Federico Fellini Films | Federico Fellini Filmography | Federico Fellini Biography | Federico Fellini Career | Federico Fellini Awards

Federico Fellini is one of the most controversial figures in the recent history of Italian cinema. Though his successes have been spectacular, as in the cases of La strada, La dolce vita, and Otto e mezzo, his failures have been equally flamboyant. This has caused considerable doubt in some quarters as to the validity of his ranking as a major force in contemporary cinema, and made it somewhat difficult for him to achieve sufficient financial backing to support his highly personalized film efforts in his last years. Certainly, few directors in any country could equal Fellini's interest in the history of the cinema or share his certainty regarding the appropriate place for the body of his work within the larger film canon. Consequently, he has molded each of his film projects in such a way that any discussion of their individual merits is inseparable from the autobiographical details of his personal legend.

Fellini's early film La sceicco bianco gave a clear indication of the autobiographical nature of the works to follow, for it drew upon his experience as a journalist and merged it with many of the conceits he had developed in his early motion picture career as a gag writer and script writer. However, he was also an instrumental part of the development of the neorealistic film in the 1940s, writing parts of the screenplays of Roberto Rossellini's Roma citt? aperta and Pais?, and his reshaping of that tradition toward an autobiographical mode of expression in La sceicco bianco troubled a number of his former collaborators. But on his part, Fellini was seemingly just as critical of the brand of neorealism practiced by Rossellini, with its penchant for overt melodrama.

In a succeeding film, La strada, Fellini took his autobiographical parallels a step farther, casting his wife, Giulietta Masina, in the major female role. This highly symbolic work was variously interpreted as a manifesto on human rights, or at least a treatise on women's liberation. In these contexts, however, it roused the ire of strict neorealists who regarded it as containing too much justification for political oppression. Yet as a highly metaphorical personal parable about the relationship between a man and a woman it was a critical success and a confirmation of the validity of Fellini's autobiographical instincts. This gave him the confidence to indulge in a subtle criticism of the neorealistic style in his next film, Il bidone. The film served, in effect, a tongue-in-cheek criticism of the form's sentimental aspects.

In the films of Fellini's middle period, beginning in 1959 with La dolce vita, Fellini became increasingly preoccupied with his role as an international ?auteur.? As a result, the autobiographical manifestations in his films became more introspective and extended to less tangible areas of his psyche than anything that he had previously brought to the screen. La dolce vita is a relatively straightforward psychological extension of what might have become of Moraldo, the director's earlier biographical persona (I vitelloni), after forsaking his village for the decadence of Rome. But its successors increasingly explored the areas of its creator's fears, nightmares, and fantasies.

After establishing actor Marcello Mastroianni as his alter ego in La dolce vita, Fellini again employed him in his masterpiece, Otto e mezzo (8 1/2), as a vehicle for his analysis of the complex nature of artistic inspiration. Then, in a sequel of sorts, he examined the other side of the coin. In Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits), he casts his wife as the intaglio of the Guido figure in 8 1/2. Both films, therefore, explored the same problems from different sexual perspectives while, on the deeper, ever-present autobiographical plane, the two characters became corresponding sides of Fellini's mythic ego.

Subsequent films continued the rich, flamboyant imagery that became a Fellini trademark, but with the exception of the imaginative fantasy Fellini Satyricon, they have, for the most part, returned to the vantage point of direct experience that characterized his earlier works. Finally, in 1980's La citt? delle donne, which again featured Mastroianni, he returned to the larger than life examination of his psyche. In fact, a number of critics regarded the film as the ultimate statement in an ideological trilogy (begun with 8 1/2 and continued in Juliet of the Spirits) in which he finally attempts a rapprochement with his inner sexual and creative conflicts. Unfortunately, City of Women is too highly derivative of the earlier work. Consequently, it does not resolve the issues raised in the earlier two films.

Several of Fellini's films are masterpieces by anyone's standards. Yet in no other director's body of films does each work identifiably relate a specific image of the creator that he wishes to present to the world and to posterity. Whether any of the films are truly autobiographical in any traditional sense is open to debate. They definitely do not interlock to provide a history of a man, and yet each is a deliberately crafted building block in the construction of a larger than life Fellini legend which may eventually come to be regarded as the "journey of a psyche."

While the final credits on Fellini's filmography are far from his best works, they nonetheless are fitting conclusions to what is one of the legendary careers in the history of world cinema. And the Ship Sails On is the wildly preposterous but uniquely Felliniesque tale of the miscellaneous luminaries who come together for an ocean cruise in which they will bid farewell to a just-deceased opera performer. Ginger and Fred is a sweetly nostalgic film because of its union of two of Fellini's then-aging but still vibrant stars of the past, Giulietta Masina and Marcello Mastroianni. The Voice of the Moon, Fellini's last feature?which did not earn a U.S. distributor?works as a summation of the cinematic subjects which had concerned the film maker for the previous quarter century.

The most outstanding and revealing late-career Fellini is Intervista, an illuminating film (and characteristic Fellini union of reality and fantasy) about the production by a Japanese television crew of a documentary about the director. Fellini himself appears on screen, where he is shown to be shooting an adaptation of Kafka's Amerika, a film that appears to be a typically Felliniesque extravaganza-in-the-making, complete with eccentric extras, surreal images, and autobiographical touches. We watch the filmmaker as he casts Amerika. We meet his various associates and underlings, from producers to actors, from casting director to assistant director. We see how Fellini directs his performers and the steps he takes to inspire feelings and attitudes within them. And we are privy to the various crises, big and small, which are standard fare during the filmmaking process. Finally, Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg, who over thirty years before had co-starred in La dolce vita, appear as themselves. Mastroianni's entrance is especially magical; the sequence in which he and Ekberg (whom, he remarks, he has not seen since making La dolce vita) observe their younger selves in some famous clips from the film is wonderful nostalgia.

However, Intervista is primarily an homage to Cinecitta, the studio where Fellini shot his films. Revealingly, the filmmaker describes the studio as ?a fortress, or perhaps an alibi.? Fellini first came to Cinecitta in 1940, when he was a young journalist. His assignment was to interview an actress for a magazine profile. This event is dramatized in Intervista; at various points in the film, the narrative drifts from images of the real Fellini, an artist in the twilight of a much-honored career, to a recreation of young Federico (played by Sergio Rubini) and his initiation into the world of Cinecitta.To fully appreciate this very personal movie about the movie-making process, you must be familiar with?and an admirer of?Fellini and his work.?STEPHEN L. HANSON and ROB EDELMAN