Federico Fellini, the film director who won 4 Oscars

The vision that acclaimed film director Federico Fellini It had what should be the cinematographic spectacle was very particular. His movies mesmerized the viewer with scripts full of unique characters and surprising scenes, that time has been in charge of incorporating into our collective imagination. Federico Felini was born on January 20, 1920 in the city of Rimini, facing the Adriatic sea. He said of himself that he was “a craftsman who has nothing to say, but knows how to say it”, and the fact is that the filmmaker, who has become a legend of the seventh art, unintentionally incorporated a new adjective into the cinematographic vocabulary: “felliniano “.

The influence of American classics

Federico Fellini was the son of a street vendor and a housewife. From an early age he was fascinated by the world of entertainment. Thus, at the age of eight, and according to what he would recount much later in an interview, he ran away from home for a while to join a circus company. During his school years, little Federico discovered the work of the American cartoonist Winsor McCay, creator of the Little Nemo character, which sparked his passion for drawing. His talent as a cartoonist earned him a contract to paint the portraits of the protagonists of the films that were released at the Fulgor Cinema in his hometown. Fellini’s childhood and youth were also greatly influenced by his fascination with Charlie Chaplin’s films. and American comedians, to the point that in 1966 he declared: “It is evident that the intense reading of these stories, at an age in which the emotional reactions are so immediate and frequent, it conditioned my taste for adventure, the fantastic, the grotesque and the comic. In this sense it is possible to find a deep relationship between my works and those of North American comics”.

During his school years, little Federico discovered his passion for drawing thanks to the work of American cartoonist Winsor McCay, creator of the Little Nemo character.

Around 1938, Fellini got a job as a draftsman at the daily La Domenica del Corriere, and also worked for Il 420, an important Florentine satirical magazine directed by Giusepe Nerbini. Fellini also collaborated as a scriptwriter on the series flash gordon at a time when Mussolini’s fascist government banned American comics and therefore Italian writers had to figure out how to continue the series for Italian readers. At the beginning of 1939, Fellini moved to Rome under the pretext of studying law, although in reality his intention was to become a journalist. He actually worked three weeks as a reporter in the newspaper Il Popolo and established a deep friendship with the actor Alberto Sordi, relationship that would last a lifetime and which the filmmaker would narrate in his film allow yourself? Alberto Sordi.

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Italian Neorealism

In 1941, Fellini began his collaboration with the Italian Ente Audizioni Radiofoniche (EIAR) as a screenwriter. There he met a young debutant actress named Giulietta Masina who, like him, was trying to achieve a professional future in the capital and with which a relationship would begin that would end in a marriage that would last fifty years (although it was not without its ups and downs). Fellini signed more than ninety scripts, including music and radio programs, and the famous series The adventure of Cico and Pallina (The adventures of Cico and Pallina). In 1944, Fellini met the director Roberto Rossellini, and worked as a screenwriter on the Oscar-winning film, a pioneer of Italian neorealism, Rome, open city (1945). On March 22, 1945, Federico and Giuletta had a son they named Pier Federico, who died a few days after his birth.

Fellini met the director Roberto Rossellini, becoming one of the screenwriters for the Oscar-winning ‘Rome, an Open City’, a pioneering film of Italian neorealism.

By then, Fellini had become one of Italy’s most acclaimed screenwriters. He collaborated for directors of recognized prestige such as Alberto Lattuada (Mercilessly Y The mill of the Po), Pietro Germi (in the name of the law Y The city defends itself) and to Luigi Comencini (Behind the closed blinds), in addition to participating in the Rossellini film of the year 1946 country and also in the miraculousfrom 1948, as well as in one of the chapters of the film l’amorewhere he himself played a homeless man who impregnates a peasant woman who believes that she is the reincarnation of Saint Joseph. In 1952, Fellini made his first solo film, white sceico (The White Sheikh), starring comedian Alberto Sordi and in which he would meet the musician Nino Rota, who from then on would be one of his closest collaborators.

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Neorealism icon

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Fellini’s memories

In 1953 Fellini directed the useless, a film in which the Italian director narrates the adventures of a group of young people from the Adriatic coast who have never worked in their lives and for which he would receive critical acclaim. With it he won the Silver Lion at La Mostra de Venecia. In 1954 he directed the streeta film starring Anthony Quinn and his wife, Giulietta Masina, in which a brutal circus manager buys a girl who ends up loving him. the road it won the Oscar for best foreign film, and the musical theme by Nino Rota became a complete success. The second Oscar would come with The news of Cabiri (The nights of Cabiria, 1957) a film starring his muse, Giulietta Massina, in which the actress plays a prostitute looking for love, but only gets humiliation and disappointment.

In 1953, Fellini directed ‘The Useless’, a film in which the Italian director narrates the adventures of a group of young people from the Adriatic coast who have never worked in their lives. With it he won the Silver Lion at La Mostra de Venecia.

After his neorealist period, Fellini will begin to enter a world of fantasy where he dives into the deepest truths of his life: “They take me as an autobiographical director, and I must say that my autobiography is completely made up. The most accurate memories are the ones I put in the movies,” he would declare in an interview. In 1960 what is perhaps his most famous film would be released, and at the same time more controversial, la dolce vita. In the film, Fellini reflects the hectic nightlife of the bourgeois society of Rome in those years through Marcello Rubini, a journalist played by Marcello Mastroianni. The film shows the disenchantment of Roman high society who, despite living in a world of tinsel, faces a constant state of apathy.

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an acclaimed director

Eight and a half (1963) is another of the most acclaimed films in Fellini’s filmography, Awarded with the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. According to the director himself, the meaning of the film’s title is due to the number of films he had shot up to that moment, seven feature films and two shorts, and in it Mastroianni appears who plays a film director, perhaps himself. Fellini, who is attacked by a creative paralysis. Overwhelmed by the scriptwriters, the odd annoying actress, a wife who no longer loves him and a crazy lover, the director takes refuge in his childhood memories and in an unattainable love embodied by the actress Claudia Cardinale. In 1967, a Fellini harassed by health problems, began to prepare the shooting of one of his most introspective and ambitious films: The journey of G. Mastorna, an adaptation of the 1941 novel crazy universeby American writer Fredric Brown. But the filming would be affected by numerous problems and in the end the director had to abandon the project.

‘Eight and a half’ is one of Fellini’s most acclaimed films, awarded with the Oscar for best foreign film. According to the director himself, the title of the film is due to the number of films he had shot up to then.

Despite the fact that film critics consider Casanovashot in 1976, as the last of Fellini’s great personal creations, an adaptation of the satiricon for Petronio made in 1970 was nominated for an Oscar for best direction. In 1975, Fellini would win his fourth Oscar for the film Amarcord, in which the filmmaker tells the story of characters who live in a fictional city called Borgo, inspired by his native Rimini. The burgeoning North American cinema would end up relegating films like La citta delle donne (the city of women, 1980), and the ship goes (1983) and his latest feature film, the voice of the moon (The voice of the Moon, 1990). In all of them, Fellini applied all the irony that he was capable of to topics that were beginning to be in the limelight at that time, such as the role of men in a society where women were beginning to gain relevance or the infantilizing effects that television produces on men. viewers.

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A cinema farewell

In April 1993 Fellini received an Oscar. career honorary “in recognition of his cinematic achievements, which have thrilled and entertained audiences around the world,” the gala said. On June 16, he underwent femoral artery angioplasty, but two months later he suffered a stroke that left him partially immobilized. The filmmaker suffered a second stroke that would plunge him into an irreversible coma. Federico Fellini died in Rome on October 31, 1993 at the age of 73. A commemorative event was held at Cinecittà Studio 5, attended by 70,000 people, and at the express wish of his widow, Giulietta Masina, Mauro Maur’s trumpet playing the notes of Improvviso dell’Angeloof his great friend and collaborator Nino Rota, dismissed Federico Fellini, one of the most celebrated film directors of all time, forever.