Federico Fellini: a Life in Film
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Federico Fellini: a life in film Federico Fellini was born in Rimini, the Marché, on 20th January 1920. He is recognized as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time. His films have ranked in polls such as ‘Cahiers du cinéma’ and ‘Sight & Sound’, which lists his 1963 film “8½” as the 10th-greatest film. Fellini won the ‘Palme d'Or’ for “La Dolce Vita”, he was nominated for twelve 'Academy Awards', and won four in the category of 'Best Foreign Language Film', the most for any director in the history of the Academy. He received an honorary award for 'Lifetime Achievement' at the 65th Academy Awards in Los Angeles. His other well-known films include 'I Vitelloni' (1953), 'La Strada' (1954), 'Nights of Cabiria' (1957), 'Juliet of the Spirits' (1967), 'Satyricon' (1969), 'Roma' (1972), 'Amarcord' (1973) and 'Fellini's Casanova' (1976). In 1939, he enrolled in the law school of the University of Rome - to please his parents. It seems that he never attended a class. He signed up as a junior reporter for two Roman daily papers: 'Il Piccolo' and 'lI Popolo di Roma' but resigned from both after a short time. He submitted articles to a bi- weekly humour magazine, 'Marc’Aurelio', and after 4 months joined the editorial board, writing a very successful regular column “But are you listening?” Through this work he established connections with show business and cinema and he began writing radio sketches and jokes for films. He achieved his first film credit - not yet 20 - as a comedy writer in “Il pirato sono io” (literally, “I am a pirate”), translated into English as “The Pirate’s Dream”. In 1942 he met his future wife, Giulietta Masina, who was well-known for her musical comedy broadcasts. They married in 1943. He became involved in Italian neo-realism when working with Roberto Rossellini on “Rome, Open City”, for which Fellini (and Sergio Amidei) received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay. In February 1948, he was introduced to Marcello Mastroianni, then a young theatre actor appearing in a play with Giulietta Masina. He worked with Rossellini as screenwriter and Assistant Director on the film, “Paisá”. In 1950, he co- produced and co-directed his first film “Luci del varietà”, featuring Giulietta Masina and Carla del Poggio. It received poor reviews. However, in the same year he received an Oscar nomination with Rossellini and Amidei for “Paisá”. In 1951 he directed his first feature film, “The White Sheikh”. Initially entered for the Cannes Film Festival (it was withdrawn), it was screened at the Venice Film Festival and was panned by the critics. One of them wrote that Fellini had: “not the slightest aptitude for cinema direction". However, in 1953 “I Vitelloni” received critical and public acclaim. In 1954 he began directing “La Strada” - produced by Carlo Ponti and Dino de Laurentiis, and starring Anthony Quinn and Giuliette Massina. During the last few weeks into the project he was afflicted with severe clinical depression and received psychiatric therapy. However, “La Strada” has become "...one of the most influential films ever made," according to the 'American Film Institute'. It won the inaugural Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1957. It was placed fourth in the 1992 'British Film Institute' directors' list of cinema's top 10 films While preparing “Nights of Cabiria” in spring 1956, Fellini learned of his father’s death by cardiac arrest at the age of sixty-two. Produced by Dino De Laurentiis and again starring Giulietta Masina, the film took its inspiration from news reports of a woman’s severed head retrieved in a lake and stories by Wanda, a shantytown prostitute Fellini met on the set of one of his early film failures “Il Bidone”. Pier Paolo Pasolini was hired to translate some of the dialogue into Roman dialect and to supervise researches in the vice-afflicted suburbs of Rome. The movie won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 30th Academy Awards and brought Giulietta Masina the Best Actress Award at Cannes for her performance. The ‘Hollywood on the Tiber’ phenomenon of 1958 in which American studios profited from the cheap studio labour available in Rome provided the backdrop for photojournalists to steal shots of celebrities on the via Veneto. The scandal provoked by Turkish dancer Haish Nana's improvised striptease at a nightclub captured Fellini's imagination: he decided to end his latest script-in- progress, “Moraldo in the City”, with an all-night "orgy" at a seaside villa. Pierluigi Praturlon’s photos of Anita Ekberg wading fully dressed in the Trevi Fountain may have provided further inspiration for Fellini and his scriptwriters. Changing the title of the screenplay to “La Dolce Vita”, Fellini soon clashed with his producer on casting: the director insisted on the relatively unknown Mastroianni while De Laurentiis wanted Paul Newman as a hedge on his investment. Reaching an impasse, De Laurentiis sold the rights to publishing mogul Angelo Rizzoli. Shooting began on 16 March 1959 with Anita Ekberg climbing the stairs to the cupola of Saint Peter’s in a mammoth set constructed at Cinecittà. The statue of Christ flown by helicopter over Rome to Saint Peter's Square was inspired by an actual media event on 1 May 1956, which Fellini had witnessed. "La Dolce Vita" broke all box office records. Despite touts selling tickets at 1000 lire, crowds queued in line for hours to see an “immoral movie” before the censors banned it. At an exclusive Milan screening on 5 February 1960, one outraged patron spat at Fellini while others hurled insults at him. Denounced in parliament by right-wing conservatives, Domenico Magrì, undersecretary of the Christian Democrats demanded tolerance for the film's controversial themes. In competition at Cannes alongside Antonioni's “L’Avventura”, the film won the Palme d'Or awarded by presiding juror Georges Simenon. The Belgian writer was promptly “hissed at” by the disapproving festival crowd. A major discovery for Fellini after his Italian neorealism period (1950–1959) was the work of Carl Jung. After meeting Jungian psychoanalyst Dr. Ernst Bernhard in early 1960, he read Jung's autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963) and he experimented with LSD. As a consequence, Jung's seminal ideas on the anima and the animus, the role of archetypes and the collective unconscious directly influenced such films as “8½” (1963), "Juliet of the Spirits" (1965), "Fellini Satyricon" (1969), "Casanova" (1976), and "City of Women" (1980). Other key influences on his work include Luis Buñuel, Charlie Chaplin, Sergei Eisenstein, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, and Roberto Rossellini. In an October 1960 letter to his colleague Brunello Rondi, Fellini first outlined his film ideas about a man suffering creative block: "Well then - a guy (a writer? any kind of professional man? a theatrical producer?) has to interrupt the usual rhythm of his life for two weeks because of a not-too-serious disease. It’s a warning bell: something is blocking up his system." Unclear about the script, its title, and his protagonist's profession, he scouted locations throughout Italy “looking for the film”, in the hope of resolving his confusion. A collaborator from previous films, Ennio Flaiano suggested “La bella confusione” (literally The Beautiful Confusion) as the movie's title. Under pressure from his producers, Fellini finally settled on “8½”, a self-referential title referring principally (but not exclusively) to the number of films he had directed up to that time. Shooting began on 9 May 1962. Perplexed by the seemingly chaotic, incessant improvisation on the set, Deena Boyer, the director's American press officer at the time, asked for a rationale. Fellini told her that he hoped to convey the three levels "on which our minds live: the past, the present, and the conditional - the realm of fantasy". After shooting finished on 14 October, Nino Rota composed various circus marches and fanfares that would later become signature tunes of the maestro's cinema. Nominated for four Oscars, “8½” won awards for best foreign language film and best costume design in black-and-white. In California for the ceremony, Fellini toured Disneyland with Walt Disney. In his first colour feature "Juliet of the Spirits" (1965), Giulietta Masina as Juliet, a housewife rightly suspects her husband of infidelity and succumbs to the voices of spirits summoned during a séance at her home. Her sexually voracious next door neighbour Suzy (Sandra Milo) introduces Juliet to a world of uninhibited sensuality but Juliet is haunted by childhood memories of her 'Catholic guilt' and a teenage friend who committed suicide. Complex and filled with psychological symbolism, the film is set to a jaunty score by Nino Rota. In March 1971, Fellini began production on “Roma”, a seemingly random collection of episodes informed by the director's memories and impressions of Rome. A Fellini scholar wrote: “ The "diverse sequences are held together only by the fact that they all ultimately originate from the director’s fertile imagination." The film's opening scene anticipates "Amarcord" while its most surreal sequence involves an ecclesiastical fashion show in which nuns and priests roller skate past shipwrecks of cobwebbed skeletons. Over a period of six months between January and June 1973, Fellini shot the Oscar-winning “Amarcord” (in the dialect of the Marché the title means 'Mi Ricordo' in Italian and 'I remember' in English). Loosely based on the director's 1968 autobiographical essay 'My Rimini', the film depicts the adolescent Titta and his friends working out their sexual frustrations against the religious and Fascist backdrop of a provincial town in Italy during the 1930s.