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FEDERICO FELLINI
In August of 1970, I purchased a copy of Esquire because of its cover story titled “The New Movies: Faith of Our Children.” Part of the piece involved several directors directing their own photographs of themselves. Federico Fellini posed next to a realistic life-size sculpture of a stegosaurus: a dozen feet tall, twenty-five feet long, and weighing four tons, with upright plates on its back and long spikes on its tail. This is perfect, I thought.
Fellini loved the bizarre and knew how to make it enchant us -- a giant billboard model comes to life; a statue of Jesus hangs from a helicopter above Rome. His films are full of beautiful women (Claudia Cardinale, Anita Ekberg, his wife Giulietta Masina) and dashing men (Marcello Mastroianni, Anthony Quinn, Donald Sutherland). He used almost surreal colors and costumes, frequent nudity (or was it really?), and Nino Rota’s fabulous music.
Maybe one shouldn’t try to describe a Fellini film, but simply watch it and let it wash over you. Remember that he shot most of his twenty or so features in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, when most of today’s technical trickery did not exist, and when almost all films were in another dimension from the Fellini-esque.
The director won five Academy Awards, five at the Venice Film Festival, two at Cannes, and dozens more elsewhere. Herewith, my Completely Subjective List of favorite films directed by Federico Fellini:
La Dolce Vita
8 ½
Juliet of the Spirits
Nights of Cabiria
La Strada
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