Italian Sketches by Deirdre Pirro

The Florentine Press

Deirdre Pirro

italian sketches the faces of modern Italy

Illustrations by

Leo Cardini

Book design: Marco Badiani, Agile Logica Cover, illustrations and layout: Leo Cardini, Agile Logica Editor: Linda Falcone, The Florentine Press Copyeditor: Ellen Wert, for The Florentine Press Proofreader: Giovanni Giusti, Agile Logica ISBN 978-88-902434-4-8 2009 B’Gruppo srl, Prato Collana The Florentine Press Riproduzione vietata

1st edition: June 2009 2nd edition: September 2009 All rights reserved © Deirdre Pirro © Leo Cardini

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

To receive information about The Florentine Press series or to obtain our catalogue write to: press@theflorentine.net or visit www.theflorentine.net

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Federico Fellini

D

uring a starless Roman night, the statuesque sex goddess, Anita Ekberg, wore a black strapless dress and stood thigh-deep in the water of the Trevi Fountain, her blond hair flowing about her shoulders. In her kittenish purr, the actress and former Miss Sweden beseeched her reluctant leading man, Marcello Mastroianni, ‘Marcello, come, join me’. This scene from the renowned director, Federico Fellini’s film La Dolce Vita (1960), is one of the most indelible in the history of Italian cinema.

From the moment it was released, La Dolce Vita made a huge impact.

Fellini’s reflections on the new affluence and moral dissipation gripping Italian society in the early years of its post-war economic boom provoked an uproar from conservatives who labelled the film as scandalous; he was even spat on at its premier in Milan. Fellini’s opening scene shows a helicopter flying above the rooftops of Rome, transporting a statue of Jesus Christ, a group of bikini-clad girls waving and cheering as it passes. Because of this scene and his declared anti-clericalism, Fellini offended the Vatican and the film was widely censored. Censorship, however, did little to stop the picture from grossing $10 million during its first year and successively bringing in another $8 million in America.

It made far more than any other foreign film released prior, catapulting Fellini out of his role as art film director forever.

La Dolce Vita was not Fellini’s first movie; his life had gone in several other directions before he actually began directing. Born on January 20, 1920 in Rimini, a provincial seaside resort on the Adriatic coast, he was brought up in a middle-class family. He attended a strict religious school before leaving home for Florence at 18, where he briefly worked as a proof-reader and cartoonist, a talent he would later use in drawing the sets and characters for his films. Moving to Rome, Fellini began working for a satirical magazine, Marc’ Aurelio, while enrolling to study law in order to avoid conscription just before World War II. At 19, he joined a travelling vaudeville troupe, writing skits and acting as factotum. Upon his return to Rome, he began writing radio and film scripts.

After meeting Roberto Rossellini, Fellini worked as assistant director on his groundbreaking film, Roma città aperta, before directing Luci del varietà, his own first film, made jointly with Alberto Lattuada, in 1950.

Following his first solo direction in Lo sceicco bianco (1952), he won his first award, the Silver Lion, at the Venice film festival in 1953 for I

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Federico Fellini

Vitelloni, his nostalgic tale of five provincial youths and their pranks.

Later, Fellini frequently went back to explore the theme of nostalgia, and regularly used Mastroianni to play his alter ego. The trilogy, I Clowns (1970), made for television, Roma (1972) and Amarcord (1974) together represent a bittersweet journey through Fellini’s personal memories.

International recognition came with La Strada (1954), set in a circus and starring Giulietta Masina (1920–1994), whom Fellini had married in 1943. As his muse, she would also appear in Le notti di Cabiria, (1957), Giulietta degli spiriti, (1965) and Ginger e Fred (1986). In La Strada, the film in which Fellini broke with neorealism, Masina played Gelsomina, the gentle, waif-like clown alongside Anthony Quinn, in the role of Zampanò, an abusive and violent strongman. The film explored another constant and more controversial thread which characterized Fellini’s view of the world, spotlighting his relationship with women.

Born before the advent of feminism, Fellini was fascinated-even awedby women, and he often drew a stereotype dichotomy between the faitful-virgin-wife-mother and the whore or big-busted, sex-object lover; the latter was usually played by sensuous and voluptuous women such as Ekberg, Maria Antonietta Beluzzi or Sandra Milo, another muse, with whom he is thought to have had an affair. No matter the category in which each of his women fell, they all seemed have some hidden secret to reveal, feeding his sort of ageless adolescent hunger to relive the fear and excitement his first ‘sinful’ erotic experiences.

A large, loquacious and exuberant man, famous for wearing a widebrimmed black fedora, a long scarf around his neck and a tweed coat that seemed too small for him, Fellini was a perfectionist. He wrote all his own scripts, occasionally with other screenwriters like Tino Pinelli and Tonino Guerra. He was obsessed with detail rather than cost and liked to direct scenes sequentially, often re-shooting them over and over again, when dissatisfied. Preferring to film on a sound stage at Cinecittà instead of on location, Fellini often ordered expensive and elaborate sets, like the 80 sets he used for La Dolce Vita which included the dome of St Peter’s Basilica. Although he professed to adore professional actors, Donald Sutherland who played the title role in Fellini’s first English-language film, Il Casanova (1976) affirms quite the contrary in Pettigrew’s documentary, Fellini: I’m A Born Liar. ‘In his relations with actors, Federico was dreadful, a martinet, a tyrant,’ Sutherland comments. What

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Federico Fellini

the director did adore, however, were the hundreds of non-professional performers he filmed; their faces - like caricatures - fascinated him and his poetic camera.

As the last of Fellini’s films, directed throughout a career spanning four decades, became more introspective and surreal - or even grotesque and excessive, they proved less commercial. As a result, he found it increasingly difficult to raise financial backing for them. Prova d’Orchestra (1979) and La Città delle Donne (1980) did poorly at the box office while E la Nave Va (1983), Ginger e Fred (1986) and L’Intervista (1987) did not fare much better. His last film, based on Ermanno Cavazzoni’s 1987 novel, Il poema dei lunatici, was a dream-like fable called La Voce della Luna (1990) starring Roberto Benigni and Paolo Villaggio. It also proved a flop. This string of commercial failures was undoubtedly distressing for a man who once confessed ‘when I am not making movies, I feel I am not alive’.

Throughout his wide-ranging career, Fellini had been nominated for 12 Academy Awards (four for directing and eight for writing), receiving an Oscar for his career (1992) and winning four Oscars for Best Foreign Film for La Strada (1954), Notti di Cabiria (1957), 8½ (1963) and Amarcord (1974). The day after his 50th wedding anniversary, he collapsed at his home in Rome after suffering a massive stroke. Fifteen days later, on October 31, 1993, he died without recovering consciousness; he was 73.

Fellini was buried in Rimini in the family vault together with his infant son Pier Federico, who died just 12 days after his birth in 1945. Masina is also buried there; having lost her soul mate, she died five months after him.

In 1995, commissioned by the Municipality of Rimini, Arnaldo Pomodoro, his friend and fellow citizen of the city, created a monumental sculpture entitled La Grande Prua (Ship’s Bow) in memory of Fellini and his wife, which stands at the entrance to the town cemetery. Fellini’s influence on many younger filmmakers, such as Woody Allen, David Lynch, Pedro Almodovar and Sofia Ford Coppola, can still be seen on the silver screen today. The hit Broadway musicals, Sweet Charity and Nine were also inspired by this master of Italian cinematography.

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