Italian Neorealism (Italian: Neorealismo) is a national film movement characterized by stories set amongst the poor and the working class, filmed on location, frequently using nonprofessional actors. Italian Neorealist films mostly contend with the difficult economic and moral conditions of post-World War II Italy], reflecting the changes in the Italian psyche and the conditions of everyday life: poverty and desperation.

History[link]

Italian Neorealism came about as World War II ended and Benito Mussolini's government fell, causing the Italian film industry to lose its center. Neorealism was a sign of cultural change and social progress in Italy. Its films presented contemporary stories and ideas, and were often shot in the streets because the film studios had been damaged significantly during the war.

The neorealist style was developed by a circle of film critics that revolved around the magazine Cinema, including Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti, Gianni Puccini, Cesare Zavattini, Giuseppe De Santis and Pietro Ingrao. Largely prevented from writing about politics (the editor-in-chief of the magazine was Vittorio Mussolini, son of Benito Mussolini), the critics attacked the white telephone films that dominated the industry at the time. As a counter to the poor quality of mainstream films, some of the critics felt that Italian cinema should turn to the realist writers from the turn of the 19th to 20th century.

Both Antonioni and Visconti had worked closely with Jean Renoir. Additionally, many of the filmmakers involved in neorealism developed their skills working on calligraphist films (though the short-lived movement was markedly different from neorealism). Elements of neorealism are also found in the films of Alessandro Blasetti and the documentary-style films of Francesco De Robertis. Two of the most significant precursors of neorealism are Toni (Renoir, 1935) and 1860 (Blasetti, 1934). In the Spring of 1945, Mussolini was executed and Italy was liberated from German occupation. This period, known as the "Italian Spring," was a break from old ways and an entrance to a more realistic approach when making films. Italian cinema went from utilizing elaborate studio sets to using the countryside and the city streets to provide a more "realistic" setting.^[1]

The first neorealist film is generally thought to be Ossessione by Luchino Visconti (1943), while Aniki-Bóbó by Manoel de Oliveira remained generally unnoticed since its release in 1942. Neorealism became famous globally in 1946 with Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City, when it won the Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival as the first major film produced in Italy after the war.

Italian Neorealism rapidly declined in the early 1950s. Liberal and socialist parties were having a hard time presenting their message. Levels of income were gradually starting to rise and the first positive effects of the Ricostruzione period began to show. As a consequence, most Italians favored the optimism shown in many American movies of the time. The vision of the existing poverty and despair, presented by the neorealist films, was demoralizing a nation anxious for prosperity and change. The views of the postwar Italian government of the time were also far from positive, and the remark of Giulio Andreotti, who was then a vice-minister in the De Gasperi cabinet, characterized the official view of the movement: Neorealism is "dirty laundry that shouldn't be washed and hung to dry in the open."

Italy's move from individual concern with neorealism to the tragic failure of the human condition can be seen through Federico Fellini's films. His early works Il bidone and La Strada are transitional movies. The larger social concerns of humanity, treated by neorealists, gave way to the exploration of individuals. Their needs, their alienation from society and their tragic failure to communicate became the main focal point in the Italian films to follow in the 1960s. Similarly, Antonioni's Red Desert and Blow-up take the neo-realist trappings and internalize them in the suffering and search for knowledge brought out by Italy's post-war economic and political climate.

Characteristics[link]

They are generally filmed with nonprofessional actors--although, in a number of cases, well known actors were cast in leading roles, playing strongly against their normal character types in front of a background populated by local people rather than extras brought in for the film.

They are shot almost exclusively on location, mostly in poor neighborhoods and in the countryside.

The subject matter involves life among the impoverished and the working class. Performances are mostly constructed from scenes of people performing fairly mundane and quotidian activities, devoid of the self-consciousness that amateur acting usually entails. Neorealist films often feature children in major roles, though their characters are frequently more observational than participatory.

Open City established several of the principles of neorealism, depicting clearly the struggle of normal Italian people to live from day to day under the extraordinary difficulties of the German occupation of Rome, consciously doing what they can to resist the occupation. The children play a key role in this, and their presence at the end of the film is indicative of their role in neorealism as a whole: as observers of the difficulties of today who hold the key to the future. Vittorio De Sica's 1948 film Bicycle Thieves is also representative of the genre, with non-professional actors, and a story that details the hardships of working-class life after the war.

In the period from 1944–1948, many neorealist filmmakers drifted away from pure neorealism. Some directors explored allegorical fantasy, such as de Sica's Miracle in Milan, and historical spectacle, like Senso by Visconti. This was also the time period when a more upbeat neorealism emerged, which produced films that melded working-class characters with 1930s-style populist comedy, as seen in de Sica's Umberto D.^[2]

At the height of neorealism, in 1948, Visconti adapted I Malavoglia, a novel by Giovanni Verga, written at the height of the 19th century realist verismo movement (in many ways the basis for neorealism, which is therefore sometimes referred to as neoverismo), bringing the story to a modern setting, which resulted in remarkably little change in either the plot or the tone. The resulting film, The Earth Trembles, starred only non-professional actors and was filmed in the same village (Aci Trezza) as the novel was set in.

More contemporary theorists of Italian Neorealism characterize it less as a consistent set of stylistic characteristics and more as the relationship between film practice and the social reality of post-war Italy. Millicent Marcus delineates the lack of consistent film styles of Neorealist film.^[3] Peter Brunette and Marcia Landy both deconstruct the use of reworked cinematic forms in Rossellini's Open City.^[4] Using psychoanalysis, Vincent Rocchi characterizes neorealist film as consistently engendering the structure of anxiety into the structure of the plot itself.^[5]

Impact[link]

The period between 1943 and 1950 in the history of Italian cinema is dominated by the impact of neorealism, which is properly defined as a moment or a trend in Italian film, rather than an actual school or group of theoretically motivated and like-minded directors and scriptwriters. Its impact nevertheless has been enormous, not only on Italian film but also on French New Wave cinema, the Polish Film School and ultimately on films all over the world. It also influenced several Indian film directors including Bimal Roy, who made Do Bigha Zameen (1955), after watching Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948).^[6]

Furthermore, as some critics have argued, the abandoning of the classical way of doing cinema and so the starting point of the Nouvelle Vague and the Modern Cinema can be found in the post world-war II Italian cinema and in the neorealism experiences. ^{[7] [8]} In particular,

this cinema seems to be constituted as a new subject of knowledge, which it-self builds and develops. It produces a new world in which the main elements have not so many narrative functions as they have their own aesthetic value, related with the eye that is watching them and not with the action they are coming from. ^[9]

Significant works[link]

Precursors and influences[link]

• The works of Giovanni Verga
• Poetic realism
• 1860 (Alessandro Blasetti, 1934)
• An Inn in Tokyo (Yasujirō Ozu, 1935)
• Toni (Jean Renoir, 1935)
• La nave bianca (Roberto Rossellini, 1941)
• Aniki-Bóbó (Manoel de Oliveira, 1942)
• Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (novel, Carlo Levi, 1947)

Main works[link]

• Ossessione (Luchino Visconti, 1943)
• Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945)
• Shoeshine (Vittorio De Sica, 1946)
• Paisan (Roberto Rossellini, 1946)
• Germany, Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1948)
• Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948)
• The Earth Trembles (Luchino Visconti, 1948)
• Bitter Rice (Giuseppe De Santis, 1949)
• Stromboli (Roberto Rossellini, 1950)
• Bellissima (Luchino Visconti, 1951)
• Umberto D. (Vittorio De Sica, 1952) — filmed in 1951, but released in 1952. Many film historians date the end of the neorealist movement with the public attacks on the film.^[10]
• The Greatest Love (Roberto Rossellini, 1952)
• I Vitelloni (Federico Fellini, 1953)

Major figures[link]

• Vittorio De Sica
• Federico Fellini
• Roberto Rossellini
• Luchino Visconti
• Cesare Zavattini

See also[link]

• Cinema of Italy
• French New Wave
• Japanese New Wave
• L.A. Rebellion
• Indian Parallel Cinema
• Polish Film School

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Mario Verdone, Il Cinema Neorealista, da Rossellini a Pasolini (Celebes Editore, 1977).

External links[link]

• GreenCine primer on Italian Neo-Realism
• Comprehensive interview with Suso Cecchi d'Amico - the legendary screenwriter from the Neo-Realism period
• - Verisimilitude and the (Re)presentation of the City

Vittorio De Sica (7 July 1901 or 1902 – 13 November 1974) was an Italian director and actor, a leading figure in the neorealist movement.

Four of the films he directed won Academy Awards: Sciuscià and Ladri di biciclette were awarded honorary Oscars, while ieri, oggi, domani and Il giardino dei Finzi Contini won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Indeed, the great critical success of Sciuscià (the first foreign film to be so recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) and Ladri di biciclette helped establish the permanent Best Foreign Film Oscar. These two films generally are considered part of the canon of classic cinema.^[1] Ladri di biciclette was cited by Turner Classic Movies as one of the 15 most influential films in cinema history.^[2]

Ironically, for an artist considered one of the Italian cinema's greatest and most influential directors,^[3] De Sica's sole Academy Award nomination was for acting, when he received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nod for playing Major Rinaldi in American director Charles Vidor's 1957 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, a movie that was panned by critics and proved a box office flop. De Sica's acting was considered the highlight of the film.^[4]

Life and career[link]

Born into poverty in Sora, Lazio (in either 1901 or 1902 - sources are divided), he began his career as a theatre actor in the early 1920s and joined Tatiana Pavlova's theatre company in 1923. In 1933 he founded his own company with his wife Giuditta Rissone and Sergio Tofano. The company performed mostly light comedies, but they also staged plays by Beaumarchais and worked with famous directors like Luchino Visconti.

His meeting with Cesare Zavattini was a very important event: together they created some of the most celebrated films of the neorealistic age, like Sciuscià (Shoeshine) and Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, released as The Bicycle Thief in the U.S.A.), both of which De Sica directed.

De Sica appeared in the British television series The Four Just Men (1959).

Private Life[link]

His passion for gambling was well known. Because of it, he often lost large sums of money and accepted work that might not otherwise have interested him. He never kept his gambling a secret from anyone; in fact, he projected it on characters in his own movies, like Count Max (which he acted in but did not direct) and The Gold of Naples.

In 1937 he married Giuditta Rissone, whom he met ten years before and who gave birth to his daughter, Emi. In 1942, on the set of Un garibaldino al convento, he met Spanish actress Maria Mercader (sister of Ramon Mercader, Trotsky's assassin), with whom he started a relationship.

He was a Roman Catholic.^[5]

After divorcing Rissone in France in 1954, he married Mercader in 1959, again in Mexico, but this union was not considered valid under Italian law. In 1968 he obtained French citizenship and married Mercader in Paris. Meanwhile he had already had two sons with her: Manuel, in 1949, a musician, and Christian, in 1951, who would follow his father's path as an actor and director.

Although divorced, De Sica never parted from his first family. He led a double family life, with double celebrations on holidays. It is said that, at Christmas and on New Year's Eve, he used to put back the clocks by two hours in Mercader's house so that he could make a toast at midnight with both families. His first wife agreed to keep up the facade of a marriage so as not to leave her daughter without a father.

Vittorio De Sica died at 73 after a surgery at the Neuilly-sur-Seine hospital in Paris.

Filmography as director[link]

Filmography as actor[link]

Note: on many sources, Fontana di Trevi by Carlo Campogalliani (1960) and La pappa reale by Robert Thomas (1964) are included but de Sica does not appear in those films.

Television as actor[link]

• The Four Just Men, by Sapphire Films (1959) (10 of the 39 episodes made)

Awards and nominations[link]

Vittorio De Sica was given the Interfilm Grand Prix in 1971 by the Berlin Film Festival

• Miracolo a Milano
  • Cannes Film Festival Palme D'Or Winner
• Umberto D.
  • Cannes Film Festival Official Selection
• Stazione Termini
  • Cannes Film Festival Official Selection
• L'oro di Napoli
  • Cannes Film Festival Official Selection
• Il Tetto
  • Cannes Film Festival OCIC Award Winner
• Anna di Brooklyn
  • Berlin Film Festival Official Selection^[9]
• La Ciociara
  • Cannes Film Festival Official Selection
• Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini
  • Berlin Film Festival Golden Bear Winner^[10]
  • Berlin Film Festival Interfilm Award Winner - Otto Dibelius Film Award
• Nastro d'Argento al miglior regista 1946 for Sciuscià
• Academy Award 1947 Honorary Award to the Italian production for Sciuscià (Shoeshine), 1946
• Academy Award 1949 Special Foreign Language Film Award for Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves)
• BAFTA (British Academy Award) 1950 Best film Ladri di biciclette
• Academy Award 1965 Best Foreign Language film for Ieri, oggi, domani(Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow)
• Academy Award 1972 Best Foreign Language film for Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini

Quotations[link]

"There is no crisis in cinema. There are negative periods. There are times when some films are received well and others aren't. The past teaches us that some films were received badly, while others go sailing on. There are two films doing very well right now in the Italian market: One is Il gattopardo, which earns seven million lire a day, and the other is Il diavolo, starring Sordi, which earns 3 1/2 million. So there are films that are doing very well. What I notice is that producers have been known to make errors in judgment, which have caused them to be overly daring. For example, I've been told many millions were spent, somewhere around half a billion, for a film entrusted to a young person. We must make room for young people, but with half a billion we could have made eight of Ladri di biciclett. Experimental cinema should be inexpensive cinema. Half a billion lire should be entrusted to those professionals who we can be sure will bring home the half billion spent. We should be cautious with new initiatives. Producers should be cautious. As for television as a competitor, yes, there I see a danger. Let television do television, let them do documentaries, but cinema as such should be shown on screens, because there's no one more lazy than the public. When people don't have to leave their homes, they're very happy. A film shown in the home encourages the audience not to budge."

References[link]

External links[link]

• Vittorio De Sica at the Internet Movie Database
• Vittorio De Sica director bio for The Garden of the Finzi-Continis Sony Pictures Entertainment website, retrieved 8 April 2006

Nino Rota
Born	(1911-12-03)December 3, 1911 Milan, Italy
Died	April 10, 1979(1979-04-10) (aged 67) Rome, Italy
Nationality	Italian
Occupation	Composer

Nino Rota (December 3, 1911, Milan – April 10, 1979, Rome) was an Italian composer and academic who is best known for his film scores, notably for the films of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti. He also composed the music for two of Franco Zeffirelli's Shakespeare films, and for the first two films of Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy, receiving for the latter the Academy Award for Best Original Score in 1974.

During his long career Rota was an extraordinarily prolific composer, especially of music for the cinema. He wrote more than 150 scores for Italian and international productions from the 1930s until his death in 1979—an average of three scores each year over a 46 year period, and in his most productive period from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s he wrote as many as ten scores every year, and sometimes more, with a remarkable thirteen film scores to his credit in 1954. Alongside this great body of film work, he composed ten operas, five ballets and dozens of other orchestral, choral and chamber works, the best known being his string concerto. He also composed the music for many theatre productions by Visconti, Zeffirelli and Eduardo de Filippo^[1] as well as maintaining a long teaching career at the Liceo Musicale in Bari, Italy, where he was the director for almost 30 years.

Early career[link]

Born Giovanni Rota Rinaldi, into a musical family in Milan, Rota was a renowned child prodigy—his first oratorio, L'infanzia di San Giovanni Battista, was written at age 11^[2] and performed in Milan and Paris as early as 1923; his three-act lyrical comedy after Hans Christian Andersen, Il Principe Porcaro, was composed when he was just 13 and published in 1926. He studied at the Milan conservatory there under Giacomo Orefice^[1] and then undertook serious study of composition under Ildebrando Pizzetti and Alfredo Casella at the Santa Cecilia Academy in Rome, graduating in 1930.^[3]

Encouraged by Arturo Toscanini, Rota moved to the United States where he lived from 1930 to 1932. He won a scholarship to the Curtis Institute of Philadelphia, where he was taught conducting by Fritz Reiner and had Rosario Scalero as an instructor in composition.^[3] Returning to Milan, he wrote a thesis on the Renaissance composer Gioseffo Zarlino. Rota earned a degree in literature from the University of Milan, graduating in 1937, and began a teaching career that led to the directorship of the Liceo Musicale in Bari, a title he held from 1950 until 1978.^[3]

Film scores[link]

In his entry on Rota in the 1988 edition of The Concise Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Composers and Musicians, music scholar Nicholas Slonimsky described Rota as "brilliant" and stated that his musical style:

"... demonstrates a great facility and even felicity, with occasional daring excursions into dodecaphony. However his most durable compositions are related to his music for the cinema; he composed the sound tracks of a great number of films of the Italian director Federico Fellini covering the period from 1950 to 1979."^[3]

During the 1940s, Rota composed scores for more than 32 films, including Renato Castellani's Zazà (1944). His association with Fellini began with The White Sheik (1952), followed by I vitelloni (1953) and La Strada (1954). They continued to work together for decades, and Fellini recalled:

The most precious collaborator I have ever had, I say it straightaway and don't even have to hesitate, was Nino Rota — between us, immediately, a complete, total, harmony ... He had a geometric imagination, a musical approach worthy of celestial spheres. He thus had no need to see images from my movies. When I asked him about the melodies he had in mind to comment one sequence or another, I clearly realized he was not concerned with images at all. His world was inner, inside himself, and reality had no way to enter it.^[4]

The relationship between Fellini and Rota was so strong that even at Fellini's funeral Giulietta Masina, Fellini's wife, asked trumpeter Mauro Maur to play Rota's Improvviso dell'Angelo in the Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri in Rome.^[5]

Rota's score for Fellini's 8½ (1963) is often cited as one of the factors which makes the film cohesive. His score for Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits (1965) included a collaboration with Eugene Walter on the song, "Go Milk the Moon" (cut from the final version of the film), and they teamed again for the song "What Is a Youth?", part of Rota's score for Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet.

The American Film Institute ranked Rota's score for The Godfather #5 on their list of the greatest film scores. His score for War and Peace was also nominated for the list.

In all, Rota wrote scores to more than 150 films.

Orchestral, chamber and choral music[link]

Rota wrote numerous concerti and other orchestral works as well as piano, chamber and choral music, much of which has been recorded and released on CD. After his death from heart failure^[6] in 1979, Rota's music was the subject of Hal Willner's 1981 tribute album Amarcord Nino Rota, which featured several at the time relatively unknown but now famous jazz musicians. Gus Van Sant used some of Rota's music in his 2007 film Paranoid Park and director Michael Winterbottom used several Rota selections in the 2005 film Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. Danny Elfman frequently cites Nino Rota as a major influence. Director Mario Monicelli filmed a documentary Un amico magico: il maestro Nino Rota which featured interviews with Franco Zeffirelli and Riccardo Muti (a student under Rota at Bari Conservatory), and was followed by a German documentary Nino Rota - Un maestro della musica. Both explored film and concert sides of the composer.

Operas[link]

His 1955 opera Il cappello di paglia di Firenze (The Florentine Straw Hat), an adaptation of the play by Eugène Labiche was presented by the Santa Fe Opera in 1977. In 2005 his opera Aladino e la lampada magica (Aladdin and the Magical Lamp), with Cosmin Ifrim in the title role, was performed in German translation at the Vienna State Opera and released on DVD.

Written for a radio production by RAI in 1950, his short opera, I due timidi (The Two Timid Ones), was presented by the Santa Fe Opera as part of their pre-season "One-Hour Opera" program in May/June 2008.

Quotations[link]

Federico Fellini recalls his first chance meeting with Rota:

"Outside Cinecittà, I noticed a funny little man waiting in the wrong place for the tram. He seemed happily oblivious of everything. I felt compelled ... to wait with him.... I was certain that the tram would stop in its regular place and we would have to run for it, and he was equally certain it would stop where he was standing ... To my surprise, the tram did stop right in front of us."

A critic conversing with Nino Rota at the age of eleven just prior to a performance of his oratorio, The Childhood of St. John the Baptist, in 1923:

Critic: "Do you like playing?"

Rota: "Whenever I can ... Is it hard to write for a newspaper?"

Critic: "It's not easy to do a good article"

Rota: "Have you come from Brussels specially to hear my oratorio?"

Critic: "I certainly have, my little friend."

Rota: "That’s really funny. I won’t be conducting it tonight. Yesterday the double bass snubbed me"

On his friendship with Igor Stravinsky:

"Stravinsky was fun; his mind struck sparks. Age was no barrier - ours became a true friendship, despite distance and meeting ever more rarely."

Nino Rota reflecting on the unhappiness of others:

"When I’m creating at the piano, I tend to feel happy; but - the eternal dilemma - how can we be happy amid the unhappiness of others? I'd do everything I could to give everyone a moment of happiness. That's what's at the heart of my music."

Federico Fellini on Nino Rota:

"He was someone who had a rare quality belonging to the world of intuition. Just like children, simple men, sensitive people, innocent people, he would suddenly say dazzling things. As soon as he arrived, stress disappeared, everything turned into a festive atmosphere; the movie entered a joyful, serene, fantastic period, a new life."

Works[link]

See List of compositions by Nino Rota and List of film scores by Nino Rota.

Discography[link]

See Nino Rota discography

References[link]

• Kennedy, Michael (2006), The Oxford Dictionary of Music, 985 pages, ISBN 0-19-861459-4

External links[link]

• http://www.schott-music.com/shop/persons/featured/16370/news/
• Nino Rota official site
• Nino Rota at the Internet Movie Database

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Federico Fellini
Born	(1920-01-20)January 20, 1920 Rimini, Italy
Died	October 31, 1993(1993-10-31) (aged 73) Rome, Italy
Occupation	Film director and scriptwriter
Years active	1945–1992
Influenced by	Charlie Chaplin, John Ford, Luis Buñuel, Sergei Parajanov, Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman
Influenced	Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, David Lynch, Terry Gilliam, Pedro Almodóvar, Dariush Mehrjui, John Waters, Alejandro Jodorowsky
Spouse	Giulietta Masina (m. 1943–1993, his death)

Federico Fellini (Italian pronunciation: [fedeˈriːko felˈliːni]; January 20, 1920 – October 31, 1993) was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for a distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images, he is considered one of the most influential filmmakers of the 20th century, and is widely revered.^[1] He won five Academy Awards and was nominated for 12 in a career that spanned over forty years.

Early life and education[link]

Rimini (1920–1938)[link]

Fellini was born on January 20, 1920 to middle-class parents in Rimini, then a small town on the Adriatic Sea. His father, Urbano Fellini (1894–1956), born to a family of Romagnol peasants and small landholders from Gambettola, moved to Rome in 1915 as a baker apprenticed to the Pantanella pasta factory. His mother, Ida Barbiani (1896–1984), came from a bourgeois Catholic family of Roman merchants. Despite her family’s vehement disapproval, she eloped with Urbano in 1917 to live at his parents' home in Gambettola.^[2] A civil marriage followed in 1918 with the religious ceremony held at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome a year later. The couple settled in Rimini where Urbano became a traveling salesman and wholesale vendor. Fellini had two siblings: Riccardo (1921–1991), a documentary director for RAI Television, and Maria Maddalena (m. Fabbri; 1929–2002).

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. An attentive student, he spent his leisure time drawing, staging puppet shows, and reading Il corriere dei piccoli, the popular children’s magazine that reproduced traditional American cartoons by Winsor McCay, George McManus and Frederick Burr Opper. (Opper’s Happy Hooligan would provide the visual inspiration for Gelsomina in Fellini's 1954 film La strada; McCay’s Little Nemo would directly influence his 1980 film City of Women.)^[3] In 1926, he discovered the world of Grand Guignol, the circus with Pierino the Clown, and the movies. Guido Brignone’s Maciste all’Inferno (1926), the first film he saw, would mark him in ways linked to Dante and the cinema throughout his entire career.^[4]

Enrolled at the Ginnasio Giulio Cesare in 1929, he made friends with Luigi ‘Titta’ Benzi, later a prominent Rimini lawyer (and the model for young Titta in Amarcord (1973)). In Mussolini’s Italy, Fellini and Riccardo became members of the Avanguardista, the compulsory Fascist youth group for males. He visited Rome with his parents for the first time in 1933, the year of the maiden voyage of the transatlantic ocean liner SS Rex (which makes an appearance in Amarcord). The sea creature found on the beach at the end of La Dolce Vita (1960) has its basis in a giant fish marooned on a Rimini beach during a storm in 1934. Although Fellini adapted key events from his childhood and adolescence in films such as I Vitelloni (1953), 8½ (1963), and Amarcord (1973), he insisted that such autobiographical memories were inventions: "It is not memory that dominates my films. To say that my films are autobiographical is an overly facile liquidation, a hasty classification. It seems to me that I have invented almost everything: childhood, character, nostalgias, dreams, memories, for the pleasure of being able to recount them."^[5]

In 1937, Fellini opened Febo, a portrait shop in Rimini with the painter Demos Bonini. His first humorous article appeared in the "Postcards to Our Readers" section of Rimini’s Domenica del Corriere. Deciding on a career as a caricaturist and gag writer, Fellini travelled to Florence in 1938 where he published his first cartoon in the weekly 420. Failing his military culture exam, he graduated from high school in July 1938 after doubling the exam.

Rome (1939)[link]

In September 1939, he enrolled in law school at the University of Rome to please his parents although biographer Hollis Alpert reports that "there is no record of his ever having attended a class".^[6] Installed in a family pensione, he met another lifelong friend, the painter Rinaldo Geleng. Desperately poor, they unsuccessfully joined forces to draw sketches of restaurant and café patrons. Fellini eventually found work as a cub reporter on the dailies Il Piccolo and Il Popolo di Roma but quit after a short stint, bored by the local court news assignments.

Four months after publishing his first article in Marc’Aurelio, the highly influential biweekly humour magazine, he joined the editorial board, achieving success with a regular column titled Will You Listen to What I Have to Say?^[7] Described as “the determining moment in Fellini’s life”,^[8] he enjoyed steady employment between 1939 and 1942, interacting with writers, gagmen, and scriptwriters that eventually led to opportunities in show business and cinema. Among his collaborators on the magazine’s editorial board were the future director Ettore Scola, Marxist theorist and scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini, and Bernardino Zapponi, a future Fellini screenwriter. Conducting interviews for CineMagazzino also proved congenial: when asked to interview Aldo Fabrizi, Italy’s most popular variety performer, their immediate personal rapport led to professional collaboration. Specializing in humorous monologues, Fabrizi commissioned material from his young protégé.^[9]

Career and later life[link]

Early screenplays (1940-43)[link]

Retained on business in Rimini, Urbano sent wife and family to Rome in 1940 to share an apartment with his son. Fellini and Ruggero Maccari, also on the staff of Marc’Aurelio, began writing radio sketches and gags for films. Not yet twenty and with Fabrizi’s help, Fellini obtained his first screen credit as a comedy writer on Mario Mattoli’s Il pirata sono io (The Pirate's Dream). Progressing rapidly to numerous collaborations on films at Cinecittà, his circle of professional acquaintances widened to include novelist Vitaliano Brancati and scriptwriter Piero Tellini. In the wake of Mussolini’s declaration of war against France and England on June 10, 1940, he discovered Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Gogol, John Steinbeck and William Faulkner along with French films by Marcel Carné, René Clair, and Julien Duvivier.^[10] In 1941 he published Il mio amico Pasqualino, a 74-page booklet in ten chapters describing the absurd adventures of Pasqualino, an alter ego.^[11]

Writing for radio while attempting to avoid the draft, Fellini met his future wife Giulietta Masina in a studio office at the Italian public radio broadcaster EIAR in autumn 1942. Well-paid as the voice of Pallina in Fellini's radio serial, Cico and Pallina, Masina was also known for her musical-comedy broadcasts which cheered an audience depressed by the war.^[12] In November 1942, Fellini was sent to Libya, occupied by Fascist Italy, to work on the screenplay of I cavalieri del deserto (Knights of the Desert, 1942), directed by Osvaldo Valenti and Gino Talamo. Fellini welcomed the assignment as it allowed him "to secure another extension on his draft order".^[13] Responsible for emergency re-writing, he also directed the film's first scenes. When Tripoli fell under siege by British forces, he and his colleagues made a narrow escape by boarding a German military plane flying to Sicily. His African adventure, later published in Marc’Aurelio as "The First Flight", marked “the emergence of a new Fellini, no longer just a screenwriter, working and sketching at his desk, but a filmmaker out in the field”.^[14]

The apolitical Fellini was finally freed of the draft when an Allied air raid over Bologna destroyed his medical records. Fellini and Giulietta hid in her aunt’s apartment until Mussolini's fall on July 25, 1943. After dating for nine months, the couple were married on October 30, 1943. Several months later, Masina fell down the stairs and suffered a miscarriage. She gave birth to a son, Pierfederico, on March 22, 1944 but the child died of encephalitis three weeks later. The tragedy had enduring emotional and artistic repercussions.^[15]

Neorealist apprenticeship (1944–1949)[link]

After the Allied liberation of Rome on June 4, 1944, Fellini and Enrico De Seta opened the Funny Face Shop where they survived the postwar recession drawing caricatures of American soldiers. He became involved with Italian Neorealism when Roberto Rossellini, at work on Stories of Yesteryear (later Rome, Open City), met Fellini in his shop proposing he contribute gags and dialogue for the script . Aware of Fellini’s reputation as Aldo Fabrizi’s “creative muse”,^[16] Rossellini also requested he try to convince the actor to play the role of Father Giuseppe Morosini, the parish priest executed by the SS on April 4, 1944.

In 1947, Fellini and Sergio Amidei received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay of Rome, Open City.

Working as both screenwriter and assistant director on Rossellini’s Paisà (Paisan) in 1946, Fellini was entrusted to film the Sicilian scenes in Maiori. In February 1948, he was introduced to Marcello Mastroianni, then a young theatre actor appearing in a play with Giulietta Masina.^[17] Establishing a close working relationship with Alberto Lattuada, Fellini co-wrote the director’s Senza pietà (Without Pity) and Il mulino del Po (The Mill on the Po). Fellini also worked with Rossellini on the anthology film L'Amore (1948), co-writing the screenplay and in one segment titled, "The Miracle", acting opposite Anna Magnani. To play the role of a vagabond rogue mistaken by Magnani for a saint, Fellini had to bleach his black hair blond.

Early films (1950-53)[link]

In 1950 Fellini co-produced and co-directed with Alberto Lattuada Variety Lights (Luci del varietà), his first feature film. A backstage comedy set among the world of small-time travelling performers, it featured Giulietta Masina and Lattuada’s wife, Carla del Poggio. Its release to poor reviews and limited distribution proved disastrous for all concerned. The production company went bankrupt, leaving both Fellini and Lattuada with debts to pay for over a decade.^[18] In February 1950, Paisà received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay by Rossellini, Sergio Amidei, and Fellini.

After travelling to Paris for a script conference with Rossellini on Europa '51, Fellini began production on The White Sheik in September 1951, his first solo-directed feature. Starring Alberto Sordi in the title role, the film is a revised version of a treatment first written by Michelangelo Antonioni in 1949 and based on the fotoromanzi, the photographed cartoon strip romances popular in Italy at the time. Producer Carlo Ponti commissioned Fellini and Tullio Pinelli to write the script but Antonioni rejected the story they developed. With Ennio Flaiano, they re-worked the material into a light-hearted satire about newlywed couple Ivan and Wanda Cavalli (Leopoldo Trieste, Brunello Bovo) in Rome to visit the Pope. Ivan’s prissy mask of respectability is soon demolished by his wife’s obsession with the White Sheik. Highlighting the music of Nino Rota, the film was selected at Cannes (among the films in competition was Orson Welles’s Othello) and then retracted. Screened at the 13th Venice Film Festival, it was razzed by critics in “the atmosphere of a soccer match”.^[19] One reviewer declared that Fellini had “not the slightest aptitude for cinema direction”.

In 1953, I Vitelloni found favour with the critics and public. Winning the Silver Lion Award in Venice, it secured Fellini’s first international distributor.

Beyond neorealism (1954-60)[link]

Fellini directed La strada based on a script completed in 1952 with Pinelli and Flaiano. During the last three weeks of shooting, Fellini experienced the first signs of severe clinical depression.^[20] Aided by his wife, he undertook a brief period of therapy with Freudian psychoanalyst Emilio Servadio.^[20]

Fellini cast American actor Broderick Crawford to interpret the role of an aging swindler in Il Bidone. Based partly on stories told to him by a petty thief during production of La strada, Fellini developed the script into a con man’s slow descent towards a solitary death. To incarnate the role’s “intense, tragic face”, Fellini’s first choice had been Humphrey Bogart^[21] but after learning of the actor’s lung cancer, chose Crawford after seeing his face on the theatrical poster of All the King’s Men (1949). The film shoot was wrought with difficulties stemming from Crawford’s alcoholism.^[22] Savaged by critics at the 16th Venice Film Festival, the film did miserable box office and did not receive international distribution until 1964.

During the autumn, Fellini researched and developed a treatment based on a film adaptation of Mario Tobino’s novel, The Free Women of Magliano. Located in a mental institution for women, financial backers considered the subject had no potential and the project was abandoned.

While preparing Nights of Cabiria in spring 1956, Fellini learned of his father’s death by cardiac arrest at the age of 62. Produced by Dino De Laurentiis and starring Giulietta Masina, the film took its inspiration from news reports of a woman’s decapitated head retrieved in a lake and stories by Wanda, a shantytown prostitute Fellini met on the set of Il Bidone.^[23] Pier Paolo Pasolini was hired to translate Flaiano and Pinelli’s dialogue into Roman dialect and to supervise researches in the vice-afflicted suburbs of Rome. The movie won an Academy Award as Best Foreign Film and brought Masina the Best Actress Award at Cannes for her performance.

With Pinelli, he developed Journey with Anita for Sophia Loren and Gregory Peck. An “invention born out of intimate truth”, the script was based on Fellini's return to Rimini with a mistress to attend his father's funeral.^[24] Due to Loren’s unavailability, the project was shelved and resurrected twenty-five years later as Lovers and Liars (1981), a comedy directed by Mario Monicelli with Goldie Hawn and Giancarlo Giannini. For Eduardo De Filippo, he co-wrote the script of Fortunella, tailoring the lead role to accommodate Masina’s particular sensibility.

The Hollywood on the Tiber phenomenon of 1958 in which American studios profited from the cheap studio labour available in Rome provided the backdrop for photojournalists to steal shots of celebrities on the via Veneto.^[25] The scandal provoked by Turkish dancer Haish Nana’s improvised striptease at a nightclub captured Fellini’s imagination: he decided to end his latest script-in-progress, Moraldo in the City, with an all-night “orgy” at a seaside villa. Pierluigi Praturlon’s photos of Anita Ekberg wading fully dressed in the Trevi Fountain provided further inspiration for Fellini and his scriptwriters. Changing the title of the screenplay to La Dolce Vita, Fellini soon clashed with his producer on casting: the director insisted on the relatively unknown Mastroianni while De Laurentiis wanted Paul Newman as a hedge on his investment. Reaching an impasse, De Laurentiis sold the rights to publishing mogul Angelo Rizzoli. Shooting began on March 16, 1959 with Anita Ekberg climbing the stairs to the cupola of Saint Peter’s in a mammoth décor constructed at Cinecittà. The statue of Christ flown by helicopter over Rome to Saint Peter's Square was inspired by an actual media event on May 1, 1956, which Fellini had witnessed. The film wrapped August 15 on a deserted beach at Passo Oscuro with a bloated mutant fish designed by Piero Gherardi.

La Dolce Vita broke all box office records. Despite scalpers selling tickets at 1000 lire,^[26] crowds queued in line for hours to see an “immoral movie” before the censors banned it. At an exclusive Milan screening on February 5, 1960, one outraged patron spat on Fellini while others hurled insults. Denounced in parliament by right-wing conservatives, undersecretary Domenico Magrì of the Christian Democrats demanded tolerance for the film’s controversial themes.^[27] The Vatican's official press organ, l'Osservatore Romano, lobbied for censorship while the Board of Roman Parish Priests and the Genealogical Board of Italian Nobility attacked the film. In one documented instance involving favourable reviews written by the Jesuits of San Fedele, defending La Dolce Vita had severe consequences.^[28] In competition at Cannes alongside Antonioni’s L’Avventura, the film won the Palme d'Or awarded by presiding juror Georges Simenon. The Belgian writer was promptly “hissed at” by the disapproving festival crowd.^[29]

Art films and dreams (1961–1969)[link]

A major discovery for Fellini after his Italian neorealism period (1950–1959) was the work of Carl Jung. After meeting Jungian psychoanalyst Dr. Ernst Bernhard in early 1960, he read Jung's autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963). Bernhard also recommended that Fellini consult the I Ching and keep a record of his dreams. What Fellini formerly accepted as "his extrasensory perceptions"^[30] were now interpreted as psychic manifestations of the unconscious. Bernhard’s focus on Jungian depth psychology proved to be the single greatest influence on Fellini’s mature style and marked the turning point in his work from neorealism to filmmaking that was “primarily oneiric”.^[31] As a consequence, Jung's seminal ideas on the anima and the animus, the role of archetypes and the collective unconscious directly influenced such films as 8½ (1963), Juliet of the Spirits (1965), Satyricon (1969), Casanova (1976), and City of Women (1980).^[32]

Exploiting La Dolce Vita’s success, financier Angelo Rizzoli set up Federiz in 1960, an independent film company, for Fellini and production manager Clemente Fracassi to discover and produce new talent. Despite the best intentions, their guarded editorial and business skills forced the company to close down soon after cancelling Pasolini’s project, Accattone (1961).

Condemned as a “public sinner”^[33] for La Dolce Vita, Fellini responded with The Temptations of Doctor Antonio, a segment in the omnibus Boccaccio '70. His first colour film, it was the sole project green-lighted at Federiz. Infused with the surrealistic satire that characterized the young Fellini’s work at Marc’Aurelio, the film ridiculed a crusader against vice who goes insane trying to censor a billboard of Anita Ekberg espousing the virtues of milk.

In an October 1960 letter to his colleague Brunello Rondi, Fellini first outlined his film ideas about a man suffering creative block: "Well then - a guy (a writer? any kind of professional man? a theatrical producer?) has to interrupt the usual rhythm of his life for two weeks because of a not-too-serious disease. It’s a warning bell: something is blocking up his system."^[34] Unclear about the script, its title, and his protagonist’s profession, he scouted locations throughout Italy “looking for the film”^[35] in the hope of resolving his confusion. Flaiano suggested La bella confusione (literally A Fine Confusion) as the movie’s title. Under pressure from his producers, Fellini finally settled on 8½, a self-referential title referring principally (but not exclusively)^[36] to the number of films he had directed up to that time.

Giving the order to start production in spring 1962, Fellini signed deals with his producer Rizzoli, fixed dates, had sets constructed, cast Mastroianni, Anouk Aimée, and Sandra Milo in lead roles, and did screen tests at the Scalera Studios in Rome. He hired cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo, among key personnel. But apart from naming his hero Guido Anselmi, he still couldn't decide what his character did for a living.^[37] The crisis came to a head in April when, sitting in his Cinecittà office, he began a letter to Rizzoli confessing he had "lost his film" and had to abandon the project. Interrupted by the chief machinist requesting he celebrate the launch of 8½, Fellini put aside the letter and went on the set. Raising a toast to the crew, he "felt overwhelmed by shame… I was in a no exit situation. I was a director who wanted to make a film he no longer remembers. And lo and behold, at that very moment everything fell into place. I got straight to the heart of the film. I would narrate everything that had been happening to me. I would make a film telling the story of a director who no longer knows what film he wanted to make".^[38]

Shooting began on May 9, 1962. Perplexed by the seemingly chaotic, incessant improvisation on the set, Deena Boyer, the director’s American press officer at the time, asked for a rationale. Fellini told her that he hoped to convey the three levels “on which our minds live: the past, the present, and the conditional - the realm of fantasy”.^[39] After shooting wrapped on October 14, Nino Rota composed various circus marches and fanfares that would later become signature tunes of the maestro’s cinema.^[40] Nominated for four Oscars, 8½ won awards for best foreign language film and best costume design in black-and-white. In Hollywood for the ceremony, Fellini toured Disneyland with Walt Disney the day after.

Increasingly attracted to parapsychology, Fellini met the Turin magician Gustavo Rol in 1963. Rol, a former banker, introduced him to the world of Spiritism and séances. In 1964, Fellini experimented with LSD 25^[41] under the supervision of Emilio Servadio, his psychoanalyst during production of La strada.^[42] For years reserved about what actually occurred that Sunday afternoon, he admitted in 1992 that

"objects and their functions no longer had any significance. All I perceived was perception itself, the hell of forms and figures devoid of human emotion and detached from the reality of my unreal environment. I was an instrument in a virtual world that constantly renewed its own meaningless image in a living world that was itself perceived outside of nature. And since the appearance of things was no longer definitive but limitless, this paradisiacal awareness freed me from the reality external to my self. The fire and the rose, as it were, became one."^[43]

Fellini's hallucinatory insights were given full flower in his first colour feature Juliet of the Spirits (1965), depicting Giulietta Masina as a housewife, Juliet, who rightly suspects her husband's infidelity and succumbs to hearing voices of spirits summoned at a séance at her home. Her sexually voracious next door neighbor Suzy (Sandra Milo) introduces Juliet to a world of uninhibited sensuality but Juliet is haunted by childhood memories of her Catholic guilt and a teenaged friend who committed suicide. Complex and filled with psychological symbolism, the film is set to a jaunty score by Nino Rota.

Honours (1970–1980)[link]

Fellini received a lifetime achievement at the 27th Cannes Film Festival in 1974.

Amarcord, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age comedy, won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1975.^[44]

The following year Fellini's Casanova won the Oscar for Best Costumes (Danilo Donati).

Late films and projects (1981–1990)[link]

Organized by his publisher Diogenes Verlag in 1982, the first major exhibition of 63 drawings by Fellini was held in Paris, Brussels, and the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York.^[45] A gifted caricaturist, much of the inspiration for his sketches was derived from his own dreams while the films-in-progress both originated from and stimulated drawings for characters, decor, costumes and set designs. Under the title, I disegni di Fellini (Fellini’s Designs), he published 350 drawings executed in pencil, watercolours, and felt pens.^[46]

On September 6, 1985 Fellini was awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 42nd Venice Film Festival. That same year, he became the first non-American to receive the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s annual award for cinematic achievement.

Long fascinated by Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, Fellini accompanied the Peruvian author on a journey to the Yucatán to assess the feasibility of a film. After first meeting Castaneda in Rome in October 1984, Fellini drafted a treatment with Pinelli titled Viaggio a Tulun. Producer Alberto Grimaldi, prepared to buy film rights to all of Castaneda’s work, then paid for pre-production research taking Fellini and his entourage from Rome to Los Angeles and the jungles of Mexico in October 1985.^[47] When Castaneda inexplicably disappeared and the project fell through, Fellini’s mystico-shamanic adventures were scripted with Pinelli and serialized in Corriere della Sera in May 1986. A barely veiled satirical interpretation of Castaneda's work,^[48] Viaggio a Tulun was published in 1989 as a graphic novel with artwork by Milo Manara and as Trip to Tulum in America in 1990.

For Intervista, produced by Ibrahim Moussa and RAI Television, Fellini intercut memories of the first time he visited Cinecittà in 1939 with present-day footage of himself at work on a screen adaptation of Franz Kafka’s Amerika. A meditation on the nature of memory and film production, it won the special 40th Anniversary Prize at Cannes and the 15th Moscow Film Festival Grand Prize. In Brussels later that year, a panel of thirty professionals from eighteen European countries named Fellini the world’s best director and 8½ the best European film of all time.^[49]

In early 1989 Fellini began production on The Voice of the Moon, based on Ermanno Cavazzoni’s novel, Il poema dei lunatici (The Lunatics’ Poem). A small town was built at Empire Studios on the via Pontina outside Rome. Starring Roberto Benigni as Ivo Salvini, a madcap poetic figure newly released from a mental institution, the character is a combination of La strada's Gelsomina, Pinocchio, and Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi.^[50] Fellini improvised as he filmed, using as a guide a rough treatment written with Pinelli.^[51] Despite its modest critical and commercial success in Italy, and its warm reception by French critics, it failed to interest North American distributors.

Fellini won the Praemium Imperiale, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the visual arts, awarded by the Japan Art Association in 1990.^[52]

Final years (1991–1993)[link]

In July 1991 and April 1992, Fellini worked in close collaboration with Canadian filmmaker Damian Pettigrew to establish "the longest and most detailed conversations ever recorded on film".^[53] Described as the "Maestro's spiritual testament” by his biographer Tullio Kezich,^[54] excerpts culled from the conversations later served as the basis of their feature documentary, Fellini: I'm a Born Liar (2002) and the book, I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon. Finding it increasingly difficult to secure financing for feature films, he developed a suite of television projects whose titles reflect their subjects: Attore, Napoli, L’Inferno, L’opera lirica, and L’America.

In April 1993, Fellini received his fifth Oscar for lifetime achievement "in recognition of his cinematic accomplishments that have thrilled and entertained audiences worldwide". On June 16, he entered the Cantonal Hospital in Zurich for an "angioplasty on his femoral artery"^[55] but suffered a stroke at the Grand Hotel in Rimini two months later. Partially paralyzed, he was first transferred to Ferrara for rehabilitation and then to the Policlinico Umberto I in Rome to be near his wife, also hospitalized. He suffered a second stroke and fell into an irreversible coma. Fellini died in Rome on October 31 at the age of 73, a day after his fiftieth wedding anniversary. The memorial service was held in Studio 5 at Cinecittà attended by an estimated “70,000 people”.^[56] At the request of Giulietta Masina, trumpeter Mauro Maur played the "Improvviso dell'Angelo" by Nino Rota during the funeral ceremony.^[57] Five months later on March 23, 1994, Giulietta Masina died of lung cancer.

Fellini, Masina and their son Pierfederico are buried in a bronze sepulchre sculpted by Arnaldo Pomodoro. Designed as a ship's prow, the tomb is located at the main entrance to the Cemetery of Rimini. The Federico Fellini Airport in Rimini is named in his honour.

Influence and legacy[link]

Dedicatory plaque to Fellini on Via Veneto, Rome:
To Federico Fellini, who made Via Veneto the stage for the "Sweet Life" - SPQR - January 20, 1995

Personal and highly idiosyncratic visions of society, Fellini's films are a unique combination of memory, dreams, fantasy and desire. The adjectives "Fellinian" and "Felliniesque" are "synonymous with any kind of extravagant, fanciful, even baroque image in the cinema and in art in general".^[3] La Dolce Vita contributed the term paparazzi to the English language, derived from Paparazzo, the photographer friend of journalist Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni).^[58]

Contemporary filmmakers such as Woody Allen, Pedro Almodovar, Tim Burton,^[59] Terry Gilliam,^[60] Emir Kusturica,^[61] David Lynch,^[62] Girish Kasaravalli, David Cronenberg, Martin Scorsese, and Juraj Jakubisko have cited Fellini's influence on their work.

Polish director, Wojciech Has, whose two major films, The Saragossa Manuscript (1965) and The Hour-Glass Sanatorium (1973) are examples of modernist fantasies, has been compared to Fellini for the sheer "luxuriance of his images".^[63]

I Vitelloni inspired European directors Juan Antonio Bardem, Marco Ferreri, and Lina Wertmuller and had an influence on Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973), George Lucas's American Graffiti (1974), Joel Schumacher's St. Elmo's Fire (1985), and Barry Levinson's Diner (1987), among many others.^[64] When the American magazine Cinema asked Stanley Kubrick in 1963 to name his favorite films, the film director listed I Vitelloni as number one in his Top 10 list.^[65]

Nights of Cabiria was adapted as the Broadway musical Sweet Charity and the movie Sweet Charity (1969) by Bob Fosse starring Shirley MacLaine.

8½ inspired among others: Mickey One (Arthur Penn, 1965), Alex in Wonderland (Paul Mazursky, 1970), Beware of a Holy Whore (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1971), Day for Night (François Truffaut, 1973), All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979), Stardust Memories (Woody Allen, 1980), Sogni d'oro (Nanni Moretti, 1981), Parad Planet (Vadim Abdrashitov, 1984), La Pelicula del rey (Carlos Sorin, 1986), Living in Oblivion (Tom DiCillo, 1995), 8½ Women (Peter Greenaway, 1999), Falling Down (Joel Schumacher, 1993), along with the successful Broadway musical, Nine (Maury Yeston and Arthur Kopit, 1982).^[66] Yo-Yo Boing! (1998), a Spanish novel by Puerto Rican writer Giannina Braschi, features a dream sequence with Fellini that was inspired by 8½.^{[citation needed]}

City of Women was adapted for the Berlin stage by Frank Castorf in 1992.

Fellini’s work is referenced on the albums Fellini Days (2001) by Fish and Funplex (2008) by the B-52's with the song Juliet of the Spirits, and in the opening traffic jam of the music video Everybody Hurts by R.E.M.^[67] It influenced two American TV shows, Northern Exposure and Third Rock from the Sun.^[68]

Certain of his film related material and personal papers are contained in the Wesleyan University Cinema Archives to which scholars and media experts from around the world may have full access.^[69] In October 2009, the Jeu de Paume in Paris opened an exhibit devoted to Fellini, running through to January 2010. The exhibition included Fellini ephemera, television interviews, behind-the-scenes photographs, and excerpts from La dolce vita and 8½. It also featured the Book of Dreams based on 30 years of illustrations and notes by Fellini.^[70]

Awards[link]

Selected awards and nominations[link]

• Rome, Open City (Dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1945)
  • Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay (with Sergio Amidei)

• Paisà (Dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1946)
  • Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay (with Sergio Amidei, Alfred Hayes, Marcello Pagliero, and Rossellini)

• I Vitelloni (1953)
  • Venice Film Festival Silver Lion
  • Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay (with Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano)

• La Strada (1954)
  • Venice Film Festival Silver Lion
  • Oscar for the Best Foreign Language Film^[71]
  • Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay (with Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano)
  • New York Film Critics Award for Best Foreign Film
  • Screen Directors Guild Award for Best Foreign Film

• Nights of Cabiria (1957)
  • Festival de Cannes Best Actress Award (Giulietta Masina)^[72]
  • Oscar for the Best Foreign Language Film^[73]

• La Dolce Vita (1960)
  • Palme d'Or at Festival de Cannes
  • Oscar Best Costumes in B&W (Piero Gherardi)
  • Oscar nominations for Best Director, Best Screenplay (with Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, Brunello Rondi), Best Art and Set Direction
  • New York Film Critics Award for Best Foreign Language Film
  • National Board of Review citation for Best Foreign Language Film

• 8½ (Otto e Mezzo, 1963)
  • Moscow International Film Festival Grand Prize
  • Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film^[74]
  • Oscar for Best Costumes in B&W (Piero Gherardi)
  • Oscar nomination for Best Director
  • Oscar nomination for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration in B&W (Piero Gherardi)
  • Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists Silver Ribbons for Best Cinematography in B&W (Gianni Di Venanzo), Best Director (Federico Fellini), Best Original Story (Fellini and Flaiano), Best Producer (Angelo Rizzoli), Best Score (Nino Rota), Best Screenplay (Fellini, Pinelli, Flaiano, Rondi), and Best Supporting Actress (Sandra Milo)
  • Berlin Film Festival Special Award
  • BAFTA Film Award nomination for Best Film from any Source
  • Bodil Award for Best European Film
  • Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures
  • New York Film Critics Award for Best Foreign Film
  • National Board of Review Award for Best Foreign Language Picture
  • Grolla d’Oro at Saint Vincent Film Festival for Best Director
  • Kinema Junpo Award for Best Foreign Language Film & Best Foreign Language Film Director

• Juliet of the Spirits (1965)
  • New York Film Critics Award for Best Foreign Film
  • National Board of Review Award for Best Foreign Language Story
  • Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film

• Satyricon (1969)
  • Oscar nomination for Best Director^[75]

• I clowns (1970)
  • National Board of Review citation for Best Foreign Language Film

• Amarcord (1974)
  • Oscar for Best Foreign Film^[44]
  • Oscar nomination for Best Director
  • Oscar nomination for Best Writing, Original Screenplay
  • New York Film Critics Award for Best Direction
  • New York Film Critics Award for Best Motion Picture

• Fellini's Casanova (1976)
  • Oscar for Best Costumes (Danilo Donati)

• Intervista (1987)
  • Moscow International Film Festival Grand Prize
  • Festival de Cannes Special 40th Anniversary Prize

• The Voice of the Moon (1990)
  • David di Donatello Awards for Best Actor, Best Production Design, and Best Editing

Distinctions[link]

• 1974
  • 27th Cannes Film Festival Lifetime Achievement Award (with French director René Clair)

• 1967
  • Grande Ufficiale OMRI^[76]

• 1985
  • 42nd Venice Film Festival Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement
  • Film Society of Lincoln Center Award for Cinematic Achievement

• 1987
  • Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI^[77]

• 1989
  • Lifetime Achievement Award - European Film Awards

• 1990
  • Japan Art Association's Praemium Imperiale (equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the visual arts)

• 1993
  • Oscar for Lifetime Achievement

Filmography[link]

Major screenplay contributions[link]

• L'ultima carrozzella (1943) (dir. Mario Mattoli) Co-scriptwriter
• Roma, città aperta (1945) (dir. Roberto Rossellini) Co-scriptwriter
• Paisà (1946) (dir. Roberto Rossellini). Co-scriptwriter
• Il delitto di Giovanni Episcopo (1947) (dir. Alberto Lattuada) Co-scriptwriter
• Senza pietà (1948) (dir. Alberto Lattuada) Co-scriptwriter
• Il miracolo (1948) (dir. Roberto Rossellini) Co-scriptwriter
• Il mulino del Po (1949) (dir. Alberto Lattuada) Co-scriptwriter
• Francesco, giullare di Dio (1950) (dir. Roberto Rossellini) Co-scriptwriter
• Il Cammino della speranza (1950) (dir. Pietro Germi) Co-scriptwriter
• La città si difende (1951) (dir. Pietro Germi) Co-scriptwriter
• Persiane chiuse (1951) (dir. Luigi Comencini) Co-scriptwriter
• Il brigante di Tacca del Lupo (1952) (dir. Pietro Germi) Co-scriptwriter
• Fortunella (1979) (dir. Eduardo De Filippo) Co-scriptwriter
• Lovers and Liars (1979) (dir. Mario Monicelli) Fellini not credited