Federico Fellini
Article abstract: Fellini’s achievement, beginning in 1950, was to move Italian cinema away from the realistic chronicle, to concentrate on the private, inner experience and personal memory as the inspiration for art.
Early Life
Federico Fellini was born into a middle-class family in the resort town of Rimini (Emilia) on the eve of the Fascist era. His father, Urbano, was a traveling salesman. His mother, Ida, was a Roman. Fellini stated that nothing happened to him until he left high school. Yet his hometown played a major role in the formation of the man and artist, being the source of so many memories and emotions that later animated his films. Among these emotions was the yearning to leave for Rome.
Fellini was the model provincial, with a love-hatred for his point of origin, lured by the capital. Fellini first spent six months in Florence, where he earned a precarious living drawing cartoons for a satirical magazine, 420. Yet Rome beckoned, and he arrived in the capital in the spring of 1939. There he joined the staff of the satirical weekly Marc’ Aurelio as a cartoonist and writer, supplementing his income by drawing caricatures of the patrons of cafés. Fellini became a friend of the variety star Aldo Fabrizi, who introduced him to the slightly tawdry world of vaudeville, to which he had always been—and would remain—attracted. It is unlikely that Fellini toured the provinces with Fabrizi, as he claimed; however, the stories that the actor told him worked their way into his films. Through Fabrizi, Fellini was hired as a gag writer on minor comedies.
Fellini also wrote for a radio show about a young couple called Cico and Pallina. The actress who played Pallina was Giulietta Masina, whom Fellini married in October, 1943. These were perilous times for Italy. Fellini was fortunate to avoid the draft. Benito Mussolini was deposed in July, 1943. Later that fall, the Allies invaded Sicily, and the Italians, under Marshal Pietro Badoglio, surrendered. In the summer of 1944, Giulietta gave birth to a son who died after only three weeks. Her role in Fellini’s artistic life was crucial. He referred to her as his muse, and she appeared in starring roles in four of his films.
In 1945, Roberto Rossellini invited Fellini to collaborate on Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City), starring Fabrizi and Anna Magnani. This was the first acclaimed neorealist masterpiece and a huge international success. Subsequently, Fellini worked with Rossellini on Paisà (1946; Paisan) and other films. Fellini always acknowledged his debt to Rossellini, from whom, he said, he learned all there was to know about film direction and about Italy itself and the teeming variety of life to be found in its towns and countryside. By 1950, Fellini was ready to launch his own directorial career.
Life’s Work
Fellini’s first two films, Luci del Varietà (1950; Variety Lights) and Lo sceicco bianco (1952; The White Sheik), are distillations of his fascination for popular entertainment and his life as a cartoonist. The promise of his debut is fulfilled in the autobiographical I vitelloni (1953), a winter’s tale of five idlers in Rimini who spend their time reminiscing about last summer while waiting for the next, stifled by the boredom of their native town, yet fearful of the world outside. Finally, one of them, the dreamer Moraldo, does leave. For this analysis of doomed provincial youth, Fellini won the Silver Lion at Venice and the approval of left-wing critics.
Fellini’s films of the 1950’s (all in black-and-white) veer between a poetic social realism and the spiritual...
(This entire section contains 2333 words.)
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search for a personal truth. The latter is embodied by Masina, who starred as Gelsomina inLa Strada (1954) and the heroine of Le notti di Cabiria (1957; The Nights of Cabiria). The former is a timeless fable, the drama divided between the brute Zampano, the angelic waif Gelsomina, and the philosopher-fool. The film was an enormous success abroad, notably in France and the United States, where Masina won an Oscar; in Italy, however, the film was the target of a deluge of left-wing criticism that accused Fellini of abandoning neorealism. In The Nights of Cabiria, Masina played a pathetic prostitute victimized by life and men who refuses to give up and smiles through her tears.
Meanwhile Fellini had gathered around him a group of collaborators who made unique contributions to his filmic world. Nino Rota wrote the music for every Fellini film until Rota’s death in 1979. The writers Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano worked with him on the screenplays up to Giulietta degli spiriti (1965; Juliet of the Spirits). Fellini and his troupe were now ready for their most ambitious project, La dolce vita (1960), a panoramic view of Roman café society that questions the moral rot below the glittering surface. Leading the enquiry is Marcello, who has abandoned his serious ambitions as a novelist and investigative reporter to become a gossip columnist. The film is visually stunning, and such scenes as that of Anita Ekberg in the Fontana di Trevi have become a fixed part of the annals of film history. The film raised a storm of controversy in Italy, where in some circles it was described as obscene and a national disgrace. It was embraced by the Left and condemned by the Vatican.
From the chronicle of national psychosis, Fellini, now at the height of his powers, withdrew into the dream world of the psyche in Otto e mezzo (1963; 8½) and Juliet of the Spirits. 8½ is his most confessional film: It is the account of a creative block of a film director in midcareer and in midlife crisis and the story of his relationship between wife and mistress. The film moves from memory to fantasy to the pressing demands of the present as the viewer passes through the director’s school days to his imaginary harem and back to the real world, where actors, journalists, and the director’s producer demand answers to unanswerable questions. Stylistically 8½ is Fellini’s masterpiece. A study of confusion, it is shot with remarkable control; yet it is equally a self-indulgent film, marking the limits of Fellini’s vision. It won Oscars for direction and set design and, oddly, first prize at the Moscow Film Festival.
Juliet of the Spirits marked a crossroads in Fellini’s career. It was his first color film and was also his last collaboration with Pinelli and Flaiano. It was an apologetic gesture toward Masina, invited back for her first starring role in one of her husband’s films since The Nights of Cabiria. She plays a wife hurt by an adulterous husband and tormented by the ghosts of her past. In the gaudy, baroque sets representing the villa of Suzy, Masina’s promiscuous neighbor, there is a clear sign of the preference for the controlled set over location shooting, favored earlier by the neorealists.
In the mid-1960’s, Fellini gathered around him a new team of collaborators: the writer Bernardino Zapponi, the cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, and the art director Danilo Donati. All projects were suspended in 1967 as the result of a serious illness that befell Fellini, yet he returned to make a film based on a story by Edgar Allen Poe. The same year, Fellini consented to direct and appear in a documentary about himself for American television. It included interviews with Masina and other collaborators and a visit to a set of an abandoned project.
Fellini bade farewell to the 1960’s with the grandiose Fellini Satyricon (1969), which was his personal vision of Petronius’ fragmentary ancient novel by which the director had been fascinated since his school days. It is a further illustration of his fascination for spectacle as well as an anthem of contemporary youth, by no means seen as innocent but poised to renew the world out of the ashes of the past. The film can be seen as an exercise in science fiction in which the director’s imagination has throttled backward in time to land on a totally unfamiliar planet called ancient Rome.
The early 1970’s represented a period of creative resurgence for Fellini, his next few films linked by nostalgic memories. Fellini Roma (1972) is the director’s subjective interpretation based on personal memories of the city where he has spent his creative life. Innocence and hope clash with experience, and in one telling sequence Fellini confesses to a group of students who tell him he should be making a movie on housing problems that such is a film he simply could not make. Amarcord (1973) is a reminder that Fellini grew up in the Fascist era. He reveals the absurd Roman epics in the local cinema, his father humiliated by castor oil treatment, and Mussolini’s scowling face made up in flowers. In Amarcord, Fellini is in top form. The film teems with incident and extraordinary characters; the separate tableaux are woven together in a coherent narrative and a composite harmony that follow the seasons from spring to spring.
The mood of Amarcord was not to last. For whatever reason, Il Casanova di Federico Fellini (1976; Casanova) is about the death of love, or the inevitable conclusion of a life of libertinage. The erotic adventures and sumptuous sets cannot distract the viewer from the aging and isolation of the hero. The fear of women animates La città delle donne (1980; City of Women). Consequently, the hero’s nightmare is that women may now have the power to create their own state. The former dream of male dominance (the harem scene from 8½) has been replaced by the nightmare of captivity at the hands of vengeful feminists.
In Fellini’s last films, much of this bewildered despair has been tempered. E la nave va (1983; And the Ship Sails On) is a marine fantasy set aboard the luxurious Gloria N., whose passengers set sail in July, 1914, to scatter the ashes of an opera diva at sea. The horror of war is represented by a boatload of Serbian refugees, whose plight announces the onslaught of World War I. The general air of nostalgia and fantasy distance the scenario from the verge of tragedy. And the Ship Sails On was shown out of competition at the 1983 Venice Film Festival, an appropriate tribute to a master of modern cinema at the end of his career. In June, 1985, Fellini, with Masina by his side, was honored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center for outstanding cinematic achievement.
Summary
The French critic André Bazin declared that Federico Fellini had taken Italian cinema beyond the boundaries imposed by neorealism. This meant that Fellini had instinctively rejected the idea that neorealism was some absolute ethical and aesthetic system and that its function was to record a reality it alone defined with political intent. Reality for Fellini was not “objectively historical” but colored by the private perception of each individual, highly subjective, therefore infinitely varied and frequently irrational in tone. He declared that reality is not what is seen but is shaped by who sees it.
Fellini saw no dividing line between imagination and reality, because the imagined world is reality for most people and imagination is the surest source of the artist’s vision, that on which he depended to transform raw material into art. On this basis Fellini created a world of his own devising, originally born of experience and memory, later carefully handcrafted within the confines of the studio set. Among the repeated images that define his world and the condition of those characters struggling through it are the following: visions of the sea, suggesting distant horizons; empty squares at night; circuses and variety shows that stimulate the popular imagination; and the life of wandering entertainers. These images represent the condition of solitude that Fellini believed is the fate of most human beings. The loose-limbed, episodic structure of his films, which most critics have noted, is a narrative representation of the search for a better life, a final satisfaction via love, or one’s work, or settling down.
Fellini’s early reputation was of an entertainer and satirist, but films such as La Strada and La dolce vita quickly changed that. There emerged the guilty Catholic moralist along with the caustic ironist. Looking back over a forty-year career that has drawn millions into the cinema, tribute must be paid to Fellini for the good humor, tolerance, and appreciation that he showed for those who have struggled through.
Bibliography
Alpert, Hollis. Fellini, A Life. New York: Atheneum, 1986. A complete life of the director. Succeeds in separating the gossip from the truth. The biographical detail is balanced by summaries and critical assessments of the films. Contains a full filmography.
Bondanella, Peter, ed. Federico Fellini: Essays in Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Excellent anthology of the most important criticism on Fellini up to Amarcord. Contains a filmography.
Fava, Claudio G., and Aldo Vigano, eds. The Films of Federico Fellini. Translated by Shula Curto. Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1985. Convenient, popular summary of Fellini’s career, richly illustrated with many photographs and stills. Provides a handy year-by-year biography, complete filmography (up to And the Ship Sails On), analysis of each film, plus selections from contemporary reviews.
Fellini, Federico. Fellini on Fellini. Edited by Anna Keel and Christian Strich. Translated by Isabel Quigley. New York: Dell, 1977. Fellini speaks for himself in a fascinating series of reminiscences, articles on his methods, and selections taken from interviews.
Murray, Edward. Fellini the Artist. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1976. Useful early study of Fellini’s career up to Amarcord. Part 1 is biographical, part 2 examines Fellini’s methods, and part 3 offers a chronological analysis of each film. Includes a filmography and a basic bibliography.
Rosenthal, Stuart. The Cinema of Federico Fellini. South Brunswick, N.J.: A. S. Barnes, 1976. An overview of Fellini’s career up to Amarcord. It emphasizes the director’s personal vision, illustrated by major themes and recurrent imagery. Includes a full filmography up to 1973.
Solmi, Angelo. Fellini. Translated by Elizabeth Greenwood. New York: Humanities Press, 1968. This biography covers the first half of Fellini’s career. Contains much useful information about his early life and temperament.