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: a life in

Federico Fellini was born in , the Marché, on 20th January 1920.

He is recognized as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time. His 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 “”, he was nominated for twelve '', 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 '' (1953), '' (1954), '' (1957), '' (1967), '' (1969), 'Roma' (1972), '' (1973) and 'Fellini's Casanova' (1976).

In 1939, he enrolled in the law school of the University of - 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 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, , who was well-known for her musical comedy broadcasts. They married in 1943. He became involved in Italian neo-realism when working with on “Rome, Open City”, for which Fellini (and Sergio Amidei) received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay. In February 1948, he was introduced to , 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 , “The White Sheikh”. Initially entered for the (it was withdrawn), it was screened at the Film Festival and was panned by the critics.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 and , and starring 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 ''. It won the inaugural Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1957. It was placed fourth in the 1992 '' 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 “”. 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 . 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 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 as a hedge on his investment. Reaching an impasse, De Laurentiis sold the rights to publishing mogul . 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 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 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), "" (1969), "Casanova" (1976), and "" (1980). Other key influences on his work include Luis Buñuel, Charlie , , , , the Marx Brothers, and Roberto Rossellini.

In an October 1960 letter to his colleague , 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 “looking for the film”, in the hope of resolving his confusion. A collaborator from previous films, 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, composed various 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 .

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 () 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 , 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 . Produced by , the seriocomic film became Fellini's second biggest commercial success after “La Dolce Vita”. Circular in form, “Amarcord” avoids plot and linear narrative in a way similar to “Roma”.

On 6 September 1985 Fellini was awarded the ‘’ for lifetime achievement at the 42nd . That same year, he became the first non-American to receive the 'Film Society of Lincoln Center’s' annual award for cinematic achievement.

Fellini died in Rome on 31 October 1993 at the age of 73 after a heart attack he had suffered a few weeks earlier, a day after his 50th wedding anniversary. The memorial service, in Studio 5 at Cinecittà, was attended by an estimated 70,000 people. At Giulietta Masina's request, trumpeter Mauro Maur played Nino Rota's "Improvviso dell'Angelo" during the ceremony.

Five months later, on 23 March 1994, Masina died of lung cancer. Fellini, Masina and their son, Pierfederico, are buried in a bronze sepulchre sculpted by . Designed as a ship's prow, the tomb is at the main entrance to the Cemetery of Rimini. The Federico Fellini Airport in Rimini is named in his honour.

“8½” inspired, among others: “Day for Night” - François Truffaut (1973), “All that Jazz” - Bob Fosse (1979) and “Stardust Memories” - (1980).

As they write at the end of some cartoons: “That’s all, folks!”

I hope that I haven’t indulged myself too much this week.

Have a good week.

Best wishes,

Gerald