Federico Felini

Federico Fellini (Rimini, January 20, 1920 – Rome, October 31, 1993) began as a journalist and was a songwriter and cartoonist. Scriptwriter and assistant director, he joined the cinema in 1942, also contributing to the birth of the neorealist movement together with Roberto Rossellini , with whom he collaborated on the scripts for Roma, ciudad abierta and Paisà ; but maintaining his own personality and without losing the poetic style that has meant him as an author. This fact is evidenced in La Strada (1954) and Las noches de Cabiria (1957), performed by his wife, the great actress Giulietta Masina .

Fellini, a cultivator of art for art’s sake, expressed himself with a somewhat excessive lyricism that became an admirable symbiosis between subjectivized fantasy and reality. A shrewd illustrator of the human spirit, with its values ​​and its miseries, the famous Italian filmmaker builds impressive psychic-social portraits ( The useless , La dolce vita ). His overflowing frescoes, despite the decadent excesses of dubious taste and anti-clerical touches ( Roma (1972) , The City of Women ), have a certain moralizing and intellectual character regarding the condition of Humanity and its chaotic future ( Satyricon ) . .

Federico Fellini made use of a singular aesthetic, which was based more on poetic intuition than on a perfectly measured cinematographic technique. Hence his cinema was more vitalist than rational ( Fellini 8 y 1/2 , Amarcord ), with a strong tendency towards surrealism. He was also influenced by the conception of the circus show, which he would perfectly evoke in his masterpiece for TV: The Clowns (1970), which would also premiere on the big screen. In this regard, he stated: “My cinema owes a lot to the world of the circus. Clowns have been for me the ambassadors of my vocation as a showman”.

However, its metaphorical form contains a baroque style ( Giulietta of the Spirits , Fellini’s Casanova ) that sometimes breaks out in intimate orgy, or in large crowded scenes: parties, parades, the circus, processions or the bacchanalia… This is where Fellini’s creative mastery is truly appreciated as he mastered the editing and the global conception of the sequences; although not as a narrator in the traditional sense, but with a carousel of images that externalize his interior. And it is that possibly his starting point was closer to life-that-passes, with its chaotic and indefinable multiplicity, than to the idea or the pure image. That is why, taking his footing in the concrete, he raised his critical fable through a very personal lyricism (And the ship goes , The voice of the moon ) that did not save, sometimes, certain ugliness.

With an agnostic tendency and a Catholic background, Fellini was accused of being a revolutionary and a crypto-Marxist; he had also declared: “My films revolve around loving others. They show a world without love – people who exploit others – in which an insignificant being wants to contribute love and lives on love”. Idealism that never excluded social criticism, and that over time became somewhat skeptical and bombastic.

It is obvious, then, that between the life and the work of Federico Fellini there is an enormous rapport. It has even been said that each tape constitutes his present life, worried about aging and death. For this reason his work was profoundly autobiographical, a vital need to express his inner universe. He built, with a team of excellent collaborators and in the Cinecittà Roman studios, huge sets, rich in color, imagination and expressiveness. Likewise, Nino Rota gave brilliance to the unusual Fellinian work with his unforgettable music. 

Fellini was a dreamlike and visionary creator, repetitive and somewhat narcissistic, since he sometimes included his own name in the titles of his films, and every day he suffered more difficulties to continue working, due to the lack of financing for his ambitious projects. .