Early screenplays (1940–1943) Retained on business in Rimini, Urbano sent his wife and family to Rome in 1940 to share an apartment with his son. Fellini and Ruggero Maccari, also on the staff of ''Marc'Aurelio'', began writing radio sketches and gags for films. Not yet twenty and with Fabrizi's help, Fellini obtained his first screen credit as a comedy writer on
Mario Mattoli's
Il pirata sono io (''The Pirate's Dream''). Progressing rapidly to numerous collaborations on films at
Cinecittà, his circle of professional acquaintances widened to include novelist
Vitaliano Brancati and scriptwriter Piero Tellini. In the wake of Mussolini's declaration of war against France and Britain on 10 June 1940, Fellini discovered
Kafka's
The Metamorphosis,
Gogol,
John Steinbeck and
William Faulkner along with French films by
Marcel Carné,
René Clair, and
Julien Duvivier. In 1941 he published
Il mio amico Pasqualino, a 74-page booklet in ten chapters describing the absurd adventures of Pasqualino, an alter ego. Writing for radio while attempting to avoid the draft, Fellini met his future wife
Giulietta Masina in a studio office at the Italian public radio broadcaster
EIAR in the autumn of 1942. Well-paid as the voice of Pallina in Fellini's radio serial,
Cico and Pallina, Masina was also well known for her musical-comedy broadcasts which cheered an audience depressed by the war. In November 1942, Fellini was sent to
Libya, occupied by Fascist Italy, to work on the screenplay of
I cavalieri del deserto (
Knights of the Desert, 1942), directed by
Osvaldo Valenti and Gino Talamo. Fellini welcomed the assignment as it allowed him "to secure another extension on his draft order". Responsible for emergency re-writing, he also directed the film's first scenes. When
Tripoli fell under siege by British forces, he and his colleagues made a narrow escape by boarding a German military plane flying to
Sicily. His African adventure, later published in ''Marc'Aurelio'' as "The First Flight", marked "the emergence of a new Fellini, no longer just a screenwriter, working and sketching at his desk, but a filmmaker out in the field". The
apolitical Fellini was finally freed of the draft when an Allied air raid over
Bologna destroyed his medical records. Fellini and Giulietta hid in her aunt's apartment until Mussolini's fall on 25 July 1943. After dating for nine months, the couple were married on 30 October 1943. Several months later, Masina fell down the stairs and suffered a miscarriage. She gave birth to a son, Pierfederico, on 22 March 1945, but the child died of
encephalitis 11 days later on 2 April 1945. Masina and Fellini had no other children. The tragedy had enduring emotional and artistic repercussions.
Neorealist apprenticeship (1944–1949) After the Allied liberation of Rome on 4 June 1944, Fellini and Enrico De Seta opened the Funny Face Shop where they survived the postwar recession drawing caricatures of American soldiers. He became involved with
Italian Neorealism when
Roberto Rossellini, at work on
Stories of Yesteryear (later
Rome, Open City), met Fellini in his shop, and proposed he contribute gags and dialogue for the script. Aware of Fellini's reputation as Aldo Fabrizi's "creative muse", Rossellini also requested that he try to convince the actor to play the role of Father
Giuseppe Morosini, the parish priest executed by the
SS on 4 April 1944. In 1947, Fellini and
Sergio Amidei received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay of
Rome, Open City. Working as both screenwriter and assistant director on Rossellini's
Paisà (
Paisan) in 1946, Fellini was entrusted to film the Sicilian scenes in
Maiori. In February 1948, he was introduced to
Marcello Mastroianni, then a young theatre actor appearing in a play with Giulietta Masina. Establishing a close working relationship with
Alberto Lattuada, Fellini co-wrote the director's
Senza pietà (
Without Pity) and
Il mulino del Po (
The Mill on the Po). Fellini also worked with Rossellini on the
anthology film ''
L'Amore'' (1948), co-writing the screenplay and in one segment titled, "The Miracle", acting opposite
Anna Magnani. To play the role of a vagabond rogue mistaken by Magnani for a saint, Fellini had to bleach his black hair blond.
Early films (1950–1953) Fellini's early works had a "forlorn atmosphere and touch of melancholy." In 1950 Fellini co-produced and co-directed with Alberto Lattuada
Variety Lights (
Luci del varietà), his first feature film. A backstage comedy set among the world of small-time travelling performers, it featured Giulietta Masina and Lattuada's wife,
Carla Del Poggio. Its release to poor reviews and limited distribution proved disastrous for all concerned. The production company went bankrupt, leaving both Fellini and Lattuada with debts to pay for over a decade. In February 1950,
Paisà received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay by Rossellini,
Sergio Amidei, and Fellini. After travelling to Paris for a script conference with Rossellini on ''
Europa '51, Fellini began production on The White Sheik in September 1951, his first solo-directed feature. Starring Alberto Sordi in the title role, the film is a revised version of a treatment first written by Michelangelo Antonioni in 1949 and based on the fotoromanzi'', the photographed cartoon strip romances popular in Italy at the time. Producer
Carlo Ponti commissioned Fellini and
Tullio Pinelli to write the script but Antonioni rejected the story they developed. With
Ennio Flaiano, they re-worked the material into a light-hearted satire about newlywed couple Ivan and Wanda Cavalli (
Leopoldo Trieste, Brunella Bovo) in Rome to visit the Pope. Ivan's prissy mask of respectability is soon demolished by his wife's obsession with the White Sheik. Highlighting the music of
Nino Rota, the film was selected at Cannes (among the films in competition was
Orson Welles's
Othello) and then retracted. Screened at the
13th Venice International Film Festival, it was razzed by critics in "the atmosphere of a soccer match". One reviewer declared that Fellini had "not the slightest aptitude for cinema direction". In 1953,
I Vitelloni found favour with the critics and public. Winning the Silver Lion Award in Venice, it secured Fellini his first international distributor.
Beyond neorealism (1954–1960) – Teatro 5, Fellini's favorite studio Fellini directed
La Strada based on a script completed in 1952 with Pinelli and Flaiano. It starred his wife
Giulietta Masina,
Anthony Quinn, and
Richard Basehart. During the last three weeks of shooting, Fellini experienced the first signs of severe clinical depression. Aided by his wife, he undertook a brief period of therapy with Freudian psychoanalyst Emilio Servadio. Fellini cast American actor
Broderick Crawford to interpret the role of an aging swindler in
Il Bidone. Based partly on stories told to him by a petty thief during production of
La Strada, Fellini developed the script into a con man's slow descent. To incarnate the role's "intense, tragic face", Fellini's first choice had been
Humphrey Bogart, but after learning of the actor's lung cancer, chose Crawford after seeing his face on the theatrical poster of ''
All the King's Men'' (1949). The film shoot was wrought with difficulties stemming from Crawford's alcoholism. Savaged by critics at the
16th Venice International Film Festival, the film did miserably at the box office and did not receive international distribution until 1964. During the autumn, Fellini researched and developed a treatment based on a film adaptation of
Mario Tobino's novel,
The Free Women of Magliano. Set in a mental institution for women, the project was abandoned when financial backers considered the subject had no potential. While preparing
Nights of Cabiria in spring 1956, Fellini learned of his father's death by cardiac arrest at the age of sixty-two. Produced by
Dino De Laurentiis and starring Giulietta Masina, the film took its inspiration from news reports of a woman's severed head retrieved in a lake and stories by Wanda, a shantytown prostitute Fellini met on the set of
Il Bidone.
Pier Paolo Pasolini was hired to translate Flaiano and Pinelli's dialogue into Roman dialect and to supervise researches in the vice-afflicted suburbs of Rome. The movie won the
Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the
30th Academy Awards and brought Masina the Best Actress Award at Cannes for her performance. With Pinelli, he developed
Journey with Anita for
Sophia Loren and
Gregory Peck. An "invention born out of intimate truth", the script was based on Fellini's return to Rimini with a mistress to attend his father's funeral. Due to Loren's unavailability, the project was shelved and resurrected twenty-five years later as
Lovers and Liars (1981), a comedy directed by
Mario Monicelli with
Goldie Hawn and
Giancarlo Giannini. For
Eduardo De Filippo, he co-wrote the script of
Fortunella.'', 1956The
Hollywood on the Tiber phenomenon of 1958 in which American studios profited from the cheap studio labour available in Rome provided the backdrop for photojournalists to steal shots of celebrities on the via Veneto. The scandal provoked by Turkish dancer Nana Kaish's improvised striptease at a nightclub captured Fellini's imagination: he decided to end his latest script-in-progress,
Moraldo in the City, with an all-night "orgy" at a seaside villa.
Pierluigi Praturlon's photos of
Anita Ekberg after an evening spent with the actress in a Rome night club provided further inspiration for Fellini and his screenwriters. Changing the title of the screenplay to
La Dolce Vita, Fellini soon clashed with his producer on casting: The director insisted on the relatively unknown Mastroianni while De Laurentiis wanted
Paul Newman as a hedge on his investment. Reaching an impasse, De Laurentiis sold the rights to publishing mogul
Angelo Rizzoli. Shooting began on 16 March 1959 with Anita Ekberg climbing the stairs to the cupola of Saint Peter's in a mammoth décor constructed at
Cinecittà. The statue of Christ flown by helicopter over Rome to
St. Peter's Square was inspired by an actual media event on 1 May 1956, which Fellini had witnessed.
La Dolce Vita broke all box office records. Despite scalpers selling tickets at 1000 lire, crowds queued in line for hours to see an "immoral movie" before the censors banned it. At an exclusive
Milan screening on 5 February 1960, one outraged patron spat on Fellini while others hurled insults. Denounced in parliament by right-wing conservatives, undersecretary Domenico Magrì of the Christian Democrats demanded tolerance for the film's controversial themes. The
Vatican's official press organ, ''
L'Osservatore Romano, lobbied for censorship while the Board of Roman Parish Priests and the Genealogical Board of Italian Nobility attacked the film. In one documented instance involving favourable reviews written by the Jesuits of San Fedele, defending La Dolce Vita'' had severe consequences. In competition at Cannes alongside Antonioni's ''
L'Avventura'', the film won the
Palme d'Or awarded by presiding juror
Georges Simenon. The Belgian writer was promptly "hissed at" by the disapproving festival crowd.
Art films and dreams (1961–1969) A major discovery for Fellini after his
Italian neorealism period (1950–1959) was the work of
Carl Jung. After meeting Jungian psychoanalyst Dr. Ernst Bernhard in early 1960, he read Jung's autobiography,
Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963) and experimented with
LSD. Bernhard also recommended that Fellini consult the
I Ching and keep a record of his dreams. What Fellini formerly accepted as "his extrasensory perceptions" were now interpreted as psychic manifestations of the unconscious. Bernhard's focus on Jungian depth psychology proved to be the single greatest influence on Fellini's mature style and marked the turning point in his work from neorealism to filmmaking that was "primarily oneiric". As a consequence, Jung's seminal ideas on the
anima and the
animus, the role of archetypes and the collective unconscious directly influenced such films as
8½| (1963),
Juliet of the Spirits (1965),
Fellini Satyricon (1969),
Casanova (1976), and
City of Women (1980). Other key influences on his work include
Luis Buñuel,
Charlie Chaplin,
Sergei Eisenstein,
Buster Keaton,
Laurel and Hardy, the
Marx Brothers, and
Roberto Rossellini. Exploiting
La Dolce Vitas success, financier Angelo Rizzoli set up Federiz in 1960, an independent film company, for Fellini and production manager Clemente Fracassi to discover and produce new talent. Despite the best intentions, their overcautious editorial and business skills forced the company to close down soon after cancelling Pasolini's project,
Accattone (1961). Condemned as a "public sinner", for
La Dolce Vita, Fellini responded with
The Temptations of Doctor Antonio, a segment in the omnibus ''
Boccaccio '70''. His second colour film, it was the sole project green-lighted at Federiz. Infused with the
surrealistic satire that characterized the young Fellini's work at ''Marc'Aurelio'', the film ridiculed a crusader against vice, interpreted by
Peppino De Filippo, who goes insane trying to censor a billboard of
Anita Ekberg espousing the virtues of milk. In an October 1960 letter to his colleague Brunello Rondi, Fellini first outlined his film ideas about a man suffering creative block: "Well then – a guy (a writer? any kind of professional man? a theatrical producer?) has to interrupt the usual rhythm of his life for two weeks because of a not-too-serious disease. It's a warning bell: something is blocking up his system." Unclear about the script, its title, and his protagonist's profession, he scouted locations throughout Italy "looking for the film", in the hope of resolving his confusion. Flaiano suggested
La bella confusione (literally
The Beautiful Confusion) as the movie's title. Under pressure from his producers, Fellini finally settled on '''', a
self-referential title referring principally (but not exclusively) to the number of films he had directed up to that time. Giving the order to start production in spring 1962, Fellini signed deals with his producer Rizzoli, fixed dates, had sets constructed, cast Mastroianni,
Anouk Aimée, and
Sandra Milo in lead roles, and did screen tests at the Scalera Studios in Rome. He hired
cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo, among key personnel. But apart from naming his hero Guido Anselmi, he still couldn't decide what his character did for a living. The crisis came to a head in April when, sitting in his Cinecittà office, he began a letter to Rizzoli confessing he had "lost his film" and had to abandon the project. Interrupted by the chief machinist requesting he celebrate the launch of '''', Fellini put aside the letter and went on the set. Raising a toast to the crew, he "felt overwhelmed by shame… I was in a no exit situation. I was a director who wanted to make a film he no longer remembers. And lo and behold, at that very moment everything fell into place. I got straight to the heart of the film. I would narrate everything that had been happening to me. I would make a film telling the story of a director who no longer knows what film he wanted to make". The self-mirroring structure makes the entire film inseparable from its reflecting construction. Shooting began on 9 May 1962. Perplexed by the seemingly chaotic, incessant improvisation on the set, Deena Boyer, the director's American press officer at the time, asked for a rationale. Fellini told her that he hoped to convey the three levels "on which our minds live: the past, the present, and the conditional — the realm of fantasy". After shooting wrapped on 14 October,
Nino Rota composed various circus marches and fanfares that would later become signature tunes of the maestro's cinema. Nominated for four Oscars, '''' won awards for best foreign language film and best costume design in black-and-white. In California for the ceremony, Fellini toured
Disneyland with
Walt Disney the day after. Increasingly attracted to
parapsychology, Fellini met the
Turin antiquarian
Gustavo Rol in 1963. Rol, a former banker, introduced him to the world of
Spiritism and
séances. In 1964, Fellini took
LSD under the supervision of Emilio Servadio, his psychoanalyst during the 1954 production of
La Strada. For years reserved about what actually occurred that Sunday afternoon, he admitted in 1992 that ... objects and their functions no longer had any significance. All I perceived was perception itself, the hell of forms and figures devoid of human emotion and detached from the reality of my unreal environment. I was an instrument in a virtual world that constantly renewed its own meaningless image in a living world that was itself perceived outside of nature. And since the appearance of things was no longer definitive but limitless, this paradisiacal awareness freed me from the reality external to my self. The fire and the rose, as it were, became one. Fellini's hallucinatory insights were given full flower in his first colour feature
Juliet of the Spirits (1965), depicting
Giulietta Masina as Juliet, a housewife who rightly suspects her husband's infidelity and succumbs to the voices of spirits summoned during a séance at her home. Her sexually voracious next door neighbor Suzy (
Sandra Milo) introduces Juliet to a world of uninhibited sensuality, but Juliet is haunted by childhood memories of her
Catholic guilt and a teenaged friend who committed suicide. Complex and filled with psychological symbolism, the film is set to a jaunty score by
Nino Rota.
Nostalgia, sexuality, and politics (1970–1980) To help promote
Satyricon in the United States, Fellini flew to Los Angeles in January 1970 for interviews with
Dick Cavett and
David Frost. He also met with film director
Paul Mazursky who wanted to cast him in a starring role alongside
Donald Sutherland in his new film,
Alex in Wonderland. In February, Fellini scouted locations in Paris for
The Clowns, a
docufiction both for cinema and television, based on his childhood memories of the circus and a "coherent theory of clowning." As he saw it, the clown "was always the caricature of a well-established, ordered, peaceful society. But today all is temporary, disordered, grotesque. Who can still laugh at clowns?... All the world plays a clown now." In March 1971, Fellini began production on
Roma, a seemingly random collection of episodes informed by the director's memories and impressions of Rome. The "diverse sequences," writes Fellini scholar
Peter Bondanella, "are held together only by the fact that they all ultimately originate from the director's fertile imagination." The film's opening scene anticipates
Amarcord while its most surreal sequence involves an ecclesiastical fashion show in which nuns and priests roller skate past shipwrecks of cobwebbed skeletons. Over a period of six months between January and June 1973, Fellini shot the
Oscar-winning
Amarcord. Loosely based on the director's 1968 autobiographical essay
My Rimini, the film depicts the adolescent Titta and his friends working out their sexual frustrations against the religious and Fascist backdrop of a provincial town in Italy during the 1930s. Produced by
Franco Cristaldi, the
seriocomic movie became Fellini's second biggest commercial success after
La Dolce Vita. Circular in form,
Amarcord avoids plot and linear narrative in a way similar to
The Clowns and
Roma. The director's overriding concern with developing a poetic form of cinema was first outlined in a 1965 interview he gave to
The New Yorker journalist
Lillian Ross: "I am trying to free my work from certain constrictions – a story with a beginning, a development, an ending. It should be more like a poem with metre and cadence."
Late films and projects (1981–1990) receiving a
David di Donatello Award from Fellini in 1985 Organized by his publisher
Diogenes Verlag in 1982, the first major exhibition of 63 drawings by Fellini was held in Paris,
Brussels, and the
Pierre Matisse Gallery in
New York. A gifted caricaturist, he found much of the inspiration for his sketches from his own dreams while the films-in-progress both originated from and stimulated drawings for characters, decor, costumes and set designs. Under the title,
I disegni di Fellini (Fellini's Designs), he published 350 drawings executed in pencil, watercolours, and felt pens. On 6 September 1985 Fellini was awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 42nd Venice Film Festival. That same year, he became the first non-American to receive the
Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual award for cinematic achievement. with the
Golden Lion Honorary Award at the
47th Venice International Film Festival. Long fascinated by
Carlos Castaneda's
The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, Fellini accompanied the Peruvian author on a journey to the
Yucatán to assess the feasibility of a film. After first meeting Castaneda in Rome in October 1984, Fellini drafted a treatment with Pinelli titled
Viaggio a Tulun. Producer
Alberto Grimaldi, prepared to buy film rights to all of Castaneda's work, then paid for pre-production research taking Fellini and his entourage from Rome to
Los Angeles and the jungles of
Mexico in October 1985. When Castaneda inexplicably disappeared and the project fell through, Fellini's mystico-shamanic adventures were scripted with Pinelli and serialized in
Corriere della Sera in May 1986. A barely veiled satirical interpretation of Castaneda's work,
Viaggio a Tulun was published in 1989 as a
graphic novel with artwork by
Milo Manara and as
Trip to Tulum in America in 1990. For
Intervista, produced by Ibrahim Moussa and RAI Television, Fellini intercut memories of the first time he visited
Cinecittà in 1939 with present-day footage of himself at work on a screen adaptation of
Franz Kafka's
Amerika. A meditation on the nature of memory and film production, it won the special 40th Anniversary Prize at Cannes and the
15th Moscow International Film Festival Golden Prize. In Brussels later that year, a panel of thirty professionals from eighteen European countries named Fellini the world's best director and '''' the best European film of all time. In early 1989 Fellini began production on
The Voice of the Moon, based on Ermanno Cavazzoni's novel,
Il poema dei lunatici (''The Lunatics' Poem
). A small town was built at Empire Studios on the via Pontina outside Rome. Starring Roberto Benigni as Ivo Salvini, a madcap poetic figure newly released from a mental institution, the character is a combination of La Strada''s Gelsomina,
Pinocchio, and Italian poet
Giacomo Leopardi. Fellini improvised as he filmed, using as a guide a rough treatment written with Pinelli. Despite its modest critical and commercial success in Italy, and its warm reception by French critics, it failed to interest North American distributors. Fellini won the
Praemium Imperiale, an international prize in the visual arts given by the Japan Art Association in 1990.
Final years and death (1991–1993) In July 1991 and April 1992, Fellini worked in close collaboration with Canadian filmmaker
Damian Pettigrew to establish "the longest and most detailed conversations ever recorded on film". Described as the "Maestro's spiritual testament" by his biographer
Tullio Kezich, excerpts culled from the conversations later served as the basis of their feature documentary, ''
Fellini: I'm a Born Liar (2002) and the book, I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon''. In April 1993 Fellini received his fifth
Oscar, for lifetime achievement, "in recognition of his cinematic accomplishments that have thrilled and entertained audiences worldwide". On 16 June, he entered the Cantonal Hospital in
Zürich for an
angioplasty on his
femoral artery but suffered a
stroke at Rimini's
Grand Hotel two months later. Partially paralyzed, he was first transferred to
Ferrara for rehabilitation and then to the
Policlinico Umberto I in Rome to be near his wife, also hospitalized. He suffered a second stroke and fell into an irreversible
coma. Fellini died in Rome on 31 October 1993 at the age of 73 after a heart attack he suffered a few weeks earlier, a day after his 50th wedding anniversary. The memorial service, in Studio 5 at Cinecittà, was attended by an estimated 70,000 people. At
Giulietta Masina's request, trumpeter
Mauro Maur played
Nino Rota's "Improvviso dell'Angelo" during the ceremony. Five months later, on 23 March 1994, Masina died of
lung cancer. Fellini is buried with Masina and their son, Pierfederico, in a bronze sepulchre sculpted by
Arnaldo Pomodoro in the
Monumental Cemetery of Rimini. Rimini's
Federico Fellini Airport is named in his honour. == Personal life ==