Federico Felini

Federico Fellini (Rimini, Emilia-Romagna, January 20, 1920-Rome, October 31, 1993) was an Italian film director and screenwriter. considered the most important post-war filmmaker of his country worldwide.

Winner of four Oscars for best foreign film, in 1993 he was awarded an honorary Oscar for his career.

Throughout his career he gave life to characters and scenes that have been incorporated into the cinematographic collective imagination. He himself said that he was "a craftsman who has nothing to say, but he knows how to say it."

Beyond the aesthetic contributions of his work in general, and those strange characters and settings that have been labeled as «fellinesque», one of his films, La Dolce Vita, has a palpable and lasting impact on international culture by naming the figure of the paparazzi, this based on the name of one of its protagonists, Paparazzo.

Biography

Childhood and youth

He was born into a middle-class family: his father, Urbano Fellini, was a liquor, sweets and groceries representative, born in Gambettola, a town west of Rimini; Her mother, Ida Barbiani, of Roman origin, was a housewife.The Fellini couple had two more children: Riccardo, born in 1921, and Maddalena, born in 1929.

At the age of 8, he ran away from home for a brief period and joined a circus, according to what he stated in various interviews. He studied at the Liceo Classico "Giulio Cesare", where he discovered his talent for the drawing; he admired the American cartoonist Winsor McCay, creator of the comic book character Little Nemo. films. In 1938 he began to publish cartoons in the newspaper and in the humorous magazine "420" from Florence.

In his childhood, the young Fellini showed a keen interest in Chaplin's films and humorous American comics, going so far as to state in 1966:

It is evident that the intense reading of these stories, at an age when emotional reactions are so immediate and frequent, conditioned my taste for adventure, fantastic, grotesque and comic. In this sense it is possible to find a profound relationship between my works and the American comics. From their caricaturescas styles, their landscapes, the characters silhouetted against the horizon, I have been happily left images "small", images that occasionally resurface and whose unconscious memory has conditioned the figurative element and the plots of my films.

Professional beginnings

Fellini de jóvenes

Before finishing classical secondary school, around the year 1938, Fellini managed to collaborate with newspapers and magazines as a cartoonist. Such is the case of the publication of his cartoons in the newspaper La Domenica del Corriere and, above all, in the Florentine newspaper Il 420, an important publication edited by Nerbini, who In addition, he will hire him as proofreader, thus spending a stay of about 8 months in Florence. He will also write the series Flash Gordon , with drawings by George Toppi, when the fascist government prohibits the importation of American comics and Italian authors have to continue them so as not to disappoint their readers.

At the beginning of 1939, he moved to Rome under the pretext of studying Law, but with the intention of becoming a journalist. In fact, for three weeks he works as a reporter in the newspaper Il Popolo. .

It was during this period that he became friends with another rookie actor, Alberto Sordi. Their friendship will last a lifetime and is well told in the movie Permette? Alberto Sordi.

In 1940 he joined the editorial team of the main Italian satirical magazine, Marc'Aurelio, directed by Vito de Bellis. After the success in Marc'Aurelio, Fellini receives many job offers and substantial amounts of money.

During these early years he wrote comedic sequences for well-known actors such as Aldo Fabrizi and Erminio Macario in Imputato, alzatevi! and Lo vedi come sei... lo vedi come sei? in 1939. Fellini also produced various drawings (mainly in pencil on paper), often comic portraits and political caricatures, which is how the young Fellini was introduced to cinema: his first success was as a publicity cartoonist for films. Avant-garde during fascism, his first works were for the Italian Cinematographic Alliance (ACI), a production company of Vittorio Mussolini, son of Benito Mussolini, through which he met Roberto Rossellini.

Fellini and the radio

In 1941 he began to collaborate with the Italian Ente Audizioni Radiofoniche (EIAR), living a brief but happy phase as a writer on the radio. Fellini's time on the radio marks the maestro's debut in show business and the beginning of his affective and artistic relationship with Giulietta Masina. In recent years he signed some ninety Fellini scripts, including the presentations of music programs, magazines, radio, to the famous series Cico and Pallina . The series was broadcast between 1942 and 1943, it told the story of a young couple.

In July 1943, Giulia introduced Federico to her parents, and the couple married in October of that same year. On March 22, 1945, Giulia and Federico had a son, Pier Federico, who died just twelve days after his birth.

The neorealist phase

Fellini, Masina, Carla del Poggio and Alberto Lattuada in 1952

In the early 1940s, Fellini meets Tullio Pinelli, a playwright, and they found a professional association. Fellini and Pinelli are in charge of writing the text that will make Aldo Fabrizi known. In 1944, after the fall of fascism in a Rome just liberated from armed troops, he opened a portrait and caricature shop, The Funny Face Shop. In 1945 Fellini's first meeting with Roberto Rossellini took place and his contribution to the most representative film of post-war Italian cinema began: Roma città aperta ( Rome open city ). Fellini also wrote scripts for other renowned directors such as Alberto Lattuada (No Mercy, El molino del Po), Pietro Germi (In the Name of the Law, The city defends itself) and Luigi Comencini.

After collaborating on the scripts for other Rossellini films: Paisà (Comrade, 1946) and L'amore (Love, 1948); and making his directorial debut with Alberto Lattuada with Variety Lights in 1950, in 1951 he made his first solo film Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheikh, starring the comedian Alberto Sordi and written by Michelangelo Antonioni and Ennio Flaiano During the filming of this comedy between satirical and burlesque with echoes of the omnipresent neorealism of the time, Fellini met Nino Rota, the musician who would follow him down the remainder of his career.

International resonance

Fellini in the 1970s

The actress Giulietta Masina, whom Fellini had married in 1943, became his absolute muse and the physical and above all emotional character that fascinated audiences around the world in golden titles of Italian cinema such as Almas Without Conscience, The Nights of Cabiria, La Strada, Giulietta of the Spirits and Ginger and Fred. Another actor who constantly appears in his films is Marcello Mastroianni, who studied acting at the same school as Massina, and who was a great friend of the director. In fact, Mastroianni appears in some of his most important films, always playing the main role (among them La Dolce Vita and Eight and a Half ). Fellini also worked with actors such as Anita Ekberg, whom he launched to fame, Sandra Milo, the aforementioned Sordi and Fabrizi, Anouk Aimée, Claudia Cardinale, Richard Basehart, Sylva Koscina, Freddie Jones and Roberto Benigni.

The scriptwriters with whom he always worked (Bernardo Zapponni for example), managed to find a way to combine dialogues and structures with the plasticity, expressiveness and enormous cinematographic personality of Fellini (present in the narrative, framing, themes about the dreamlike, the pathos, the cruelty, the happiness, the desolation, the different, the extravagant, the provocation, the humor, the show business, the Mediterranean...), and all of this comes to overflow the vast majority of his films.

Maturity

Fellini and the actor Bruno Zanin during the shooting Amarcord

His period of maturity is marked by his distancing from critics and by his massive loss of profitability for the market, coinciding with two key events: the end of the supremacy of the big American and European studios, and the generational change so disruptive as radical that occurs in the early 1970s in half the world, to which is added the rise of television as the engine of daily entertainment for the vast majority of the public, accompanied by the manufacture of a new invention that changes the concept of the predominant film industry until then: home video.

Also now, the overcoming of cinema with a classical structure harms the filmmaker's career since, paradoxically, it is now when the Italian master becomes —at least apparently— more conventional in his proposals and his cinema "goes from fashion" for the sake of the new currents of the cinema of the old continent (the thriller of Jean Pierre Melville, the philosophical classicism of François Truffaut, the political commitment of Pier Paolo Pasolini, the aesthetic and formal innovations of Bernardo Bertolucci, the poetic and metaphysical lyricism of Andréi Tarkovski, the rise of new and young creators (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, Carlos Saura, Ken Russell, Vilgot Sjöman, Hristo Popov) However, it is at this time that Fellini turns to making smaller and more personal works, with smaller budget but commendable artistic scope, since this professional crisis does not diminish the value of the projects that he is filming and premiering: I clowns (Los clowns, 1970); Roma, (1972); Prova d'orchestra (Orchestra Rehearsal, 1979) or E la nave va (And the ship goes, 1983).

Unfinished work

Il viaggio di G. Mastorna (The Journey of G. Mastorna) is the title of a screenplay written between 1965 and 1966 by Fellini for producer Dino De Laurentiis. Originally, the project would be an adaptation of the novel What Mad Universe by American Frederic Brown. The decision to adapt this science fiction book arose from the scene portrayed on the cover of the 1949 edition, where a woman with a face similar to Betty Page's and a body reminiscent of Anita Ekberg's was getting out of the shower while it was observed by an alien crouched next to a rocket with an obvious phallic shape. However, the Italian filmmaker would change his mind and start developing an original work based on an idea by Dino Buzzati.

The script, endowed with a dreamlike narrative, tells the story of Giuseppe Mastorna, a famous cellist who finds himself in an extra-terrestrial dimension that he arrives after a plane crash. Written in collaboration with Brunello Rondi, Il viaggio de G. Mastorna was never produced, although it was always in Fellini's plans until the moment of his death.

The script in Italian has been published since 1995, while an annotated translation in English came out in 2013 under the title The Journey of G. Mastorna. The Film Fellini Didn't Make (The journey of G. Mastorna. The film that Fellini never made).

Filmography

There are three moments in the filmography of this director: His beginnings, in constant flirtation with the predominant neorealist current in Italian cinema of the 1940s and 1950s, and in order to find his own style that would define him as a creator (of The white sheikh to Souls without conscience going through the stupendous The useless (I vitelloni, 1953)); international fame and conquest of box offices around the world, including Oscars (La strada, Las noches de Cabiria, La dolce vita, Juliet of the Spirits, The Satyricon, Casanova and Amarcord); and the period of maturity, marked by his distancing from critics and by his massive loss of profitability for the market.

As director

As a writer

Awards and distinctions

Oscar Awards

Venice International Film Festival