FEDERICO FELLINI, THE GREATEST LAUREATED FILMMAKER

Today, The Grandma has been watching some films directed by Federico Fellini, the Italian filmmaker, who was born on a day like today in 1920.

Federico Fellini (20 January 1920-31 October 1993) was an Italian filmmaker. He is known for his distinctive style, which blends fantasy and baroque images with earthiness. He is recognized as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time. His films have ranked highly in critical polls such as that of Cahiers du Cinéma and Sight & Sound, which lists his 1963 film 8+1⁄2 as the 10th-greatest film.

Fellini's best-known films include I vitelloni (1953), La Strada (1954), Nights of Cabiria (1957), La Dolce Vita (1960), 8½ (1963), Juliet of the Spirits (1965), Fellini Satyricon (1969), Roma (1972), Amarcord (1973), and Fellini's Casanova (1976).

Fellini was nominated for 17 Academy Awards over the course of his career, winning a total of four in the category of Best Foreign Language Film (the most for any director in the history of the award). He received an honourary award for Lifetime Achievement at the 65th Academy Awards in Los Angeles.

Fellini also won the Palme d'Or for La Dolce Vita in 1960, two times the Moscow International Film Festival in 1963 and 1987, and the Career Golden Lion at the 42nd Venice International Film Festival in 1985.

In Sight & Sound's 2002 list of the greatest directors of all time, Fellini was ranked 2nd in the directors' poll and 7th in the critics' poll.

More information: MUBI

Fellini was born on 20 January 1920, to middle-class parents in Rimini, then a small town on the Adriatic Sea. On 25 January, at the San Nicolò church he was baptized Federico Domenico Marcello Fellini.

In September 1939, he enrolled in law school at the Sapienza University of Rome to please his parents.

Retained on business in Rimini, Urbano sent 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).

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.

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.

In 1950 Fellini co-produced and co-directed with Alberto Lattuada Variety Lights (Luci del varietà), his first feature film.

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.

More information: The Fade Out

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. La Dolce Vita broke all box office records.

A major discovery for Fellini after his Italian neorealism period (1950-1959) was the work of Carl Jung.

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.

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.

Fellini died in Rome on 31 October 1993 at the age of 73.

Personal and highly idiosyncratic visions of society, Fellini's films are a unique combination of memory, dreams, fantasy and desire. The adjectives Fellinian and Felliniesque are synonymous with any kind of extravagant, fanciful, even baroque image in the cinema and in art in general.

La Dolce Vita contributed the term paparazzi to the English language, derived from Paparazzo, the photographer friend of journalist Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni).

More information: The Beaver

All art is autobiographical.
The pearl is the oyster's autobiography.

Federico Fellini