Federico Fellini biography

Synopsis

(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, citt 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 Pais (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.

Fellini made his debut as director in collaboration with Lattuada on Luci del variet (1951; Variety Lights). This was the first in a series of works dealing with provincial life and was followed by Lo sceicco bianco (1951; The White Sheik) and I vitelloni (1953; Spivs or The Young and the Passionate), his first critically and commercially successful work. This film, a bitterly sarcastic look at the idle “mama's boys” of the provinces, is still considered by some critics to be Fellini's masterpiece.

Major works

Fellini's next films formed a trilogy that dealt with salvation and the fate of innocence in a cruel and unsentimental world. One of Fellini's best-known works, the heavily symbolic La strada (1954; “The Road”), stars Anthony Quinn as a cruel, animalistic circus strongman and Masina as the pathetic waif who loves him. The film was shot on location in the desolate countryside between Viterbo and Abruzzo, with the great empty spaces reflecting the virtual inhumanity of the relationship between the principal characters. Although it was criticized by the left-wing press in Italy