Federico Fellini (1920 - 1993) was an Italian film director and screenwriter whose work moved from postwar neorealism towards a highly personal cinema of memory, dream and spectacle. [1] His films include La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, La Dolce Vita, 8½ and Amarcord; four of them won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and he received an Academy Honorary Award in 1993. [2]
Early life
Fellini was born on 20 January 1920 in Rimini, on the Adriatic coast, the setting he later reimagined in several films. He was drawn to drawing, caricature and the circus from childhood. [1] He moved to Rome in 1939, nominally enrolling in law at the Sapienza University, and instead worked as a cartoonist and writer of sketches, contributing to the humour magazine Marc'Aurelio and to radio serials. Through radio he met the actress Giulietta Masina, whom he married in 1943 and who appeared in several of his most important films.
Neorealism and first films
After the liberation of Rome, Fellini worked as a screenwriter for Roberto Rossellini, collaborating on Rome, Open City and Paisan, foundational works of Italian neorealism. [3] He directed his first films in the early 1950s, including The White Sheik and I Vitelloni, the latter a study of aimless young men in a provincial seaside town.
La Strada, released in 1954, follows a simple young woman sold to a brutal travelling strongman, and won the first Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Nights of Cabiria, also starring Masina, won the same award three years later. [2]
La Dolce Vita and 8½
La Dolce Vita, released in 1960, follows a gossip journalist through nights in Rome in a series of loosely connected episodes. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, caused controversy in Italy, and gave the world the word paparazzo, from the name of a photographer character. [4]
8½, in 1963, took as its subject a film director unable to make his film, mixing memory, fantasy and present action without marking the boundaries between them. It won two Academy Awards and has been repeatedly cited in critics' polls as among the finest films ever made. [1]
Later work
His later films grew more stylised and were made largely in the studios of Cinecittà in Rome, where he had entire streets and seascapes constructed. They include Juliet of the Spirits, Fellini Satyricon, Roma, Amarcord, which won another Academy Award and drew on his Rimini childhood under Fascism, Casanova, And the Ship Sails On and Ginger and Fred. [3] He worked repeatedly with the composer Nino Rota and with actors including Marcello Mastroianni, who served as a screen alter ego.
Fellini also kept an extensive dream notebook of drawings and descriptions, later published as Il libro dei sogni, which fed directly into his visual style. [4]
Legacy
Fellini received an Academy Honorary Award in March 1993 and died in Rome on 31 October that year, the day after his fiftieth wedding anniversary; Masina died five months later. [1] Among many other honours he received the Praemium Imperiale, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at Venice and the European Film Academy Lifetime Achievement Award.
The term Felliniesque entered general use for the baroque, procession-like and dreamlike imagery characteristic of his films, and his influence is acknowledged by directors including Martin Scorsese, Pedro Almodóvar, Terry Gilliam and Paolo Sorrentino. [2]
