Federico Fellini - Directors | Art-kino Croatia

Fellini, Federico, Italian director and screenwriter (Rimini, January 20, 1920 - Rome, October 31, 1993).

Born in a middle-class family, he attended a Catholic boarding school, studied law in Florence since 1938, but leaves the college for drawing cartoons and comics, which he continues from 1939 in Rome, where he writes sketches for radio (then he meets his future wife, actress G. Masina ) and theatre. Since 1940, he has also written film scripts, and collaborating as a screenwriter and assistant director with R. Rossellini on his neo-realist masterpieces Rome, Open City and Paisá, he finally decides to pursue film. His first directorial work was Variety Lights (1950), in coherence with A. Lattuad, and the first stand-alone film The White Sheik (1952), which also begins his first series of films, those with the theme of permeating reality with imagination and hopes. The first international success is achieved by The Bullocks(1953), while the award-winning The Road begins the second series (made up by The Drum, 1955 and Nights of Cabiria), which are films of redemption, in which neorealist elements ('small' people, the setting of neglected provinces and suburbs, emphasis on poverty) builds on psychological and moralistic observations (the so-called neorealism of the soul or 'refurbished' neorealism), which provokes animosity of Marxist critics who favor social issues. During this period, he has been bringing together full time screenwriting associates (E. Flaiano, T. Pinelli, B. Rondi), and has been collaborating with composer N. Rot since the first film. The culmination of this phase, as well as the transition to another, is the film La Dolce Vita (1960), in which he completely abandons the patterns of classical narration, opting for the so-called mosaic structure (a series of richly processed "slices of life" with no explicit causal connection), for a more modernist approach and a "metropolitan" theme - the modern world of abundance, alienation, relativization of moral values and decadence with a focus on identity crisis, with M. Mastroianni as central intelligence world. An even more favorable echo is his problematic, partly autobiographical and metanarrative film, Eight and a Half, in which, along with modernist, postmodern features that characterize his further work appear, leading to the dissolution of his screenwriting team. 

The following films elaborate on some of the content or formal components of the previous ones: Juliet of the Spirits (1965) is the work of 'baroque' modernist directing and the theme of the intertwining of reality and imagination, and an adaptation of Petroni's work Satyricon directs by comparing the decadent Rome from Nero's time to the present; nostalgic reminiscence accents prevail in Amarcord, his most successful work of that phase and in the film Ginger and Fred (1986), the obsession with sexuality in Casanova (1976) and the City of Women (1980), while the Orchestra Rehearsal, a parable of the current political situation in Italy, also stands out. According to many, he's the most significant personality of Italian cinema in general, certainly the most award-winning world. an author between 1953 and 1974,  and considered the 1960s director superstar. Fellini originally marked all stages in the development of European film since the end of World War II. making an equally significant contribution to all major thematic and stylistic orientations. He created a recognizable personal authorial world made up of harder-to-conform opposition components: almost documentary-accurate observations of reality in which he successfully blends the signs of modern civic and folk culture at a later stage with stylized elements and visualizations of the imagination; a world of pragmatic social practice is demanted by circus spectacle and associations with mute and silly comedy, critical attitudes and the explicitness of theses are mitigated by melancholy in depicting particular situations and characters, as well as persisting in hope, sentimental tones contrasting the grotesque and nostalgic irony, which distinguishes it from other great nostalgics, J. Ford. Other films (as director): Marriage Agency (episode of the omnibus Love in the City, 1953), The Temptation of Dr. Antonio (episode of the Boccaccio '70 omnibus, 1962), Toby Dammit (episode of the Spirits of the Dead, 1968), Clowns (1970), Fellini's Rome (1972), And The Ship Sails On (1983), Interview (1987), The Voice of the Moon (1990).

Acquired from: Film Lexicon of the Lexicographic Institute of Miroslav Krleža / author: A. Peterlić