Fellini, Legendary Film Director of Italy, Dies : Cinema: The five-time Oscar winner translated highly personal material into phantasmagorical screen images.
Federico Fellini, five-time Academy Award-winning director whose movies could be defined internationally in a single word, “Fellini-esque,†died Sunday in a Rome hospital two weeks after he fell into a coma. He was 73.
Fellini, who suffered heart failure and went into a coma Oct. 17, died at Umberto Primo Hospital of cardiac arrest. His brain stopped functioning Thursday and doctors abandoned hope for his recovery. He had been ill since a stroke in August.
“An immense void remains in the richness of Italian art,†Italian President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro said in a message to actress Giulietta Masina, who observed the 50th anniversary of her wedding to Fellini only Saturday.
“A great light has gone out,†said actress Sophia Loren from her California ranch.
Actor Marcello Mastroianni, whom Fellini cast as the archetypal Latin lover in “La Dolce Vita†and who starred in many of his other films, grasped for words: “How can I capture in a comment the genius of a director and my sincere friendship with him? It would be better to reflect in order to understand how great this man was.â€
In Los Angeles, Directors Guild of America President Gene Reynolds said: “Fellini was an uncompromising genius, individualistic, drawing from the storehouse of his own personal experience. He was courageous, always in pursuit of the truth, instinctive and surprising. We’ve lost a poet in film.â€
The term “Fellini-esque,†coined from the Italian filmmaker’s name, evokes an orgy of rich, roiling carnival-like imagery, leering gargoyle faces and sumptuous decadence. But this phantasmagoria is by no means all that Fellini conjured up in his directorial career.
His legend began with such early classics as “La Strada,†which in 1954 won him his first Oscar, and “Nights of Cabiria,†which won him another in 1957.
His reputation grew through the scandalous “La Dolce Vita†in 1960, which was condemned by the Vatican as obscene because of its portrayal of decadence and promiscuity, but which won the prestigious Palme d’Or at Cannes.
His masterpiece “8 1/2†and “Amarcord†won him two more Oscars in 1963 and 1974. His final films, “L’ Intervista†(“The Interviewâ€) and “The Voice of the Moon,†brought to a close a career in which the artist’s stream of consciousness reached full flood.
Fellini was honored last March with a special Academy Award for lifetime achievement.
Il maestro (Italian for “the master†) or il mago (“the magicianâ€) was born Jan. 20, 1920, in the provincial town of Rimini on the Adriatic Coast. It was to be the location--either real or imagined--for some of his most resonant movies, including the 1953 “I Vitelloni,†his first international success, and, much later, “Amarcord.â€
Although Fellini once described his middle-class childhood in an interview as being exceptionally happy, his rebellions started early. As a boy of 7, or perhaps 12 (Fellini was always mischievously vague about the particulars of his autobiography) he briefly ran away with a traveling circus, returning to his parents within several days. The escapade opened his eyes to the tawdry magic of show business and set in motion one of his great passions--the circus as a metaphor for life’s experiences.
Another of his passions was fired when he was sent to a private boys academy 30 miles north of Rimini and incurred the wrath of the priests he mercilessly caricatured in sketches. (He was taught obedience by kneeling on kernels of dried corn.)
Heading for Florence in 1938, Fellini worked as a proofreader and newspaper comic-strip cartoonist, then moved on to Rome, intending to become a famous journalist.
Instead, he wrote satirical magazine pieces and radio comedy sketches and then hooked up with a group of bohemian writers and actors, including Aldo Fabrizi. The two set out on a countrywide tour of Italy with a traveling vaudeville troupe, where Fellini did everything from writing gags to painting sets.
Fellini described this period for The Saturday Evening Post in 1966: “That was perhaps the most important year of my life. I was overwhelmed by the variety of the country’s physical landscape and, too, by the variety of its human landscape. It was the kind of experience that few young men are fortunate enough to have--a chance to discover the character . . . of one’s own country and, at the same time, to discover one’s own identity.â€
When Fabrizi was given the lead role in a movie, the 1942 “Come On In, There’s Room,†Fellini was hired as a scriptwriter, and soon he was regularly scripting comedies.
A year later he met and married Masina, to whom he was first attracted after hearing her voice on a radio comedy series for which he had written. Masina was to become the star of some of his finest movies, most famously “Nights of Cabiria,†where she played a waif-like prostitute, and “La Strada,†where her moon-faced, clown-like Gelsomina was opposite Anthony Quinn’s brutal strongman Zampano.
After the liberation of Rome, Fellini opened an arcade, The Funny Face Shop, for American GIs, where he was visited by Roberto Rossellini. The documentary that Rossellini asked Fellini to help script turned into the pioneering 1945 dramatic feature “Open City,†one of the key works of the Italian neo-realist movement, which often used real locations and non-actors to convey the immediacy and squalor of experience.
A year later Fellini co-scripted and acted as assistant director on Rossellini’s extraordinary “Paisa†and scripted and acted opposite Anna Magnani in the director’s short film “The Miracle,†where he played a tramp who seduces a shepherdess who mistakes him for St. Joseph.
The film was Fellini’s first encounter with official displeasure. In the United States, conservative Catholics pressured the New York State Board of Regents into banning the film shortly after it opened in December, 1950. It took a year and a half of litigation before the U.S. Supreme Court finally reversed the ban.
By this time, Fellini was beginning to make inroads as a film director. “Variety Lights,†which he co-directed with Alberto Lattuada, drew on his traveling-player experiences. His next film, which he directed solo, the 1951 “The White Sheik,†starred Alberto Sordi and dealt broadly and affectionately with the world of fumetti , the Italian photo comic books.
It was Fellini’s next film, “I Vitelloni,†that signaled the arrival of a major artist. A movie about aimless youths in Rimini, it conveyed a deep-seated longing so personal and expressive that it won the Silver Lion award at the 1953 Venice Film Festival and gave Fellini his first international audience.
His next feature, “La Strada,†remains one of his most extraordinary achievements. It also moved Fellini away from the strictures of neo-realism and into a more fanciful, frankly lyrical realm. “Nights of Cabiria†not only brought Fellini his second Oscar but confirmed Masina’s gifts. (Charlie Chaplin called her “the actress I admire most.â€)
In 1960, “La Dolce Vita†featured Mastroianni, who would become Fellini’s closest and most frequent collaborator, as a journalist in a modern-day Rome awash in depravity and retribution. Mastroianni was playing, in effect, the Fellini role: the provincial who came to Rome and discovered corruption. The film’s famous images--such as the Valkyrean Anita Ekberg awash in the Trevi Fountains, or the statue of Christ being flown over Rome, or the shots of buzzing paparazzi --were eye-openers for art-house audiences accustomed to more sedate fare.
“La Dolce Vita†ushered in the high-style, party-giver period in Fellini’s career, and it signaled his fascination with the transgressions of the moneyed classes. (Up until this point his movies had always been about the poor and the working class.)
His next feature-length film, “8 1/2,†was a genre unto itself: the autobiographical phantasmagoria. The film’s title referred to the number of films--seven features and three shorts--that Fellini had made up until that time. Mastroianni played Guido, the famous film director who has run into a creative block, and yet the film seemed to unblock a vivid storehouse of the director’s personal memories and inspirations.
Fellini came as close in that film as any film artist ever has to transferring dream states onto film. The Oscar winner became the inspiration of directors as disparate as Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese and Paul Mazursky, who, in his “Alex in Wonderland,†actually got Fellini to appear as himself in a cameo.
With “Juliet of the Spirits,†Fellini’s first color film, he moved further into the fantastical, attempting to create a tutti-frutti, dream-like whirligig. Masina’s Juliet escaped into her florid dreams in that film, and some critics began to question whether Fellini himself was escaping into ever more flamboyantly private fantasies in his films.
“Fellini Satyricon†in 1969 was ostensibly derived from Petronius but bubbled up its Roman orgy excesses from what appeared to be a Cecil B. De Mille fever dream.
“The Clowns†in 1970 brought Fellini partway back to Earth, as he celebrated, mostly through interviews, the survivors of the circus clown tradition that had so enraptured him as a child.
Another quasi-documentary, “Fellini’s Roma†in 1972, was vivid and impressionistic--a swirling paean to a city that had become as central to his artistic imagination as the mythical Yoknapatawpha County had been to William Faulkner.
“Amarcord†in 1974, which brought Fellini his fourth Oscar, was a return to his Rimini roots, and in the opinion of most critics, his finest film since “8 1/2.†It was simpler and more heartfelt than the films he had been making, and it was flush with resplendent imagery, such as the shot of a peacock suddenly spreading its blue and gold tail into the snowy night.
Fellini worked out private themes in his movies with such intensity that there often seemed to be no division between the artist and his autobiography. But “Amarcord†had a retrospective power that seemed to touch him in a way that his more recent and much of his subsequent work failed to do.
“Fellini’s Casanova†in 1976, with a leering, dispirited Donald Sutherland in the title role, turned off many of Fellini’s most loyal audiences. Fellini the celebrated cinematic orgiast had turned sour and chilly.
Fellini made an uneven attempt at political satire with “Orchestra Rehearsal,†which he made for Italian television, with the warring orchestra members symbolizing Italy’s warring factions.
“City of Women†in 1980 showcased Mastroianni as a kind of randy, beleaguered Everyman adrift in a swirl of predatory females and provoked charges of misogyny.
“And the Ship Sails On†in 1983 was waterlogged with metaphor--its 1914 luxury ocean liner was the most metaphorical vessel since Katherine Anne Porter’s “Ship of Foolsâ€--but the film was superbly designed and full of wonderful, stylized shots of the ocean liner moving royally into the voluminous fog.
Fellini’s last film to receive wide distribution in America, “Ginger and Fred†in 1986, brought Mastroianni and Masina together as aging dance hall stars reuniting for a television special. The film gave Fellini ample opportunities to target TV, which he had come to believe was the cause for the decline in the reception of his work.
His last two films, “L’ Intervista†and “The Voice of the Moon,†finally received limited U.S. distribution in the early 1990s, years after their completion.
In a 1993 interview with The Times in Rome, Fellini complained that “TV has distorted the taste of knowing how to narrate a story, look at an image, be together in silence, to go into the theater and wait for the lights to go out.â€
Fellini, for all his air of majesty, could be self-deprecating. In that same interview, he said, “When journalists ask me, all animated and with the best of intentions, ‘Why did you make that film?’ the answer is always the same:
“I sign a contract, I get an advance, I don’t want to give it back . . . and so I make the film.â€
His body will lie in state in a closed casket for the public to pay respects Tuesday in Studio 5 (where “La Dolca Vita†was filmed) of Cinecitta, the Italian film studio that became Fellini’s forum.
A funeral Mass will be said Wednesday by Rome Cardinal Achille Silvestrini in Santa Maria Degli Angeli church in Rome’s Piazza della Repubblica. Burial will be in Fellini’s native Rimini.
* MAKING SENSE OF SADNESS: Federico Fellini and River Phoenix touched our real and movie lives. F1
Federico Fellini: 1920-1993
Federico Fellini--a charismatic figure known for his extravagant temperament and individual style--has died at 73. Highlights of the five-time Academy Award winning director’s film career include:
* La Strada, 1954
* Le Notti di Cabiria (The Nights of Cabiria), 1957
* La Dolce Vita, 1960
* 8 1/2, 1963
* Fellini Satyricon, 1969
* I Clown (The Clowns), 1970 (for Italian television)
* Roma (Fellini’s Roma), 1972
* Amarcord, 1973
* Casanova, 1976
* La Citta delle Donne (City of Women), 1980
* Ginger e Fred (Ginger and Fred), 1986
* L’Intervista (The Interview), 1987
* La Voce della Luna (The Voice of the Moon), 1990
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