Federico Fellini

Federico Fellini: The Director Who Filmed His Own Dreams

In April 1962 Federico Fellini was midway through a production he could no longer describe to anyone, including himself. He sat down to write the letter abandoning it. What he wrote instead was the realization that saved him: he would make a film about a director who no longer knows what film he wants to make. The salvage operation became *8½*, which *Sight & Sound* now ranks among the ten greatest films ever made. The title was simply the number of pictures he had directed to that point.

Rimini, the Circus, and Grand Guignol

He was born on 20 January 1920 in Rimini on the Adriatic coast and baptized Federico Domenico Marcello Fellini five days later. His father Urbano was a travelling salesman; his mother Ida came from a bourgeois Catholic merchant family. In 1926 he encountered what he later described as the trinity that formed him — "the world of Grand Guignol, the circus with Pierino the Clown and the movies." Everything in the mature work descends from that sentence: the ringmasters, the parades, the grotesque faces held a beat too long, the sense that a film is a tent with something disreputable happening inside it.

Marc'Aurelio: Gags for a Living

Fellini's apprenticeship was not in cinema but in drawing and jokes. He opened a portrait shop in Rimini in 1937 and published his first cartoon in 1938. In 1939 he joined *Marc'Aurelio*, Italy's most influential humour magazine, and stayed until 1942 — a period one biography calls the determining moment of his life. It taught him the caricaturist's habit of reducing a person to a silhouette, and it put him in a room with the writers who would become his collaborators. He drifted from gag-writing into radio and then into screenwriting, which is where the war found him.

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Rossellini's Apprentice

After the war he met Roberto Rossellini, who brought him onto *Rome, Open City* (1946). Fellini and Sergio Amidei were nominated for an Academy Award for that screenplay; Fellini also worked as writer and assistant director on *Paisà*. He therefore entered cinema through the front door of neorealism, the movement committed to real streets, real faces and social truth — and spent the rest of his career walking away from it, taking its faces with him. *Variety Lights* (1950) and *The White Sheik* (1952) came first, then *I Vitelloni* (1953), the study of provincial young men going nowhere that made his reputation.

Masina

He met Giulietta Masina at the radio station EIAR in autumn 1942 and married her on 30 October 1943. Their son Pierfederico was born on 22 March 1945 and died of encephalitis eleven days later, a loss with enduring emotional and artistic consequences for both of them. Masina became the instrument for his most direct films: *La Strada* (1954), in which she plays the abused clown Gelsomina, and *Nights of Cabiria* (1957), the story of a Roman prostitute drawn partly from a woman Fellini met in a shantytown during production. Both won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film; Masina took Best Actress at Cannes for *Cabiria*. *La Strada* also broke him. During the last three weeks of shooting he suffered the first symptoms of severe clinical depression and entered brief therapy with the analyst Emilio Servadio.

La Dolce Vita and a New Word

*La Dolce Vita* (1960) broke every box-office record in Italy, took the Palme d'Or, and provoked a national argument about decadence and the Church. It also gave English a word. The photographer who trails the journalist Marcello Rubini through Rome is named Paparazzo, and the plural entered the language as the name for a profession Fellini had accurately identified before it had one.

Bernhard, Jung, and the Book of Dreams

In early 1960 Fellini met the analyst Ernst Bernhard, read Jung's *Memories, Dreams, Reflections*, and — under Servadio's supervision — took LSD in 1964. Bernhard's Jungian depth psychology has been called the single greatest influence on his mature style. The practical consequence was a habit: Fellini kept illustrated dream notebooks for roughly thirty years, later published as *The Book of Dreams*. From *8½* onward the films stop pretending to report the world and start reporting the interior, moving between memory, fantasy and the present without marking the joins. *Juliet of the Spirits* (1965), *Fellini Satyricon* (1969), *Roma* (1972) and *Amarcord* (1973) all work this way. *Amarcord*, loosely based on his 1968 autobiographical essay *My Rimini* and shot between January and June 1973, returns to a provincial town in the 1930s and became his second-biggest commercial success after *La Dolce Vita*. It also won him another Oscar.

Why Federico Is Called a Genius

The specific quality is this: Fellini found a way to make the private interior of one man legible as public spectacle, and he did it without the usual apparatus of psychological realism. Most filmmakers who work with dreams signal them — soft focus, dissolves, a wake-up shot. Fellini refused the signal. In *8½* memory, fantasy, anxiety and the literal present occupy the same continuous plane, so the audience experiences Guido's confusion rather than observing it. That is a formal invention, not a mood, and it is why the film is repeatedly described as the greatest film about filmmaking ever made. The vocabulary confirms the verdict: "Fellinian" and "Felliniesque" have become synonymous with any extravagant, fanciful, baroque image, in cinema and beyond it — one of the very few directors whose name became an adjective. He holds four Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film, a record, plus an honorary Oscar in 1993 and a career Golden Lion in 1985. In *Sight & Sound*'s 2002 poll he ranked second among directors.

The counter-case deserves stating. The same freedom that produced *8½* produced films where the parade is the whole content — critics have long charged the later work with self-indulgence, with Fellini circling his own biography and mistaking the circling for depth. His technique is inimitable partly because it is not really a technique that transfers; unlike Welles's grammar, almost nothing in Fellini's method can be taught or reused, which is one reason his influence is stylistic rather than structural. And his ranking among critics in that same 2002 poll was seventh, not second — directors admire him more than critics do, which tells you something about where the genius sits.

Legacy

Fellini suffered two strokes after being hospitalized in June 1993 and died in Rome on 31 October 1993, aged 73, the day after his fiftieth wedding anniversary. Roughly 70,000 people attended the memorial service at Cinecittà, the studio where he had built most of his imagined Romes rather than filming the real one. He is buried in Rimini's Monumental Cemetery with Masina, who died five months later, and with the infant son they lost in 1945. He had gone home, which for Fellini had always been the same thing as going back into the dream.