Federico Fellini is one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of the last century. He is known for his distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images with earthiness, and recognized as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time.
Background
Fellini was born on January 20, 1920, in Rimini, then a small town on the Adriatic Sea, on January 20, 1920, to Urbano Fellini and Ida Barbiani. He had two younger siblings: Riccardo, a documentary director for RAI Television, and Maria Maddalena.
Education
In 1924, Fellini started primary school in an institute run by the nuns of San Vincenzo in Rimini, attending the Carlo Tonni public school two years later.
In 1929, he was enrolled at the Ginnasio Giulio Cesare and was required to join a Fascist youth group for boys. In September of 1939, to appease his parents, he enrolled at the University of Rome, but there is no record of him ever attending any classes.
He was given a full time position on the editorial board for Marc’Aurelio, a popular humor magazine, after submitting an article four months prior. He worked there from 1939 to 1942, which gave him the opportunity to meet a number of writers and humorists, which would eventually open the door for his career in cinema. Through the many contacts that he made, Fellini found work writing comedy for films as well as radio sketches. Later Fellini was asked by the noted actor and director Aldo Fabrizi to collaborate with him on several motion picture scenarios.
In 1945 Fabrizi introduced Fellini to the celebrated cinema director Roberto Rosselini, who offered him the opportunity to work on the script and serve as assistant director of Open City, a powerfully realistic work which depicted the Italian underground resistance to Nazi occupation. The pair continued their collaboration on the successful wartime drama Paisan (1946), and the controversial religious parable The Miracle (1948), the story of an innocent peasant woman who mistakes a crude tramp for St. Joseph. Although The Miracle was in style and execution essentially a Rosselini production, its thematic ambiguity and elusive poetry distinguished it from the director's more literal neorealist efforts. Two years later, under the technical supervision of Alberto Lattuada, Fellini made his directorial debut with Variety Lights, an intensely personal study of theatrical life, strikingly anticipatory in its images of the desolation and ennui of the bleak emotional landscapes of his later masterpieces. He then examined the tawdry, shallow world of movie stardom in a pathetic comedy, The White Sheik.
With I Vitelloni (1953) Fellini's social microcosm expanded to include the frustrated, maladjusted lives of the provincial middle class, in a penetrating analysis of youthful malaise. But more than any of his previous work, La Strada (1954) established Fellini as one of the great cinematic minds of the postwar years. Painfully touching and allegorically suggestive, it told of a bizarre and tortured relationship involving a kindhearted but simpleminded girl, a brutal itinerant strongman, and a poetic, self-sacrificing clown. Less ambitious philosophically though equally brilliant in execution, Il Bidone (1955) presented with sympathy and wit the lives of a group of small-time swindlers. Finally, with Nights of Cabiria (1957), the moving tale of a prostitute, Fellini reached the artistic culmination of his career as a romantic realist.
The director's fondness for jesuitical symbolism, sexual degradation, grotesquerie, and psychological Grand Guignol, visible in even his more naturalistic works, achieved overt expression in La Dolce Vita (1960), a monumental morality-play fresco. Although extravagantly praised at the time (it received the Academy Award for best foreign film of 1963, as had La Strada in 1955) and still his most popular production, the film, despite several memorable sequences, seems in retrospect curiously contrived and unconvincing.
Fellini's brief segment in Boccaccio 70 (1962), depicting the prurient fantasies of a middle-aged bachelor, is of little interest except as an indicator of the director's future work as evidenced in 8 1/2 (1963, Fellini's 3rd Oscar winner), an expressionistic, stream-of-consciousness, autobiographical disclosure. Juliet of the Spirits (1964) was far less successful, and 1969’s Fellini Satyricon (that dealt with the excesses of ancient Rome) was not greeted with the same enthusiasm as his other films from the 1960s.
An autobiographical film, Amarcord, came out in 1970, and again critics universally praised Fellini's talents, and the film earned Fellini another Oscar. Amarcord was the last film to gain great praise; in fact, most of Fellini's later work earned poor reviews. The lack of critical acclaim didn't diminish Fellini in the eyes of his fans, and he is generally regarded as the greatest Italian filmmaker. In 1993 Fellini earned his fifth and final Oscar, a lifetime achievement award. Later that year he suffered either a massive heart attack or a stroke, which left him unconscious and soon after, on October 31, 1993, he died of heart and lung failure.
Fellini was raised in a Roman Catholic family. Although he abandoned formal activity in the Catholic Church as an adult, he had a strong sense of Catholic identity throughout his life.
Politics
While Fellini was for the most part indifferent to politics, 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".
Views
Quotations:
"You have to live spherically - in many directions. Never lose your childish enthusiasm - and things will come your way."
"Experience is what you get while looking for something else."
"A good opening and a good ending make for a good film provide they come close together."
"My work has always been the thing that justifies my life."
"I am not the kind of director who sits in a chair smoking a cigar talking with a microphone to 10 assistants. I need to move. To touch. To put a painting on a wall. To arrange a set."
Connections
On October 30, 1943, Federico Fellini married Giulietta Masina. Several months later, Masina fell down the stairs and suffered a miscarriage. On March 22, 1945, she gave birth to a son, Pier Federico (nicknamed Federichino), but the child died of encephalitis a month later on April 24, 1945. Masina and Fellini did not have another child.