When Fellini went to Rome, in 1939, his mother wanted him to study law, but he never did. Whenever a soirée, in his movies, swells into a gallery of grotesques, you detect his primary insistence-shared with his friend Ingmar Bergman-on cinema as a record of the human visage. No surprise, perhaps, that he began as a cartoonist, and continued to scribble sketches throughout his career. If Fellini’s camera finds it hard to sit still, that is less a stylistic tic and more a principled refusal to get stuck.
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But “Amarcord” also discovers something adolescent in Fascism itself, with its taste for proud poses and its laughably doomed attempt to manhandle the vast profusion of experience into line with a single point of view. He would shrug, I suspect, and say, “That’s how it was”-like it or not, that’s how the events of the period lodged in the soul of a boy. We could be in a theatre, watching a dark farce.įoes of Fellini will point to a sequence like this and ask, Where are the victims? Do the sufferings of the time count for nothing, under his anesthetizing gaze? To be sure, the vision of Fascism that arises from “Amarcord” has none of the sinuous and oppressive mood that sheathes, say, Bertolucci’s “The Conformist” (1970), and Fellini may be the least politically engaged of major filmmakers. As a Fascist commander, pool cue in hand, prepares to play a shot in the local bar, one of his minions tiptoes around the room, so as not to disturb the maestro at work. Fellini wastes no opportunity to find them absurd. “Amarcord,” his most autobiographical film (which is saying something, for no director has fed more hungrily on the fruits of memory), is set in a heightened version of Rimini, staffed with figures in black uniforms. So it was that Fellini grew up in the embrace of Fascist rule. Fascists strode en masse toward the capital, and, shortly afterward, Mussolini came to power. We should also remember the notorious March on Rome, in 1922, two years after Fellini’s birth. It is not like being in a city, it is like being in an apartment.
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Now I consider Rome my private apartment. As soon as I came to Rome, I had the feeling that I was home. As Fellini explained to Lillian Ross, in 1965, in this magazine: The first word that we hear in “The White Sheik” (1952), his first film as a solo director, is “Roma.” It is uttered by a man at a train window, nearing his destination. Exhausted orgiasts, in “La Dolce Vita,” drift through pines and emerge onto a barren strand, where a monster of the deep, with viscid and accusing eyes, has been dragged ashore in a net.) Rimini’s other face is turned inland, toward the Eternal-and maternal-City, which beckons Fellini’s characters and gathers them to its bosom. (The bullying hero of “La Strada,” a circus strongman, winds up collapsing in tears on the sand. One face looks out to sea, and any Fellini fan will recall the beach scenes that litter his films. Many of them are warmed by the music of Nino Rota. The time and the place matter more than anything else, as we approach him now and try to make sense of the movies he bequeathed-crown jewels such as “La Dolce Vita” (1960) and “8 1/2” (1963), Oscar winners such as “La Strada” (1954), “Nights of Cabiria” (1957), and “Amarcord” (1973), and a cluster of other works. From Drawing to Film" runs until Februat the Folkwang Museum in Essen.A hundred years ago, on January 20, 1920, Federico Fellini was born in the Italian town of Rimini, on the Adriatic coast. The presentation makes Fellini's creative process clear - from the first idea to the finished work. From Drawing to Film," focuses on his drawings for the films Amarcord, Casanova, City of Women and And the Ship Sails on.Ībout 200 drawings are on display, juxtaposed with film clips, excerpts from scripts and set shots. The exhibition, titled "Federico Fellini.
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Drawings and film clipsįor the first time in three decades, Fellini's drawings are back on display in a major exhibition at the Folkwang Museum in Essen, showing works from the early 1950s to the early 1980s.
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"Just as the screenplay represents the verbal phase in the making of a film, I often draw sketches and characters during the preparation period because I want to capture and visually clarify a scene, a role, the costume of a particular character or a mood," Fellini said in a 1973 interview. He used sketches and drawings to visualize his ideas. Much later, his filmmaking career profited from his many years of experience with pen and paper. Humorous extravagance and dreamlike scenes: 'Amarcord' came out in 1973