The impact of Fellini’s work continues to be felt by his fellow directors, including Martin Scorsese, Terry Gilliam and Paolo Sorrentino.
A Fellini memorabilia collection is coming to Toronto’s Distillery District on June 27th. Here is some background on the celebrated director.
On Italy’s effervescent postwar cultural scene, it was Federico Fellini who defined the new role of the film director.
“Fellini is important because he was probably the first internationally recognized film auteur star: His name was put in front of the title of the film, Fellini’s Casanova, Fellini Satyricon,” said Alberto Zambenedetti, a cinema professor at the University of Toronto. “He was the first director to have that kind of aura about him.”
He began his rise to international prominence in the late 1950s with melodramatic stories such as that of La Strada, in which his wife Giulietta Masina plays an abused young street performer, and Nights of Cabiria, in which she is cast as a prostitute. These were the films that won him his first two of five Oscars.
In 1960, La Dolce Vita marked the beginnings of his mature style, which would deploy episodic and self-referential storytelling, dream sequences and startling imagery. His biggest commercial hit, it was a dark piece following the philandering tabloid journalist Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni) as he prowls Rome sporadically seeking some greater purpose than sex. Paradoxically, the film, which ends with a murder/suicide by Marcello’s intellectual mentor, gave its name, meaning the sweet life, to glamorous Italian style.
“If you actually watch the film, it’s a very dark, slow, ponderous film,” Zambenedetti said. “It’s not a happy story but Marcello Mastroianni looked cool in a suit.”
Today, Fellini’s oeuvre is something of a niche interest. At Queen’s University, the Fellini scholar Frank Burke often finds that he is introducing his students to the director.
“There was a time in the late 20th century when he was mentioned in the same breath as Picasso. Now you have to tell people who Fellini is. Picasso’s paintings hang in museums and are photographed and seen, but film is ephemeral.”
Still, the impact of Fellini’s work continues to be felt by his fellow directors, including Martin Scorsese, Terry Gilliam and Paolo Sorrentino. Meanwhile, the internet tosses up memes of the bespectacled Mastroianni, playing a tortured film director in the Oscar-winning 8½, and gifs of Masina’s sweetly clowning face.
Today’s film researchers, often troubled by Fellini’s womanizing heroes and free-wheeling take on gender politics, are considering how to reinterpret the director, who would have turned 100 in 2020. Zambenedetti’s students include one who is writing her thesis on the work that Masina, an Italian star in her own right, did in theatre and television without her famous husband, while another undergraduate built an archive of Fellini memes and clips.
“His imagery keeps cropping up,” Zambenedetti said.