"You want everything to be well made and reasonable, and you'd rather die than see anything vulgar. "You critics and your good taste," he snarled. I once criticized Fellini to a young director whose film had just won at Cannes, and he glared at me. Still, to belabor such faults, especially in a centenary year, is to miss why people love him. Yet when the maestro's inspiration flagged, his work increasingly fell into Felliniesque self-parody - a bombastic world of clowns, buxom prostitutes, flatulent school children and retrograde sexual politics that looked worse with each passing year. You'd walk from the theater humming the music by Nino Rota. At his best, he created visually dazzling set pieces as in the wonderful memory film Amarcord, with its breathtaking visions of a peacock in the snow and an ocean liner emerging in the night, and in Roma, with its unforgettable drive through Roman traffic in a downpour and its hilariously blasphemous Vatican fashion show, complete with priests on roller skates. And so his theme became himself - and his own creativity.įrom then on, his films were ultimately about the imaginative genius of Fellini, whose name became a marketing tool, as in Fellini Satyricon and Fellini's Casanova, both of them pretty bad. Yet just like Guido, Fellini's success had cut him off from his roots in history and the everyday world.
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It transformed him into the very embodiment of the movie director - countless filmmakers wanted to be him. Routinely ranked as one of the 10 greatest films of all time, 8½ marked Fellini's peak. Beloved by other directors who keep copying it - most recently by Pedro Almodóvar's Pain and Glory - 8½'s gorgeous black-and-white images explode with the brio of a man who portrays his inner life as a circus. His next film, 8½, again stars Mastroianni, this time as Guido Anselmi, a Fellini-like filmmaker who can't think of a subject for his next film and spends his time juggling writers, producers, mistresses, his wife and his personal fantasies. At once glamorous and preachy, the film - which is still powerful - perfectly caught a 1960 zeitgeist torn between the embrace of booming post-war materialism and a sense of its hollowness. And seven years later, his life changed forever with La Dolce Vita, a worldwide sensation about modern decadence in which a journalist, played by Fellini's alter-ego star, Marcello Mastroianni, splashes around in the Trevi Fountain with sexy Anita Ekberg before getting all alienated and bummed. It's my favorite of his films - a smart, funny, sneakily touching portrait of five young men idling away their lives in a coastal town.įellini was hungrier than they were. Indeed, he drew on his own life for his first, and often emulated masterpiece, 1953's I Vitelloni (which means something like The Lazy Calves). Thompson once termed the "enormous condescension of posterity." He's often treated as one of those artists that a less enlightened age than our own used to think a genius.īorn 100 years ago in the coastal city of Rimini, Fellini was a child of the provinces whose early films were anchored to the real world he knew. His reputation now suffers from what the historian E.P. His maximalist showmanship - nobody ever left a Fellini film grumbling about the small portions - has fallen out of fashion. Lavishly Italianate in his earthiness, Fellini was cinema's great laureate of the id.īut over the years his reputation has dipped badly, especially among critics.
Their panache inspired generations of directors, from Martin Scorsese and Wong Kar-wai to Woody Allen and Guillermo del Toro. La Strada, La Dolce Vita, 8½, Roma, Amarcord - these weren't merely films that all serious filmgoers raced off to see. Back then, he was an international brand name, and aside from Hitchcock, probably the most famous director in the world. The first foreign filmmaker I ever heard of was Federico Fellini. Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni and Swedish actor Anita Ekberg hold hands in a scene from Federico Fellini's 1960 film La Dolce Vita.Īmerican International Pictures/Getty Images
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