A brutish strongman buys a simple-minded girl from her mother and tours the roads with a motorbike caravan (1954)
La Strada — Giulietta Masina and Anthony Quinn; the first winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film as a competitive category
Film · European
Federico Fellini
1920–1993 · Italian
Italian neorealism, then a personal baroque surrealism — 'Felliniesque'
Federico Fellini began as a cartoonist and gag-writer, helped write Rossellini's Rome, Open City, and then made a body of work so distinctive that his name became an adjective. He moved from the tender neorealism of La Strada to the carnival dream-logic of 8½ and Amarcord, won four Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film — more than any other director — and gave the world the word "paparazzi".
How to spot them
- ▸Circuses, processions, seaside towns, fat women, clowns and a face-on stare into the camera
- ▸Giulietta Masina, his wife, as the clown-like heroine; Marcello Mastroianni as his onscreen alter ego
- ▸Nino Rota's circus-march scores
- ▸Autobiography dressed as dream: Rimini, Catholic schooling and his own creative block
- ▸'Felliniesque' as shorthand for extravagant, grotesque, carnival imagery
Key films
Four idle young men in a seaside town, one of whom finally takes the morning train out (1953)
I Vitelloni — the title means roughly 'the overgrown calves'
A Roman prostitute is robbed and betrayed again and again, and smiles through her tears at a band of young musicians on the road (1957)
Nights of Cabiria (Le notti di Cabiria) — Masina; it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film
A gossip columnist drifts through Roman nightlife; a blonde wades in the Trevi Fountain and a statue of Christ is flown over the city by helicopter (1960)
La Dolce Vita — Palme d'Or winner; the photographer character Paparazzo gave English the word 'paparazzi'
A blocked film director at a spa dreams of a harem and of the launch tower built for a science-fiction film he cannot make (1963)
8½ (Otto e mezzo) — Mastroianni; two Oscars
An episodic descent through Nero's Rome, adapted from a fragmentary Latin novel by Petronius (1969)
Fellini Satyricon, after Petronius
A boy's year in a 1930s seaside town: fog, a peacock in the snow, and the liner Rex passing in the night (1973)
Amarcord — Romagnol dialect for 'I remember'; it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film
A woman in a suburban villa is haunted by visions and a Cheshire-cat medium while her husband is unfaithful; his first feature in colour (1965)
Juliet of the Spirits (Giulietta degli spiriti), with Giulietta Masina
Key ideas
- Memory and invention are the same material: 'I am a born liar,' he said of his autobiographical films
- The circus and the parade as the shape of a life — arrival, spectacle, dispersal
- A break with neorealism's social reporting in favour of the interior and the dreamed
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Rimini in 1920; he worked as a caricaturist and radio gag-writer before entering films
- •He co-wrote Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisà (1946)
- •He married Giulietta Masina in 1943; they stayed married until his death fifty years later
- •Nino Rota scored almost all his films from 1952 until Rota's death in 1979
- •He won four Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film — for La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, 8½ and Amarcord — and an honorary Oscar in 1993
- •La Dolce Vita took the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1960
- •8½ takes its title from his count of his own films: six features, two shorts and a co-direction
- •He kept a notebook of his dreams, later published as The Book of Dreams
- •He died in Rome on 31 October 1993, the day after his fiftieth wedding anniversary; Masina died five months later
Drill it — 8 cards
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Sources
- Festival de Cannes — Federico Fellini — awards and selections
- Federico Fellini — Fellini on Fellini