"Felliniesque" -- even if you have never watched a scrap of his film, this adjective summons up a world of oddity, magnificence, and pathos that testifies to Federico Fellini's creative genius. Initially part of the Italian Neorealist wave, he soon veered...
[more]"Felliniesque" -- even if you have never watched a scrap of his film, this adjective summons up a world of oddity, magnificence, and pathos that testifies to Federico Fellini's creative genius. Initially part of the Italian Neorealist wave, he soon veered towards an idiosyncratic style all his own. Fellini used film to reflect his personal passions, drawing on his childhood experiences in Rimini, a small resort town on the Adriatic, to generate a veritable circus of delightful and frightening images. (Seasonal visits by traveling circuses led to a recurring clown motif in many of his films.) Fellini became a film icon by recreating the theatrics of his own imagination, complete with a cast of whimsical freaks and caricatures, and monumental sets (often constructed on huge stages at Cinecitta, the famous Rome studio).
Fellini would cite his wife, the actress Giulietta Masina, as his muse and greatest influence; Marcello Mastroianni was his cinematic alter ego. "La Strada" (1954), the film that first brought Fellini recognition outside Italy, starred Masina in a parable of love and suffering set among circus performers and intercut with dreamlike images. "La Dolce Vita" (1960) explores the melting point between fantasy and reality in a three-hour, surreal satire where Mastroianni, playing a journalist, bears witness to the oversaturated self-indulgence of celebrities and aristocrats in Rome after the war. Mastroianni was to appear again at the center of Fellini's masterpiece, "8 1/2," the story of a conflicted filmmaker searching for a new idea. Fellini recorded a buoyantly capricious world that was intensely personal: "If I were to make a film about the life of a soul, it would end up being about me." Yet his powers of storytelling, which never left him even in his more experimental projects, were intensely affecting, making him beloved at home and abroad.
[show less]
