Federico Fellini Biography

(1920 - 1993)

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Related Works

  • Films
  • 1951 Lo Sceicco Bianco (The White Sheik)
  • 1954 La Strada (The Road)
  • 1956 Le Notte Di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria)
  • 1960 La Dolce Vita
  • 1963 Otto E Mezzo (81/2)
  • 1965 Giulietta Degli Spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits)
  • 1972 Fellini's Roma
  • 1973 Amarcord
  • 1980 Città della Donna (City of Women)
  • 1986 Ginger E Fred (Ginger and Fred)
  • 1990 La Voce Della Luna (Voices of the Moon)
» More

(born January 20, 1920, Rimini, Italy—died October 31, 1993, Rome) Italian film director who was one of the most celebrated and distinctive filmmakers of the period after World War II. Early in his career he helped inaugurate the Neorealist cinema movement, but he soon developed his own distinctive style of typically autobiographical films that imposed dreamlike or hallucinatory imagery upon ordinary situations and portrayed people at their most bizarre.

Early life and influences

After an uneventful provincial childhood during which he developed a talent as a cartoonist, Fellini at age 19 moved to Rome, where he contributed cartoons, gags, and stories to the humour magazine Marc'Aurelio. During World War II, Fellini worked as a scriptwriter for the radio program Cico e Pallina, starring Giulietta Masina, the actress who became Fellini's wife in 1943 and who went on to star in several of the director's greatest films during the course of their 50-year marriage. In 1944 Fellini met director Roberto Rossellini, who engaged him as one of a team of writers who created Roma, città aperta (1945; Open City or Rome, Open City), often cited as the seminal film of the Italian Neorealist movement. Fellini's contribution to the screenplay earned him his first Oscar nomination.

Fellini quickly became one of Italy's most successful screenwriters. Although he wrote a number of important scripts for such directors as Pietro Germi (Il cammino della speranza [1950; The Path of Hope]), Alberto Lattuada (Senza pietá [1948; Without Pity]), and Luigi Comencini (Persiane chiuse [1951; Drawn Shutters]), his scripts for Rossellini are most important to the history of the Italian cinema. These include Paisà (1946; Paisan), perhaps the purest example of Italian Neorealism; Il miracolo (1948; “The Miracle,” an episode of the film L'Amore), a controversial work on the meaning of sainthood; and Europa '51 (1952; The Greatest Love), one of the first films in postwar Italy that began to move beyond the documentary realism of the Neorealist period toward an examination of psychological problems and Existentialist themes.

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