Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (Italian: [fedeˈriːko felˈliːni]; 20 January 1920 – 31 October 1993) was an Italian film director and screenwriter. He is known for his distinctive style, which blends fantasy and baroque images with earthiness. He is recognized as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time. His films have ranked highly in critical polls such as that of Cahiers du Cinéma and Sight & Sound, which lists his 1963 film 8+1⁄2 as the 10th-greatest film.
"Fellini" redirects here. For other uses, see Fellini (disambiguation).
Federico Fellini
Fellini's best-known films include I vitelloni (1953), La Strada (1954), Nights of Cabiria (1957), La Dolce Vita (1960), 8½ (1963), Juliet of the Spirits (1965), Fellini Satyricon (1969), Roma (1972), Amarcord (1973), and Fellini's Casanova (1976).
Fellini was nominated for 17 Academy Awards over the course of his career, winning a total of four in the category of Best Foreign Language Film (the most for any director in the history of the award). He received an honorary award for Lifetime Achievement at the 65th Academy Awards in Los Angeles. Fellini also won the Palme d'Or for La Dolce Vita in 1960, two times the Moscow International Film Festival in 1963 and 1987, and the Career Golden Lion at the 42nd Venice International Film Festival in 1985. In Sight & Sound's 2002 list of the greatest directors of all time, Fellini was ranked 2nd in the directors' poll and 7th in the critics' poll.
Early life and education[edit]
Rimini (1920–1938)[edit]
Fellini was born on 20 January 1920, to middle-class parents in Rimini, then a small town on the Adriatic Sea. On 25 January, at the San Nicolò church he was baptized Federico Domenico Marcello Fellini.[1] His father, Urbano Fellini (1894–1956), born to a family of Romagnol peasants and small landholders from Gambettola, moved to Rome in 1915 as a baker apprenticed to the Pantanella pasta factory. His mother, Ida Barbiani (1896–1984), came from a bourgeois Catholic family of Roman merchants. Despite her family's vehement disapproval, she had eloped with Urbano in 1917 to live at his parents' home in Gambettola.[2] A civil marriage followed in 1918 with the religious ceremony held at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome a year later.
The couple settled in Rimini where Urbano became a traveling salesman and wholesale vendor. Fellini had two siblings, Riccardo (1921–1991), a documentary director for RAI Television, and Maria Maddalena (m. Fabbri; 1929–2002).
In 1924, Fellini started primary school in an institute run by the nuns of San Vincenzo in Rimini, attending the Carlo Tonini public school two years later. An attentive student, he spent his leisure time drawing, staging puppet shows and reading Il corriere dei piccoli, the popular children's magazine that reproduced traditional American cartoons by Winsor McCay, George McManus and Frederick Burr Opper. (Opper's Happy Hooligan would provide the visual inspiration for Gelsomina in Fellini's 1954 film La Strada; McCay's Little Nemo would directly influence his 1980 film City of Women.)[3] In 1926, he discovered the world of Grand Guignol, the circus with Pierino the Clown and the movies. Guido Brignone's Maciste all'inferno (1925, Maciste in Hell), the first film he saw, would mark him in ways linked to Dante and the cinema throughout his entire career.[4]
Enrolled at the Ginnasio Giulio Cesare in 1929, he made friends with Luigi Titta Benzi, later a prominent Rimini lawyer (and the model for young Titta in Amarcord (1973)). In Mussolini's Italy, Fellini and Riccardo became members of the Avanguardista, the compulsory Fascist youth group for males. He visited Rome with his parents for the first time in 1933, the year of the maiden voyage of the transatlantic ocean liner SS Rex (which is shown in Amarcord). The sea creature found on the beach at the end of La Dolce Vita (1960) has its basis in a giant fish marooned on a Rimini beach during a storm in 1934.
Although Fellini adapted key events from his childhood and adolescence in films such as I Vitelloni (1953), 8+1⁄2 (1963), and Amarcord (1973), he insisted that such autobiographical memories were inventions:
Political views[edit]
While Fellini was for the most part indifferent to politics,[87] he had a general dislike of authoritarian institutions, and is interpreted by Bondanella as believing in "the dignity and even the nobility of the individual human being".[88] In a 1966 interview, he said, "I make it a point to see if certain ideologies or political attitudes threaten the private freedom of the individual. But for the rest, I am not prepared nor do I plan to become interested in politics."[89]
Despite various famous Italian actors favouring the Communists, Fellini was opposed to communism. He preferred to move within the world of the moderate left, and voted for the Italian Republican Party of his friend Ugo La Malfa as well as the reformist socialists of Pietro Nenni, another friend of his, and voted only once for the Christian Democracy party (Democrazia Cristiana, DC) in 1976 to keep the Communists out of power.[90] Bondanella writes that DC "was far too aligned with an extremely conservative and even reactionary pre-Vatican II church to suit Fellini's tastes."[88]
Apart from satirizing Silvio Berlusconi and mainstream television in Ginger and Fred,[91] Fellini rarely expressed political views in public and never directed an overtly political film. He directed two electoral television spots during the 1990s: one for DC and another for the Italian Republican Party (PRI).[92] His slogan "Non si interrompe un'emozione" (Don't interrupt an emotion) was directed against the excessive use of TV advertisements. The Democratic Party of the Left also used the slogan in the referendums of 1995.[93]
Television commercials