the film L’amore), in which he also acted, playing a tramp who impregnates a simpleminded peasant when she takes him for the reincarnation of St. Joseph.
Fellini’s quest for a more personal style, which often verged on the fantastic, alienated Neorealist purists. His directorial debut, Luci del varietà (1950; Variety Lights), made in collaboration with Lattuada, is set in a traveling variety show. An enthusiast of the seedy side of show business, in particular vaudeville and the circus, Fellini returned to this milieu repeatedly, beginning with his first independent feature, Lo sceicco bianco (1952; The White Sheik), a satire on the fumetti (photographic comic strips) and their fanatical fans. However, his first critical and commercial success, I vitelloni (1953; Spivs or The Young and the Passionate), exhibited little fantasy. Based on his own adolescence in Rimini, it faithfully reflects the boredom of provincial life, which drove him to Rome.
MAJOR WORKS With La strada (1954; “The Road”), Fellini returned to the world of showmen. It starred Anthony Quinn as Zampanò, a brutish but phoney itinerant "strong man," and Masina as the waif who loves him. The film was shot on desolate locations between Viterbo and Abruzzi, mean villages and flinty roads that were intended to reflect the moral aridity of Quinn’s character, throwing into relief the sweet, forgiving nature of Masina’s Gelsomina. A commercial success, La strada won an Academy Award for best foreign film, and Nino Rota’s plaintive theme song became a hit. Producers offered to feature Masina as Gelsomina in a sequel, but Fellini instead gave her a small role only in the cynical Il bidone (1955; “The Swindle”), which featured Broderick Crawford as the leader of a gang of con men who impersonate priests in order to rob the peasantry. Masina asserted her star quality in Le notti di Cabiria (1957; Nights of Cabiria), developing the minor character she played in Lo sceicco bianco, a good-natured Roman prostitute who is optimistic even when humiliated and is swindled by the man she expects to marry. One of Fellini’s most likeable films, it won an Oscar for best foreign film and inspired the 1966 Broadway musical comedy Sweet Charity and the 1969 movie of the same name.
La dolce vita (1960; “The Sweet Life”) was the first of many collaborations with Marcello Mastroianni, an actor who came to represent Fellini’s alter ego. Inspired by newspaper headlines and some topical scandals, the film comprehensively indicts a Rome dominated by foreign movie stars, corrupt journalists, and decadent aristocrats. Condemned by the Roman Catholic Church but hailed by the public, La dolce vita contributed the word paparazzo (unscrupulous yellow-press photographer) to the English language and the adjective Felliniesque to the lexicon of film critics. He then made his first foray in colour, directing the segment Le tentazioni del dottor Antonio (“The Temptation of Dr. Antonio”) for the omnibus feature Boccaccio ’70 (1962).
Otto e mezzo (1963; 8 1/2) is among Fellini’s most widely praised films and earned the director his third Oscar for best foreign film. Entitled 8 1/2 for the number of films Fellini had made by that time (seven features and two shorts), it shows a famous director (based on Fellini and portrayed by Mastroianni) in creative paralysis. Harried by argumentative screenwriters, importunate actresses, a terse unloving wife, and his brainless giggling girlfriend, he takes refuge in fantasies of childhood and the dream of a perfect, and therefore unattainable, woman, embodied in Claudia Cardinale.
In 1965 Fellini’s health failed as he prepared what would have been his most personal work, The Journey of G. Mastorna, a dreamlike vision of the afterlife, starring Mastroianni. Forced to abandon the project, he fortuitously found an alternative outlet for his fantasies in colour. Technology placed in Fellini’s hands the tools to realize the visions that until then existed only in his dreams: “I close my eyes,” he wrote of his nocturnal imaginings, “and the festival starts.” His notebooks recording those dreams, lavishly illustrated, became his raw material. He embraced fantasy even more enthusiastically in Giulietta degli spiriti (1965: Juliet of the Spirits), with Masina as a simple bourgeois haunted by the supernatural. JulietNow established as an international talent, Fellini addressed the myths of Rome, employing an insight into the unconscious gained through study of his preferred psychoanalytical theorist, Carl Jung. Distributors incorporated Fellini’s name in the films’ titles, signifying the unique nature of his vision. Although technically inspired by Roman writers Gaius Petronius Arbiter and Lucius Apuleius, Fellini Satyricon (1969), promoted with the slogan “Before Christ. After Fellini,” actually celebrated the hippie movement, which he first encountered in the United States. Two aimless young bisexual men wander a morally and physically decaying world of casual decadence, rendered in the gaudy colours that until then had never been associated with antiquity. White marble gave way to crumbling stucco, bawdy graffiti, and urban filth. Sexually ambivalent in his private life, Fellini revealed in Satyricon a preoccupation with obesity, mutilation, and hermaphroditism that many found disturbing. Disappointingly, he never realized his hope of casting both Groucho Marx and Mae West in the film.
In Roma (1972; Fellini’s Roma), the director applied the tools of fantasy to the national capital, alternating episodes of the modern hippie occupation of its monuments with his teenage visits to its brothels and the excavations that uncover what remains of the ancient city. An “ecclesiastical fashion show” controversially mocks the Vatican that consistently condemned his films. For Amarcord (1973), which won Fellini a fourth Oscar for best foreign film, he recreated wartime Rimini in Rome’s Cinecittà studios for a nostalgic remembrance of adolescence under fascism, which restored the eccentricity of his early life that had been omitted from I Vitelloni. Though audiences took the film to be autobiographical, most of its incidents came from the more flamboyant life of a childhood friend.
MATURE YEARS The demands of the international audience hampered Fellini’s later films. Commercially oriented producers, in particular longtime associate Dino De Laurentiis, counseled a compromise with Hollywood. Though he wanted Mastroianni, Fellini was persuaded to cast American actor Donald Sutherland as Giacomo Casanova in Il Casanova di Federico Fellini (1976; Fellini’s Casanova). The film treats Casanova, and, by proxy, Sutherland, unsympathetically. Reviewing his life, the great lover sees mostly grotesquery and humiliation. Paradoxically, he finds greatest satisfaction with an ingeniously engineered and lifelike automaton, mimed remarkably by Adele Angela Lojodice—a partner that, incapable of love, demanded none.
Historians regard Casanova as the last of his great personal creations. A diminishing American market for foreign films and the rise of a young audience impatient with challenging subjects marginalized 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 (1990; The Voice of the Moon), his last feature film. Unified only by his flair for the fantastic, the films reflect with typically Fellinian irony on a variety of postmodern topics: the role of the male in an increasingly feminist society, the infantilizing effects of television, the remoteness of artistic creativity from political reality, and the growing homogenization of popular culture. At the same time, Fellini, seemingly capable of convincing himself of almost anything, also directed television commercials for Barilla pasta, Campari Soda, and the Banco di Roma.
LEGACY Although some critics employed Fellinian as a term of derision, Fellini’s place in the history of filmmaking is ensured. He pursued a personal cinema that offered an alternative to standard commercial fare. Its existence created a space in the public consciousness since colonized by numerous artists fleeing a market predicated on simple entertainment. By mingling dream and reality, autobiography and fantasy, and by using his own creative and personal problems as subject matter, Fellini also pioneered, in Otto e mezzo, a category of psychoanalytical cinema that inspired many and is still being explored. His films were nominated for 23 Academy Awards and won eight. Fellini also received 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.
The 10 Most Distinct Traits of Federico Fellini’s Cinema Federico Fellini was one of the most effective filmmakers in cinema history. The filmmakers and artists who are inspired by Fellini’s works are numerous. Lina Wertmuller, Martin Scorsese, Terry Gilliam, Emir Kusturica, David Lynch, and Tim Burton have all clearly admitted to be influenced by Fellini’s works. The fact that the expressions “Fellinian” and “Felliniesque” are common among cinema critics and filmgoers plainly underlines the vastness of Fellini’s impression on contemporary cinematic narration. He created an extremely personal language that, if one doesn’t know the title or doesn’t have any previous acknowledgement of the identity and the film’s background, they most likely can guess the filmmaker’s name. His narrative and technical style is his very professional signature. He playfully mixes up dream scenes and reality, and for this very reason one of the traits listed below is the passage from Neorealism. Most interestingly, Fellini uses every cinematic material, costume, color, music, and storyline in the most playful mode possible. Later, he dared to use his courageous and innovative approach in editing, as in “8 ½” (1963). Fellini was nominated for 12 Academy Awards; four of his films won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film: “La Strada” (1954), “Le Notti di Cabiria” (1957), “8 ½” (Otto e Mezzo, 1963) and “Amarcord” (1974). He won the Palme d’Or for “La Dolce Vita” (1960) and in 1993, he was granted an honorary Lifetime Achievement Oscar.
1. Referring to life as a circus This playful approach towards daily rituals and routines has turned to a recognizable specification of Italian cinema. Though Antonioni’s “Blow Up” (1967) takes place in London, the circus as a decisive element marks the film as an Italian narration, an element which is visually opposed to London’s more serious look. In fact, referring to life as a circus is notable in more than one film from Antonioni; the most clear example is the dancing scene in “La Notte” (1961) where the characters refuse to exchange dramatic information, and the woman (Jeanne Moreau) vaguely refers to a thought she has, declaring that she wouldn’t share that very thought with the man (Marcello Mastroianni). The aforementioned scene is long enough, though, plainly indicating the fact that if the audience wishes to be entertained, then they can just go to a circus, for life is not entertaining. It’s boring, repetitive, and crude. This playful spirit repeats itself in some most recent productions of Italian cinema like “La Grande Bellezza” (Paolo Sorrentino, 2013); nonetheless, the use of noisy parties, feasts, and the exaggerated circus-like attitude of the characters in Sorrentino’s film is represented with a more critical approach. Sorrentino is criticizing “the big circus”, whereas Fellini is admiring it. A similar approach to that of Fellini can be Matteo Garrone’s narrative ambient in “Il Racconto dei Racconti” (“Tale of Tales”, 2015). Garrone’s Fellinian touch to awaken reality through a surreal approach is notable in this film. Using the circus as one of the main narrative elements allows Fellini as a filmmaker to picture his main characters as homeless, as circus characters actually are. The circus performance is something absolutely unrealistic and dreamy for the normal viewer, but the circus members are actually living that unreal life. Their houses are movable because the circus normally doesn’t stay long in one place. Therefore, a story with the circus as one of the main narrative elements has the possibility to move and consequently represent a road movie. Since the road movie passes through the
2. “Il visionario / l’unico realista” (the only realist is the visionary) / overstepping Neorealism Fellini, unlike Antonioni in “Blow Up”, doesn’t use the circus as a lateral concept, as he clearly doesn’t prefer a crude approach toward the reality but still uses it as material; he pokes the same concepts while dancing and laughing. The role of music in his films is the very same role that the music has in a circus performance: covering up the ambient sound and the real sound effects of the act. By covering the real sound, he is actually separating the sense of reality of the presented act. Likewise, the makeup of the characters and the general narrative characterization actually cover up the real appearance and the crude reality hiding underneath the joyful presentation. In “La Strada” (1954), the miserable and extremely sad look of Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina) later gets buried under the funny face of a little clown. Almost the same thing applies to Cabiria (still played by Masina); the sad lonely aspect of prostitute is being covered up by her overdone makeup. After all, that’s all a circus is about – making real life look entertaining and quite different than what it really is. In “La Strada”, the general approach is quite crude and pitiless. Gelsomina has been separated from her mother and family; she has been sold to a travelling circus man, a strongman named Zampano (played by Anthony Quinn) who has returned to replace Gelsomina with her sister, Rosa, who has died since going on the road with Zampano.
Everything about Gelsomina’s life is extremely depressing, and therefore it all seems a realistic approach until one very specific scene where Gelsomina arrives to a city square after leaving Zampano. It’s night and a huge shadow, which is in fact the magnified shadow of a tightrope walker, reflected on the old city buildings. This is a real circus and Gelsomina remains there looking up open-mouthed at the tightrope walker, who in the middle of his long walk, stops, places a table and a chair on the rope, and starts eating spaghetti. Fellini is giving an extremely important lesson here: every surreal element is based on reality. One can not find place and effectiveness without the other. “Le Notti di Cabiria” is maybe one of Fellini’s most realistic works, and in fact, one can easily note Pier Paolo Pasolini’s touch in the screenplay. It is still a Fellinian film, since the very subject of the story and Giulietta Masina’s mode of acting still has a grotesque treatment but the brutal street life is Pasolini’s absolute territory.
3. Dream scenes The dream scene is an essential narrative part of most of Fellini’s works. “8 ½” starts with an effective dream scene and the whole remaining time of the narration seems to be a flashback (a dream). The dream scenes have an important dramatic potentiality since they are constructed by pieces of reality representing something that does not respect the real, physical laws of daily life. So what the character is actually seeing in their dream is a combination of real facts, already occurred incidents that have left their effect on the mind of the character. “La Dolce Vita” and “8 ½” benefit enormously from dream scenes. while “Le Notti di Cabiria” and “La Strada” tend to be more realistic. As mentioned before, the dreamy scene of the tightrope walker in “La Strada” is actually happening; there is no flashback in such occasion, though it seems to be one.
4. Music as a part of character treatment
What later makes Zampano note Gelsomina’s absence is the vague melody that she has hummed clumsily during the whole story. She is not there anymore, but Zampano distantly overhears a child murmuring the same tune and that makes him think Gelsomina was there. The sound undoubtedly recalls presence. When a character (in this case, Gelsomina) is represented partly by a melody, then in her absence, that very melody recalls her presence. The same approach has been repeated poorly years after in “Snatch” (Guy Ritchie, 2000), where every character (or rather, every nationality) is accompanied by a diverse musical tune. One of the very first usages of a leitmotif for characterization has been already seen in “M” (Fritz Lang, 1931), where the murderer whistles the tune “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite No. 1. Quite similarly to Fellini’s approach, every other time we hear that tune, we know that the murderer is there, even if he’s offscreen. The extradiegetic music of Nino Rota in Fellini’s films is of the same category of the circus music. It is apparently playful, underlining one very repetitive leitmotif. The instruments, in the case of “La Strada”, are mostly aerophones recalling the musical marches (just like the circus, the musical marches are constantly on the move). It is the same genre of soundtrack that was later used notably in Emir Kusturica’s films.
5. Sarcasm/controversial narrative situations The same thing is respected in a circus performance: any kind of visual/narrative situation that reveals a comparison is considered a sarcastic approach. Just think about the performative couples in a circus: a very tall man is most probably accompanied by a dwarf. The same rule can be applied in any other expressive visual combination, as any adjective is the fruit of a comparison. A fat man is considered fat if he is accompanied by a skinny man. And Fellini’s controversial situations are mirroring back this very fact: Gelsomina is an ex-
Gelsomina is an extremely little, delicate girl and, in a Fellinian way, is accompanied by the tough figure of Zampano. Who else but Fellini could have thought of Anthony Quinn and Giulietta Masina as acting partners? Saraghina, an isolated prostitute with her exaggerated badly-done makeup, dances barefoot on the beach for school kids. The combination of the schoolboy, who can be interpreted as the symbol of innocence, with a beefy, almost scary prostitute, creates a delicate, hidden concept: maybe these figures, the schoolboy and the prostitute, are not antithetical. Maybe placing Saraghina together with school kids is an indication of her innocence and desperation. Fellini’s films are stuffed with such narrative situations. Guido (Mastroianni) in “8 ½” dreams of a kind of harem filled with all the women of his life. They are magically obedient and all are in love with him. He is ruling all these half-naked women with a whip in his hand; an utterly altered image of his relationships with these women in real life.
6. Color or black and white
Though Fellini has made films both in color and in black and white, his visual approach in all his films remained the same: Fellini’s visual texture is extremely marked out. In his black and white films, the visual emphasis is caused by highly contrasted images and spotted lights, especially in dream scenes, like the harem scene in “8 ½”. Guido’s distorted shadow is reflected on the bare white walls of the location; in this case, the dominant visual presence of the shadow is also an indication to Guido’s dominant character in that very scene. However, in films like “Amarcord” and “Satyricon”, there is an explosion of colors. The usage of all these eye catching colors in one single frame is the fact that in some cases, Fellini’s works are not narratively constructed on one single protagonist, and there is more than one individual story to follow during the narration, so in some cases, visually none of the characters stand out as they are have equal narrative importance.
7. Caricatures of women
Even in films like “Le Notti di Cabiria”, where a woman is the main character and not a secondary one, Fellini’s women represent a distorted, exaggerated (in terms of makeup and attitude) figure, the very same image that later reappears in Giuseppe Tornatore’s works. The camera, in most cases, looks up at women like Saraghina; they have sexually provocative attitudes and are at the same time somewhat scary. The little boy in Saraghina’s scene is asking Saraghina to dance the rumba, but doesn’t even have the courage to hand her the money; as soon as she gets a grip on the money, the boy dashes away frightened, and equally we stare up at Sylvia (played by Anita Ekberg) climbing up seductively from the stairs. Fellini’s point of view in the treatment of female characters is clearly reflected in his choice of angles and lights. His camera is at eye level while having Giulietta Masina as the character; the light on Anita Ekberg is downward, marking out her angel-like, desirable figure. The source of light for Ekberg is artificial, while in Fellini’s films with Masina, the light source tends to be
8. Voiceover/ films as autobiographical narrations mostly
natural.
Maybe the film that most clearly reflects Fellini’s tendency for self-narrating is “8 ½”. Famous filmmaker Guido Anselmi (played by Marcello Mastroianni) is trying to concentrate on his next film, but he is suffering from director’s block. It seems that the film is mirroring back Fellini’s own situation – an already famous filmmaker by that time who is struggling to find a storyline. The characters like Claudia (played by Claudia Cardinale) clearly claim that they do not know anything about the role they are going to play in the film. “Amarcord” takes place in Rimini, Fellini’s birthplace, and though there is one dominant voiceover that guides the whole narration on a pre-decided path, the film is formed by the collective method of narration; there are lots of characters involved, almost everyone has the same narrative importance, and this very fact makes the audience believe that the whole film is a two-hour point of view, a subjective poetic narration about a city that despite all its confusion is lovable. The final scene of snow on the beach plainly reflects the emotional approach of the filmmaker toward the location. The same approach is notable in Giulietta Masina’s presence in Fellini’s films. He loves this woman so much that he cannot practically note her physical imperfections. Masina is a small woman, and probably not the first choice in a story like “Le Notti di Cabiria” if the film were 9. Narrative improvisation (Fellini versus Antonioni): The reason for confronting two filmmakers with two completely different narrative styles is the fact that Antonioni is maybe the Italian filmmaker most famous for pre-designing his visual compositions and working strictly on the basis of the screenplay. Every line of the dialogues in his films has been performed with respect to the very written version of the story, while in a Fellini film, the story clearly takes form while filming. “8 ½” plainly describes that the main storyline of the film is “searching for a storyline”: the conversation of Guido (Mastroianni) and Claudia in the car is just the repetition of the conversation that Fellini has had previously, before shooting, with Claudia Cardinale.
This approach toward the narration also mirrors back the already achieved fame and confidence of the filmmaker. He undoubtedly has followed the predicted written screenplay in “Le Notti di Cabiria” and “La Strada”, but “8 ½” is based on his own formed character as one of
10. Dubbing
Oddly, most of neorealist Italian films have been dubbed, though it is quite contradictory with the spirit and the technical rules of Neorealism. It is still extremely common to separate the main soundtrack of the non-Italian language films and dub the whole dialogues. Some filmmakers have justified dubbing their films ideologically. Precisely, Pier Paolo Pasolini declared that he prefers to use dubbing and use a different voice for an already known actor to un-familiarize him or her, and in this way, making the character unique and different from any other role that the actor had played beforehand. In Fellini’s case, it seems that he simply gives priority to the visual composition; it doesn’t mean that he does not care about the sonorous part of the narration, it means that he probably did not intend to lose a perfect visual composition because of the improper sonorous conditions. In all his films, the ambient sound is extremely isolated. Clearly not the recorded sound in the scene, the amount of sound effects is limited only to those that are meaningful in the narration and in some cases, as with lots of other Italian films of that time, the quality of the sound remains constantly high although the geographical distance and the ambience of that very visual composition do not concord with the sonorous representation.