Federico Fellini

by Tullio Kezich

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Federico Fellini

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Tullio Kezich’s Federico Fellini: His Life and Work is an updated revision of his earlier Fellini, which was published in 1987 and approved by Fellini himself. After an introduction that describes his first meeting with Fellini in 1952 and which characterizes his subject as an apolitical filmmaker preoccupied with fable, myth, and dreams, Kezich discusses the details of Fellini’s birth. He uses the fictional account, that Fellini was born on a moving train, as an example of the way that Fellini’s stories often are not true or are only partially accurate. Fellini’s portrait of himself as a rebellious hellion is also exaggerated: Fellini was actually an introspective and solitary boy who exhibited a knack for drawing. His account of his “escape” from Rimini, his hometown, also does not jibe with the accounts of his childhood friends, but the “escape” motif does play an important part in Fellini’s career, first as a cartoonist, then a screenwriter, and finally as a film director. Fellini’s first escape was, perhaps, a flight to join the circus; his second was a train ride with Bianca Soriani, his first love, another embellishment of the truth. These escapes, like many events in his life, reappear with some poetic license later in his films.

Before he went to Rome, he had published some cartoons in 420, a journal specializing in political satire, and when he and his brother Riccardo arrived in Rome, Fellini began working for Marc’Aurelio, a Roman newspaper. In the early 1940’s he also wrote for radio and later began his screenwriting career. He also met and married actress Giulietta Masina, his wife for the next fifty years. During the 1940’s he was busy avoiding the draft and writing screenplays, primarily for Cesar Zavattini, the noted neorealist film director. He then teamed up with Aldo Fabrizi, another screenwriter, for several films. When the team split, Fellini met Roberto Rossellini and worked on his Rome, Open City (1945), which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. In their next collaboration, Paisan (1946), Fellini took the lead role and acted as a temporary director in Rossellini’s absence. According to Kezich, Rossellini was responsible for awakening Fellini’s cinematic vocation. When the duo broke up after Paisan, Fellini teamed with Tullio Pinelli and soon got his first directing assignment in Variety Lights (1950). When he directed a scene from The White Sheik (1952), Fellini, according to Kezich, “became” Fellini, but again Fellini’s version of the story does not square with those of other people on the set. Nino Rota did the score for the film and for many of the following Fellini films.

For Kezich, the 1950’s were full of good-byes, for Fellini and for Italian culture. The Young and the Passionate (1953), for example, signals the end of “small-town Italy, provincial patriotism, variety shows, comic strips, Gypsies, grifters, and prostitutes”all key ingredients of early Fellini films. The first Fellini film to be distributed internationally, it won many awards and, according to Kezich, influenced such later films as Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973), George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1974), and Joel Schumacher’s St. Elmo’s Fire (1985). La Strada (1954), starring Anthony Quinn and Giulietta Masina, was Fellini’s next big hit, winning an Oscar for best foreign film and establishing Masina as an international star. Like many Fellini films, La Strada can be read as a fable, but the interpretations vary widely. One is that the relationship between the strong man and the submissive woman parallels that of Fellini and his wife, but Masina’s view was that Fellini can be found in both her character...

(This entire section contains 1756 words.)

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and in Quinn’s. For Kezich, the film is “the most painful and also enigmatic fairy tale of Fellini’s life.”

Fellini’s next major film was The Nights of Cabiria (1957), again featuring his wife. During the filming Fellini met Pier Paolo Pasolini, who became a confidant. Although the Roman Catholic Church attempted to censor The Nights of Cabiria for its story line about a prostitute, the film garnered an Oscar for best foreign film and a best actress award at Cannes for Masina, who preferred her role to the one she had played in La Strada. Perhaps the most beloved of Fellini’s films, it was later adapted by Neil Simon as Sweet Charity for the stage and then by Bob Fosse for the screen. Fellini’s next hit was La Dolce Vita (1960), starring Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni, who was to become Fellini’s alter ego, his mirror image, as Kezich describes him. During the filming there were again censorship problems with the Church and a conflict between Fellini and Dino De Laurentiis, the producer, over funding. Fellini got his own chance to be a producer when he and Angelo Rizzoli formed Federiz, a production company, but he was not successful as a producer. When he would not produce Pasolini’s “Il posto,” the pair’s relationship soured.

After his hits in the 1950’s, Fellini met Dr. Ernest Bernhard, a psychoanalyst who became a kind of surrogate father to him and who met with him three times a week for the following four years. Bernhard sparked in Fellini an interest in dreams, and Fellini began his Dream Book on November 30, 1960. According to Kezich, “From this point on we can say that for Fellini, life is but a dream.” In (1963), which appeared shortly after he began his sessions with Bernhard, Fellini made a movie about filmmaking, and he chose Mastroianni to play the director, or himself. For Kezich, Fellini was looking for a “human mirror, to reflect his own image,” and the film is certainly autobiographical. won several awards, including another Oscar for best foreign film. Juliet of the Spirits (1965), starring Masina, followed on the heels of but was not successful critically or commercially. Fellini had become increasingly interested in the supernatural and had also experimented with LSD, and the film was saturated with psychoanalytic messages, as was the later Toby Dammit (1968), a very personal adaptation of a short story by Edgar Allan Poe.

Fellini began to experience health problems and started to receive what he considered to be coded warnings about making “G. Mastorna’s Journey,” which he subsequently abandoned even after elaborate preparations had been made for the film. Like the earlier “A Journey for Love,” “G. Mastorna’s Journey” was not completed, but parts of both films were later incorporated into later works. Nothing was wasted. After the disappointing Fellini’s Roma (1972), Fellini returned to form with Amarcord (1973), another autobiographical film about not only Fellini but also Italian mainstream culture, which he regarded as being depressingly provincial and intent on hiding “the moral and cultural misery of the years of consent.” The film about memory earned Fellini his fourth Oscar for best foreign film.

Fellini’s Casanova (1976), starring Donald Sutherland in the title role, continued the autobiographical strain as Fellini’s bickering with Sutherland is seen by Kezich as indicative of Fellini’s quarreling with himself, as Fellini saw himself in Casanova the womanizer. With Orchestra Rehearsal (1978) the autobiographical elements continue as the conductor and film director’s roles are parallel. The orchestra itself, with its amusing, touching, and horrible characters, is an analogy for the world in which Fellini operates. Kezich sees the film as being very political. Not content with political controversy, Fellini next made City of Women (1980), which was attacked by feminists, some of whom had not seen the film. Kezich does not regard Fellini as a sexist, despite the roles women have played in his films: “The gist of La cittá delle donne [City of Women] is pro-woman.” Elsewhere in the book, Kezich picks up the escape motif when discussing Fellini’s relationships with women. Although he was married to Masina for fifty years and never considered leaving her, he did have many affairs. His “dream” woman, who served as an escape, was ideally a curvaceous beauty (very much like Anita Ekberg) who saw only him. Anna Giovannini was one of those women. Fellini makes his last cinematic comment on the relationship between the sexes in Ginger e Fred (1986), starring standbys Masina and Mastroianni as Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Kezich sees the leads as the embodiment of key elements of Fellini’s personality. The film is part homage and part critique of commercial television’s practice of disrupting films with commercials and of the entire culture’s degeneracy.

Fellini’s penultimate full-length film, made while his health was declining, was Intervista (1987), a film in which Fellini plays himself and the film crew become actors; it is, like , a film about making a film (in this case an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s 1927 work Amerika), but in Intervista, reality and fantasy merge. Kezich speculates, “Perhaps Fellini has become such an actor in his waking life (as people sometimes insinuate) that he can effortlessly continue his role.” Although the film was not presented for competition at Cannes, he did receive a special prize, one created for him, the Fortieth Anniversary Prize. This was just one of the awards that he received near the end of his career. When he turned seventy, the Japanese awarded him the Praemium Imperiale, which brought him one hundred million lira. Three years later, just before his death in1993, the Hollywood Academy presented him with the Lifetime Achievement Award. Masina died the following year.

The subtitle of Kezich’s book, His Life and Work, aptly describes the author’s narrative strategy, his organization, and his belief that his subject’s life and films were intricately merged. Fellini, in effect, escaped into film, and once he switched from screenwriting to directing, his life became film. Kezich sees Fellini’s narratives as being autobiographical. In some of the films he is represented by one or more actors, even by himself, and the events in his past are repackaged for cinematic use. Kezich devotes a single chapter to each of Fellini’s twenty-four feature films and also covers some of the short films and the unrealized films. In each chapter readers learn about the backgrounds of Fellini’s colleagues, production details (financing, set changes, casting), Fellini’s health at the time, and the cultural context. The text is supplemented by an eighteen-page time line and an exhaustive index. Kezich’s interpretation of the films tends to be psychoanalytic, and despite the complexity of some of the arguments, the writing is neither pedantic nor jargon-ridden. On the contrary, the tone is a bit flippant in spots and there are several amusing anecdotes. It is a thoroughly readable book.

Bibliography

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Booklist 102, nos. 9/10 (January 1, 2006): 43.

Kirkus Reviews 73, no. 24 (December 15, 2005): 1311.

Library Journal 130, no. 20 (December 15, 2005): 132.

The Nation 282, no. 11 (March 20, 2006): 32-36.

Publishers Weekly 252, no. 45 (November 14, 2005): 53.

Weekly Standard 11, no. 37 (June 12, 2006): 29-31.

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