Federico Fellini (20 Ιανουαρίου 1920 – 1993)

Federico Fellini, 1965. Paris Match/Pictorial Parade

Ο Ιταλός σκηνοθέτης Federico Fellini [20 Ιανουαρίου 1920 στο Ρίμινι – 31 Οκτωβρίου 1993 στη Ρώμη] υπήρξε από τους διασημότερους κινηματογραφιστές της περιόδου μετά από το Δεύτερο Παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο. Τις ταινίες του, λίγο-πολύ τις έχουν δει εκατομμύρια άνθρωποι σε όλο τον κόσμο. Και είναι φυσικά γνωστές: La strada, La dolce vita, Otto e mezzo [8 ¹/₂], Satyricon κ.ά.

(From left) Giulietta Masina, Anthony Quinn, and Aldo Silvani in La strada (1954), directed by Federico Fellini.

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.

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.

Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg in La dolce vita (1960), directed by Federico Fellini.

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.

Fellini made his debut as director in collaboration with Lattuada on Luci del varietà (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...

[συνέχεια:Encyclopædia Britannica]