Bloemheuvel, F.M. - Fellini, Federico - Guldemond, Jaap - Star, Walter Van Der - Stourdzé, Sam - Fellini-Amsterdam University Press, EYE (2013)

Fellini
1
Fellini
Author and editor
Sam Stourdzé
Editors for EYE
Marente Bloemheuvel
Jaap Guldemond
EYE, Amsterdam
Amsterdam University Press
HOLGER_Fellini boek opmaak.indd 1 12-02-14 17:03

Federico Fellini, 1950s.

Contents
Preface 4
The Parade of Images 8
Popular Culture
Caricatures, juvenilia 20
The photo-novel 22
Mandrake the Magician 26
The voyage of Mastorna 28
Parades 30
Dinners 32
The circus 36
Grotesques 44
Casting sessions 46
The Rugantino 50
Paparazzi 54
Look-alikes 60
The Temptations of Doctor Antonio 64
Mock advertisements 66
Fellini at Work
The scriptwriters 70
The costumes 72
Behind the camera 76
Directing actors 80
Studio 5 84
The helicopter 88
The City of Women

Fellini, Catholic filmmaker? 92
Female obsessions 96
Anita Ekberg 102`
Anna Magnani 106
All about posters 108
Prostitutes 110
Casanova 114
Fellini and his double 116
The myth of the fountain 120
Masina and Fellini 126
Biographical Imagination
Visions 130
The Book of Dreams 138
Fellini superstar 144
Appendix
Notes 152
Selected bibliography 152
Chronology 153
Filmography 154
Illustration credits 157
Acknowledgements 158

Preface
EYE is proud and excited to announce a major exhibition, a publication and a
substantial supporting programme that will be presented this summer, dedicated
to the oeuvre of one of the most defining masters of post-war Italian cinema:
Federico Fellini. His rich and incisive film oeuvre, which has been collected,
preserved and screened by EYE for many years, now will be brought out under
the spotlight on the broader stage of our new museum.
The career of Federico Fellini (1920-1993) lasted for forty years and made him
perhaps the most illustrious of all the filmmakers to have come out of Italy. Those
forty years saw the appearance of titles that have carved out a permanent niche
in the memory of generations of film lovers. The bellowing strongman in La Strada
(1954); the anguished society reporter in La Dolce Vita (1960); the tyrannical
director with the whip in 8½ (1963) or the woman who lovingly clutches the
young boy from the village to her ample bosom: these characters have become
the archetypes who inhabit that universe that we have come to call “Felliniesque.”
A universe in which Fellini’s alter ego appears – often portrayed by Marcello
Mastroianni – in different guises as a participant in an continuous parade of
grotesque human failures.
Before making his actual debut as a director, Fellini mainly concentrated on

drawing and writing screenplays. He left his birthplace Rimini when he was
nineteen years old in order to “conquer Rome.” For a period, he drew cartoons
for satirical magazines, moving on to co-write numerous screenplays during the
1940s. He was confidant and assistant to Roberto Rossellini during the making of
Roma, città aperta (1945), before making his debut as a director in 1950 with
Luci del varietà. His international reputation was established when he received
an Oscar for La Strada (1954). When he was forty years old, La Dolce Vita
(1960) put Fellini at the centre of great controversy. This “decadent” and
“blasphemous” film shocked the Catholic Church, which until then had supported
him, even embracing him as a Catholic filmmaker. However, Fellini’s free spirit
continued to guide his career, independently of trends and conventions. 8½
(1963) proved to be yet another watershed, when he decided to ignore all the
rules of storytelling and to jettison any form of logical narrative. His exploration
of the creative process and his reflections on cinema encouraged him to leave the
beaten track of reality and to explore the world of the imagination. Childhood
memories, dreams and the subconscious mind took on an increasingly important
role in his work. His films always had a strong autobiographical element, but
now Fellini no longer had any qualms about playing himself in his films (Block-
notes di un regista, I Clowns, Roma, Intervista).
This book and the exhibition aim to reveal the universe of the filmmaker and the
sources of his rich imagination, and to highlight the essential power of his work.
The story of Fellini’s themes and obsessions is, twenty years after his death, told
by movie stills, set photos and his drawings, as well as by archive material and
posters. The fantasy world of Cinecittà, the studio where Fellini made so many of
his films, is revealed through previously unseen behind-the-scenes pictures that
were taken by photographers such as Gideon Bachmann, Deborah Beer, Pierluigi
Praturlon and Paul Ronald. This publication, which was conceived as a visual
laboratory, shows how Fellini created a mythical image of himself and of Italian
life in his films and in other media, and how he constantly reinterpreted his early
years, his dreams and the images and stories conjured up by his subconscious.
We have chosen not to follow a chronological sequence, but to present
Fellini’s take on the twentieth century – the age of cinema, of course, but also that 4

of mass media in general: television, newspapers, magazines and advertising.
The age of imagery, in fact. From the 1950s on, audiences, especially in Italy,
quickly fell under the spell of the mass media, enthusiastically embracing the
images that were appearing everywhere. Fellini – who was of course the inventor
of the term “paparazzi” (in La Dolce Vita) – was quick to predict the influence
that the media would exert on human behaviour, and referred to it in his films
(such as the enormous billboard featuring Anita Ekberg, which comes to life in
the anthology film Boccaccio ’70).
The publication includes four main chapters. Popular Culture concentrates on

Fellini’s many sources of inspiration within the day-to-day popular culture of the
time. This includes not only the steadily more prevalent mass media, but also
such manifestations as the circus, rock music, cartoons and Catholic or political
parades. Fellini at Work shows us the director on the film set, instructing his
actors, working together with costume designers, behind the camera, and so on.
The City of Women concerns Fellini’s most important subject and obsession:
Woman, in all her many guises. Finally, Biographical Imagination presents Fellini
in the guise of various doppelgangers, each reflecting a different aspect of his
personality. Particular attention is given to his ‘Book of Dreams’ in which he
recorded his dreams in words and drawings.
We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the many people who have worked on this
wide-ranging project. First of all, we should mention Sam Stourdzé who compiled
the (travelling) exhibition and the publication as well as writing the texts for the
publication. NBC Photographie and Carole Troufléau Sandrin were involved in
the production. The collaboration with Sam Stourdzé was especially inspiring,
and we thank him for his enthusiasm and dedication and for his interesting
concept and approach.
Additionally, the cooperation and support of the Fondation Fellini pour le
Cinéma (Sion, Switzerland), the Fondazione Fellini (Rimini, Italy) and the Cineteca
di Bologna are essential to the success of this and any presentation about Fellini.
Design Studio Claus Wiersma conceived the design for the exhibition, which is
both complex and crystal clear. The graphic design of the book and the exhibition
was in the capable hands of the designers at Joseph Plateau. They have produced
a beautiful publication with a contemporary twist.
And last but not least, our thanks go out to all the employees at EYE who
have worked on the book, the exhibition and the accompanying programme with
tremendous dedication and an infectious degree of commitment. I am convinced
that, just as Fellini’s oeuvre has inspired us and many other generations of film
lovers, this book and the exhibition will inspire a new audience and allow it to be
captivated and absorbed by the work of this unrivalled maestro of the cinema.
Buon divertimento!
Sandra den Hamer

Director EYE

From left to right: Fellini, his assistant Moraldo Rossi, the photographers
Pierluigi Praturlon and Tazio Secchiaroli, the agent Ezio Vitale and the
photographer Sandro Vespasiani, October 1958. 6

7

The Parade
of Images
I don’t want to demonstrate anything: I want to show it
Federico Fellini
1 Beno Graziani and Federico Fellini.

Fellini’s friend Beno Graziani, a correspondent of Paris Match in Rome in the 1 Interview with the author, 19 May 2009.
2 Fellini opened the Funny Face Shop in Via
1950s, remembers him as a jovial man who wanted to be loved, and who was Nazionale in Rome together with Guglielmo
loved by everybody. “Fellini spoke to you as if you were the most intelligent Guasta and Carlo Bompiani.
3 Federico Fellini, Faire un film, Paris: Le Seuil,
person on earth.”1 One day Fellini revealed the subject of his next film to his 1980, p.114.
friend, the adventures of a journalist in Rome. He would later confess to him that 4 Grotesque is the name given to the fantastic
ornaments dating from ancient Rome that came
the character played by Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita was based on back into fashion in the fifteenth and sixteenth
century. The term has since passed into common
Graziani (ill. 1). parlance and is synonymous with a distorted,
Some friends were angered by these excessive borrowings, while others comic or droll figure, a caricature.
found it amusing that a story they told one evening would be used by Fellini the
next day. But they all agreed about his talent as a storyteller. Fellini appropriates
stories, he documents himself, meets with people and asks questions. Feeding on
the people surrounding him, he absorbs reality and fits it into his films.
Circus Fellini
Before embarking on a career in film, the boy from Rimini, who had moved to
Rome at the age of nineteen, worked as a cartoonist for popular magazines such
as 420, Travaso and Marc’Aurelio. Fellini wrote little, and concentrated on
drawing. In 1944, he opened the Funny Face Shop,2 (ill. 2) where he drew
caricatures of passers-by, mostly GIs stationed in the city (ill. 3). As a master of
caricature he needed just a few lines to capture a situation, constructing a world
inhabited by grotesque figures, a now familiar universe that would soon become
known under the name “Felliniesque.”
Fellini’s oeuvre largely found its inspiration in the circus and its great parade. In
The Clowns (1970), a child (the little Fellini) is terrified by the frightening
spectacle and leaves the circus in tears. Back in his room, he confesses off-screen
in Fellini’s own voice:
The evening ended abruptly. The clowns didn’t made me laugh, on the
contrary, they terrified me. Those plaster faces and enigmatic expressions,
those drunken masks, the shouts, the laughter, the stupid and cruel pranks
reminded me of those other strange and disturbing characters that can be
found in every provincial town.
Among this maelstrom of grotesque mugs, the viewer recognises the depraved
tramp Giovannone, the midget nun (only one foot tall) who divides her time between
the convent and the insane asylum, the matron who brings her husband home in
a wheelbarrow, and the invalid WW I veteran in his wheelchair, accompanied
by Signora Ines, who knows every one of Mussolini’s speeches by heart.
The aberrant, grotesque, ragged clowns, with their total irrationality,

violence and mad tantrums, have always seemed to me like the drunk and
delirious heralds of a calling, a premonition or prophesy: the annunciation
made to Federico. And in fact, isn’t the cinema, I mean making films, living
with a group of people making a film, just like circus life?3
But who are they, that large family of strange individuals who populate Fellini’s
films? Entertainers? Memories? Props of the spectacle? Do they form the counter
part of the story, or its complements? They are living caricatures, heirs to the 2 Fellini (left) in front of the Funny Face Shop,
tradition of the grotesque, filmed with gusto by the director.4 They form the world c. 1944.
according to Fellini, halfway between carnival and slum. Together they form the
great parade of Circus Fellini.
If we liken these extravagant, but very real characters to clowns, and if the
cinema can be equated to the circus, then the teeming world we discover under
the big top is a very strange one, which seems to have found its interpreter in 9

Fellini and his oeuvre. In fact, Fellini found inspiration both in his immediate
surroundings and in the long list of his real or invented memories.
Recurring motifs
In a filmed interview from 1961, Fellini talks about the time when, as a child, he
ran away from home and spent the day among circus people.5 This story of a rite
of passage ends when the incredulous interviewer asks: “Is that really, really
true?” Wondering why anyone would still want to know the truth, the annoyed
Fellini retorts: “No, but anyway, so what if it is accurate or not…” This is an
awkward formulation of one of his cinematographic mottos: when he is directing,
the truth as such always comes second.
I Vitelloni (1953) is his first venture into biographical fiction. For his fourth
film, Fellini draws on his childhood memories.6 A band of young adults – loafers,
vitelloni – who are continually playing pranks, drift idly through a grim and
dreary provincial town (Rimini?). They all dream of leaving, but in the end only
Moraldo (Franco Interlenghi) has the courage to move to Rome. Twenty years
later, Amarcord (1973) tells a similar story. This time the main characters are a
group of adolescents. Their pranks bring a ray of light to an otherwise gloomy
town, Rimini, which for the occasion has been recreated in the studio.7 Their
mischief is punctuated by female figures who embody the agonies and ecstasies
of their sexual desire.
In each consecutive film Fellini tells the same story, not by picking up where
he has left off, but by changing his perspective, as if he were shifting his camera
angle. From I Vitelloni to Amarcord, the main characters become younger, while
at the same time Fellini expands his cinematographic vocabulary. His growing
command of narrative techniques prompts him to introduce a new character with
an undetermined status in Amarcord, a narrator who inserts himself between the
3 Federico Fellini, caricature, from the period
spectator and the story, reminding us that the cinema mediates between the in Rimini.
viewer and reality.
Female obsessions
Fellini stages the same events in his life in a number of films. This recurrence is
not mere repetition, but rather an attempt to tell a different version of the same
story and enrich its meaning. In this respect, the comparison of two sequences,
the confession in Amarcord and the visions in City of Women (1980), sheds light
on the development of the filmmaker’s vision.8 In City of Women, Fellini first
proposes a typology of femininity, which he further expands in Amarcord.
Titta (Bruno Zanin), the main character of Amarcord, is questioned by the
priest: “Do you touch yourself? Do you know Saint Louis weeps when you touch
yourself!” The adolescent says to himself: “But how can you not touch yourself
when she looks at you that way?…” In an introspective moment, Titta makes an
inventory of the female species, full of mammary and gluteal protuberances…
The list of his obsessions includes the buxom tobacconist with the tantalising
bosom, the math teacher with the appearance of a lioness, the peasant women of
Saint Anthony straddling their bicycles, the unabashedly nymphomaniac
Volpina, and finally the femme fatale Gradisca entering a movie theatre.
In fact we are already well-acquainted with the Felliniesque women who
populate his films: isn’t Saraghina in 8½ a carbon copy of Volpina in Amarcord,
isn’t the tobacconist in Amarcord the same as the peasant woman in City of
Women?9
The sequence of visions in City of Women is based on the same model, a
typology cast in the narrative form of a memory. It is not the simple confession of
an adolescent, but an incursion into the subconscious of the character played by 10

Marcello Mastroianni, an actor who on several occasions has been used by 5 This was the first long interview with Fellini,
directed by André Delvaux for Belgian television.
Fellini as his double. Snaporaz, played by Mastroianni, a man in his fifties who 6 I Vitelloni is Fellini’s third full-length film, and his
has lost his way, is lured by strange noises under his bed and discovers a fourth film if we include the episode A Marriage
Agency from the film Love in the City.
mysterious entrance there.10 It is the top end of a giant fairground slide into 7 Fellini left Rimini in 1937 and only returned in
which he is engulfed. It is the start of a descent into the imaginary, into the heart 1946, after the town had been mostly destroyed
during the war. We can imagine how traumatic
of the image factory. With every turn, the mesmerised Mastroianni discovers new the experience was for someone who said that
he no longer recognised his home town. He had
projections of the great feminine figures that marked his childhood and first lost the place of his memories, more precisely,
stirred his erotic urges. the set of his past. For Amarcord, he recreated a
town resembling Rimini in Studio 5, and when
he made I Vitelloni, he chose to film in Ostia,
Constructed like the scene in Amarcord, it is an accumulation of obsessions with near Rome. “I filmed I Vitelloni in Ostia because
it is an artificial Rimini: it is more like Rimini than
female figures. We meet the fishmonger, the nurse, the housewife, the femme the real thing […] It is in fact a reconstruction of
fatale, the widow in the graveyard, the mythical actresses seen in the cinema, the town as I remember it, which you can visit,
how do you say, as a tourist, without fear of
and finally, the prostitute with her monumental ass. being drawn in.” Les Propos de Fellini, Paris:
Buchet/Chastel, 1980, pp. 51-52.
The formal similarity between these two sequences should not hide the fact 8 In a letter to Georges Simenon from 19 October
that Fellini’s treatment of the subject has clearly evolved. In Amarcord it takes on 1979, Fellini describes the scene of the slide in
City of Women as a sequence of visions (Federico
a classic narrative form, while in City of Women the place where the images are Fellini and Georges Simenon, Carissimo
formed – the collective imagination, to speak in Jungian terms – is personified. Simenon, mon cher Fellini, Paris: Cahiers du
cinéma, 1998, p. 66).
The descent is a metaphorical exploration of the unconscious, a call on memory. 9 In Fellini, un rêve, une vie (Paris: Cerf, 1997),
Three old men in tuxedos precede Mastroianni down the slide of memory. The Jean-Max Méjean defines the Felliniesque
woman as a polysemous creature, though she is
fairground and the slide symbolise places of entertainment. The three old men certainly also polymorphous.
10 The character played by Marcello Mastroianni
are there to remind us of this; we had already seen them in Fellini’s Roma (1972), in City of Women is called Snaporaz. This strange
where they acted as presenters of the variety show. In the visions scene in City of name had already made a brief appearance in
8½. When Guido (Marcello Mastroianni) meets
Women, they announce which women are actual memories and which are only one of his old friends, the latter greets him with
representations. The imagination becomes a mental variety show, an the enigmatic words “my good old Snaporaz.”
This is a typically Felliniesque way to discretely
inexhaustible stock of images from which the director can draw at will to stress the repetitive nature of a story with auto
compose his films. biographical overtones.
11 Over a period of almost thirty years Fellini
recorded his dreams in two large albums of
drawings. They were recently published in a
Images according to Jung 12

facsimile edition: The Book of Dreams, New
York: Rizzoli, 2008.
C.G. Jung a.o., Man and his Symbols, Garden
City: Doubleday, 1964, p. 26.
In the early 1960s, Fellini is introduced to the works of Jung by Dr. Ernst 13 Letter from Federico Fellini to Georges Simenon,
19 October 1979 (Federico Fellini and Georges
Bernhard and acquaints himself with Jung’s theories of dream analysis and the Simenon, op. cit.).
collective unconscious. He then begins to meticulously record his dreams in
drawings and writings, an enterprise that he would pursue until 1990.11 Fellini is
very enthusiastic about Jung’s ideas because they provide him with a theoretical
structure for his cinematographic research. As the psychoanalyst wrote:
I have found again and again in my professional work that the images and
ideas that dreams contain cannot possibly be explained solely in terms of
memory. They express new thoughts that have never yet reached the thres
hold of consciousness.12
From 8½ onwards, his films become more introspective, and Fellini attempts to
find a cinematographic language capable of translating internal feelings that
fluctuate between the unconscious, memories and dreams. In a letter to his friend
Georges Simenon, another confirmed Jungian, Fellini describes the scene in City
of Women as follows:
I am now filming sequences, which I have given the generic name ‘visions’:
it is a long journey, a protracted fall of the hero who descends along a
spiralling slide, is swallowed up, re-emerges and once again plunges into
the bright obscurity of his female mythology.13
In City of Women, Fellini pursues the experiment on which he had embarked in

Amarcord. He develops a formal method that grounds the analogy between
imagination and spectacle. But he goes one step further by adding a new
presence to his typology of femininity. The three old men greet her with a song: 11

“Here she is, the cinema…” This is what appears in the midst of the procession of
women: the cinema!
It may seem strange to situate the cinema at the centre of a gallery of women. But
the build-up is subtle: Fellini begins by projecting images of femmes fatales from
old films onto the screen of a cinema, when the auditorium suddenly changes
into a giant bed on which a row of boys masturbate while they gaze at the
screen. Fellini is clearly trying to define his relation with the dark cinema and to
find a place for it among his memories of women.
In Amarcord, Fellini’s approach quickly turns into slapstick. In the erotically
charged scene, Titta follows the magnificent Gradisca (Magali Noël) into a
cinema. The eager adolescent, alone in the dark theatre with this incarnation of
the femme fatale, sits down next to her and puts his hand on her thigh. Gradisca,
sensually smoking a cigarette, takes her eyes from the screen and snaps at him:
“Are you looking for something?” The adolescent then flees in a panic.
In Amarcord, the seduction game is played by a man and a woman who
are both watching the same film in the dark cinema. In City of Women, Fellini
sublimates the relationship, making it more abstract. He shifts it from the
auditorium to the screen and vice-versa. It is a radically different treatment of the
same idea. The cinema as a place where the image of a woman is projected, the
dark film theatre as a probable place of origin reflects Fellini’s ambiguous relation
ship with women and film, as if they were indistinguishable. He explained this
4 Federico Fellini, The Book of Dreams, dream
when the film first came out: of late May 1980.
The ritual of going to the cinema is in itself profoundly feminine. The way we
sit together in the dark, in an almost placental situation, the play of shadow
and light, those giant transfigured images. In the cinema, everything has to
do with projection, doesn’t it? And isn’t a woman a kind of screen onto which
men can project their fantasies?14 (ill. 4)
The circulation of images

Film acts as a mediator between reality and the way we perceive it. Fellini is
conscious of its intermediary role and its power. He continuously questions the
status of the image and the truthfulness of the message. In the second half of the
twentieth century, which was largely dominated by the problem of the image,
Fellini takes on the mediatisation of reality to its full extent, in which the event
quickly changes into a spectacle. Fellini returns to the same images, questioning
their origin and their future. In the end he never believed that they were neutral,
on the contrary, he recognised that they were being manipulated and
interpreted. This may be a lesson he learned from the distance that is a requisite
of caricature, or something he remembered from the political claims of
neorealism.
We must not forget that Fellini was a contemporary of the birth of the media
image. The simultaneous rise of cinema and the illustrated press paved the way
for a new form of representation. The media create the event, and the image that
they distribute makes the star. The illustrated press, television, posters, advertising,
and film shape the image of reality and impose themselves as the new
instruments of popular culture. Fellini makes abundant use of these instruments,
for example in the miracle scene in La Dolce Vita, staged as a media show, or in 5 “The beautiful sites of Italy!”, La Domenica
the scene in which Anita Ekberg poses on a giant billboard in The Temptations of del Corriere, 17 August 1952.
Doctor Antonio (1962), or in the televised comeback of Ginger and Fred…
In the 1950s, the reconstruction of Italy, which had been taken up immediately
following the war, had given way to prosperity. The scars of war were healing,
and the country embraced the sweet life, with Rome leading the way. In the new 12

electric society, people discovered the joys of consumerism, advertising and 14 Ornella Volta, “Autour de la Cité des femmes,”
Michel Ciment (ed.), Federico Fellini Dossier
leisure – as well as their excesses (ill. 5). The deep antagonism between the old Positif-Rivages, Paris: Rivages, February 1988,
and the new Rome became more visible than ever. The Vatican, which was only a p.123.
15 Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli were Fellini’s
few blocks away from the new hub of debauchery, the Via Veneto, cast a faithful scripwriters.
disapproving eye upon the loss of values in the modern world. 16 Les Propos de Fellini, op. cit., pp. 107-108.
17 Paparazzi is the Italian plural form of
A detailed analysis of the sources of La Dolce Vita shows how deeply the paparazzo. The term was invented by Fellini
and popularised by La Dolce Vita. One of its
film was influenced by reality, with all its references to the changing times, from possible sources may have been a contraction of
religion as a spectacle to loose morals, from the rise of stardom to the suicide of the words papatacco (small mosquito) and
ragazzo (boy).
the intellectual. 18 CIAK Newsreel, 1 May 1956. With the strong
rise of communism, the Catholic Church
develops a social doctrine in order to tighten its
Felliniesque reality grip on the popular classes. In 1955, pope Pius

XII, in a strategic attempt to win over the
working classes, establishes 1 May as the feast
of St. Joseph the Worker. On 1 May 1956, a
statue of Christ the Worker is blessed before it is
When Fellini was working with Flaiano and Pinelli on the script of La Dolce Vita, transported by helicopter to the Vatican.
he regularly met up with photographers, with his arms full of magazines.15 (ill. 6)
I spent many evenings with the photographers of Via Veneto, talking with
Tazio Secchiaroli and the others and learning about the tricks of their trade:
How they tracked down their prey, what they did to make them nervous and
how they prepared their reports to suit the demands of the different papers.16
In July 1958, near Terni, two children claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary. The
photographer Tazio Secchiaroli covered the event and published his photo-report
in Settimano Giorno. Two years later, Fellini filmed the same miracle, the popular
hysteria and the accompanying media circus.
In November 1958, Secchiaroli once again made the headlines of the
magazines by photographing the striptease of a Turkish dancer in a fashionable
club. The photos were particularly shocking because they showed Rome’s young
jet-setters participating in the debauchery. Fellini would adapt the event for the
striptease scene in La Dolce Vita.
Rock ’n’ roll was conquering Rome. L’Espresso of 26 October 1956 published
photos of people dancing in the streets of the city (ill. 7). Fellini picked up the
story in La Dolce Vita by giving a role to a young singer, Adriano Celentano,
who in the film launches into a frenzied rock ’n’ roll song as Anita Ekberg takes
to the dance floor.
All the visiting stars began to gravitate towards the bars and nightclubs in
the Via Veneto. From that moment on, the grand avenue became the playground
of a new type of photographer, hunting for scoops. For La Dolce Vita, the
spectacle of the Via Veneto and its scent of scandal were recreated in the studio.
In the film, the photographer played by Walter Santesso is called Paparazzo,
a name which would become synonymous with an entire profession: after La Dolce
Vita, scandal photographers became known as paparazzi.17
Many of Fellini’s images have been attributed to his extravagant fantasy,
although they were actually based in real events. This is most notably the case
with the opening scene of La Dolce Vita, which was inspired by a catholic
newsreel showing a statue of Jesus Christ being transported by a helicopter.18
The script of La Dolce Vita, full of references to actual events, depicts life as
it is represented by the new media. In a fascinating to-and-fro between fact and
fiction, Fellini constructs his own reality. By appropriating media events, breaking
with linear narrative and deconstructing the story, Fellini produces a powerful 6 From left to right: Fellini, his assistant Moraldo
statement of the modern turn that his cinema is taking. With his use of biographical Rossi, the photographers Pierluigi Praturlon
and Tazio Secchiaroli, the agent Ezio Vitale
inserts and the mediatisation of reality, he experiments with film and questions and the photographer Sandro Vespasiani,
its form. October 1958.
13

The myth of the fountain
The history of the Trevi fountain scene in itself sums up Fellini’s complex recycling
of images: the analysis of this process allows us to follow its development every
step of the way.
Fellini was inspired by a series of photos by Pierluigi published in 1958 in
Il Tempo. They show Anita Ekberg taking a refreshing dip in the Trevi fountain on a
warm summer’s night. In March 1959, at Fellini’s request, Ekberg recreated the event
for La Dolce Vita, this time wearing a black dress and in the company of an escort.
The images on the pages of Il Tempo are recycled in Fellini’s film. This
process is typical of the creativity of a filmmaker who has the unerring talent to
recognise anything that could be used as cinematographic material in his film.
Twenty-seven years after La Dolce Vita, Fellini revisited the fountain sequence
in The Interview (1987). The storyline of The Interview has a documentary feel
about it. A Japanese television crew follows Fellini, who acts as their guide. The
director plays himself, while Cinecittà no longer is the place where film sets are
built, but the set itself. We meet Marcello Mastroianni in a Mandrake costume who
is there to act in a commercial. Fellini, spurred on by the enthusiasm of the
television crew, invites everybody to meet Anita Ekberg.19
The surprise visit turns into an improvised party. Mastroianni the magician
conjures up a screen on which he projects two scenes from La Dolce Vita, including
the fountain sequence. Before the eyes of the world – in this case, the Japanese
television crew – the eternal couple on the screen plays out its role as archetype of
romance, and as a symbol of the sixties and the sweet life.
The images of La Dolce Vita from 1960, borrowed from Pierluigi, have been
superseded by the bitter conclusion of The Interview. We know that some
Felliniesque images have their antecedents, but here Fellini questions their future.
The filmmaker is clearly aware of the fact that the image he created twenty-seven
years earlier has changed. It has become an icon. It has been taken over and
transformed by collective memory. By confronting Marcello and Anita with their
image, Fellini shows them as helpless witnesses of their own decline. They are
older and have lost much of their grace and beauty, and what they see before
them is not La Dolce Vita, but rather its image, the myth of La Dolce Vita.
Jungians would describe this as a modern archetype of La Dolce Vita, formed by
the collective imagination or unconscious. The Fellini of The Interview is not
interested in accounting for La Dolce Vita, but in appropriating what we have
made of it. Astonishingly, no-one until then had noticed his intervention, because
Fellini has taken great care to maintain our assumptions. Still, he reworks the
sequence, reframing and re-editing it by cutting certain shots.20 He decontextual
ises the scene by zooming in on his main characters, and so recreates the illusion
that they are a couple. And he takes things even further by recording a new
soundtrack for the images of La Dolce Vita. What we see in The Interview is not
the Marcello of La Dolce Vita speaking with the Sylvia of La Dolce Vita, nor the
Marcello of The Interview speaking with the Anita of The Interview, but the
Marcello of The Interview who asks the Sylvia of La Dolce Vita: “Who are you?
A goddess, a mother, the deep ocean, home. You’re Eve…” Isn’t Marcello,
by speaking to a projected image, actually addressing cinema itself? This is the
endpoint, the conclusion, where everything comes together, from the recurring
motifs to the mediatisation of reality.
7 Rome. “Rock ’n’ roll makes its first public
I am Fellini
appearance,” L’Espresso, 26 October 1956.
In this light, let us return to our strange characters and to Fellini’s growing
awareness of a constitutive element in his films. During the process of filming his
own story or image, Fellini wasn’t trying to insert a portrait gallery – something 14

he had already done in his earlier films – but his relation with this gallery. Fellini 19 Fellini had already played with the same
idea in A Director’s Notebook when he
feels a deep affection for the crowd of extras that populates all his films. visited Marcello Mastroianni in his house in
They act as a reassuring presence with which the filmmaker loves having the Via Appia Antica.
20 The effect is a consequence of the change in
around. Beno Graziani remembers visiting Studio 5 at Cinecittà, which swarmed film format. La Dolce Vita was shot in Total
with a strange and often frightening crowd that had come to offer its services. scope, and The Interview in 4:3. But Fellini
seems to accept this. If he had wished to
Fellini himself described his method as follows: preserve the original format of La Dolce
Vita, he could have simply reduced the size
of the images.
[…] I send a small advertisement to the newspapers which says more or less: 21 L’Arc, nr. 45, Paris: Duponchelle, 1990, p. 64.
“Federico Fellini is ready to meet anyone who wishes to see him.” During
the following days, I meet hundreds of people. Every idiot in Rome turns up
to see me, including the police. It’s a kind of surreal madhouse, it creates a
very stimulating atmosphere. I look at all of them attentively. I steal
something of each visitor’s personality. One fascinates me because of his tic,
while the other attracts my attention with his glasses. I sometimes add a new
character to my film because I discover a new face. I may see a thousand in
order to pick two, but I assimilate them all. It’s as if they were saying to me,
“Take a good look at us, each of us is a bit of the mosaic you are now
building up.”21
From the beginning Fellini was aware of his special, obsessive bond with the
crowd of extras. It already was a source of inspiration for him in the 1960s when
he first tried to recreate it in his films. The first accounts of this rather unusual
search for actors began to appear in the press. During the preparations for La
Dolce Vita, the weekly magazines Oggi (ill. 8) and L’Espresso published articles
recounting the trials and tribulations of these casting sessions. With titles such as
“Fellini in search of a face” or “Fellini in search of actresses,” the press suggested
that they had almost become a part of folklore. 8 A two-page spread in the magazine Oggi
showing the search for actresses for Fellini’s
Fellini himself tried to reconstruct the true emotions that lie behind the new film, La Dolce Vita, 19 February 1959.
15

thousands of photos and letters he received. In December 1972, for example,
in the issue of Vogue which he edited (ill. 9), he reproduced four photos with
excerpts from the accompanying letters: “I am an eighteen year old girl, or
almost… You will say ‘well, she’s not pretty, she’s not tall, why would she want to
be an actress?’ Well, not really a star, but a supporting role. Giulia.” Or: “The
other night I was alone… with myself, when I thought of becoming the ideal actress.
It is now up to you to ask me for a screen test. See you soon. Theodora C.”22
Since his first film, Fellini had received letters, often with photos. Each time he met
a potential extra, he kept the portrait and sometimes took notes.
Fellini’s albums contain several thousands of photographs sent by amateur
actors or ordinary people who reacted directly to the power of identification that
film offers.23 With their spontaneous aesthetics that lack the sophistication that is
usually reserved for professional actors, these snapshots from personal albums
were selected with great care.
We see a woman in her sixties, hiding her bare breasts behind a large hat,
looking straight into the camera with a broad smile. Ten or twenty years later, the
girls have changed. Now the breasts are visible and the look provocative. We
also see a group of friends with glasses in their hands: fourteen of them packed
together in a small colour photograph, with a red arrow at top left identifying the
woman who sent the picture, a strange photo, torn in two. One wonders what
has led to this gesture. Why send a picture that reveals so little? As if everything
revolves around showing one’s self, whether too much or too little, in the end it
doesn’t matter. Each photo tells its own story, it is a projection of the self. For
some these pictures represent a transgression of everyday life, and for others the
hope of a glorified individuality. As a whole they form an X-ray of the spirit of an
age, a period which Fellini tried so hard to recreate.
The Funny Face Shop, the store of funny faces reappears in another form.24
This is not the world according to Fellini, but the world as it appeared to Fellini,
the world that answered his call – the one that, rightly or wrongly, considered
itself Felliniesque.
The world of images takes a semantic turn. When Fellini is directing his
extras, he creates his own universe, but when they come spontaneously to him,
each one of them seems to be saying: “I am Fellini.” For these people are
Felliniesque, whereas he is only Fellini!
9 Photos and letters sent to Fellini by would-be

actors who wanted to play in his films,
published for the first time in the special
Fellini issue of Vogue, December 1972.
16

In A Director’s Notebook (1969) and in his penultimate film, The Interview, Fellini 22 Vogue France, special issue edited by Fellini,
looks back on his relation with his extras. In both films, the aspiring actors file December 1972-January 1973.
23 The collection is now at the small Fellini
through the filmmaker’s office. One of them says in a pathetic voice that a wig Museum at Cinecittà, and is curated by
Roberto Mannoni, Fellini’s former executive
would really change his life, while another wants to sell a painting, saying that producer.
the painter whose name he has forgotten is greater than Raphael! The 24 In 1981, Diogenes publishes Fellini’s Faces.
This is the only book that presents a selection
incongruous dialogues raise a smile, while the obvious fact that they have been from Fellini’s photo archives, an incredible
staged affects their authenticity. None of these attempts manages to recreate the collection of snapshots sent to the filmmaker.
25 I Vitelloni and La Dolce Vita are also loosely
powerful bond between the director and his characters. At the end of A Director’s based on Fellini’s life. The former tells the
Notebook Fellini’s off-screen voice confesses with some humility: story of a group of young people in a
provincial town, and the latter recounts the
adventures of a journalist.
26 In the 1940s, Fellini made a living as a script
Yes, I know, it might seem cynical, cruel. But no, I am very fond of all these writer. He was very close to Roberto Rossellini,
characters who are always chasing after me, following me from one film to with whom he collaborated on Rome, Open
City (1945), Paisà (1946), L’Amore (1948),
another. They are all a little mad, I know that. They say they need me. But Francesco, giullare di Dio (1950) and
the truth is that I need them more […]. Europa ’51 (1952).
27 Fellini also films himself while he is filming
Roma, for example in the scene where he
meets with young people, or when he inter
A recursive cinema views Anna Magnani.

28 In a dream dating from the end of May 1980,
Fellini draws himself while he is filming or
projecting (it is not absolutely clear which)
In A Director’s Notebook, a documentary produced for the American TV-channel the image of a buxom naked woman. He
confesses: “These images are truer than truth
NBC, a kind of “Fellini by himself” already heralding The Clowns and The Inter itself!” (ill. 4) Federico Fellini, The Book of
view, the filmmaker subverts the rules of the genre and follows the biographical Dreams, Tulio Kezich and Vittorio Boarini
(eds.), New York: Rizzoli, 2008, p. 543.
path already laid down in 8½. While 8½, Fellini’s Roma and Amarcord25 could
be described as biographical fiction, A Director’s Notebook, The Clowns and
The Interview are fictional biographies that are closer to documentary essays.
Fellini had sought to reveal himself through biographical fiction, so why did he not
seize on the possibilities offered by the documentary form? Why did he under
mine the genre by inserting a large dose of fiction? Most probably because for
him, the biographical is not a question of subject matter but one of material. He
does not want to tell his story, but delves into a stock of images and draws on a
collection of cinematographic material. And this visual repository is essential for
his creative process.
According to a clearly Felliniesque mechanism, showing how the film is being
made is a stronger guarantee of authenticity than the film itself. The operation is
apparently just as important as the result, and should not show what is on and off
screen, but the image and the factory of images. As if the film is only an illusion
whose effects have to be neutralised by showing how it is being made, which in
a sense means that we must always stay one step ahead of the illusion.
Since La Dolce Vita, Fellini largely abandoned linear narrative and
concentrated on introspection. Film should not only be used to tell a story, but
must be questioned to determine what it can say, what it can show, and finally,
what it wants us to see. It is a means to stage a personal quest, to understand
one’s own history.
In these three mock documentaries that mark the second part of his career
(A Director’s Notebook, The Clowns and The Interview) – a continuation of his
reflections on the mediatisation of reality –, Fellini pushes his biographical
exploration to its limits by laying the foundations for a recursive cinema, a cinema
that calls on itself to describe itself.
We have come a long way from the neo-realist adventure which he
experienced at the side of Rossellini.26 In the films in which Fellini casts himself in
the role of director,27 cinema calls on itself to narrate the world, establishing itself 10 Federico Fellini, sketch of a prostitute.
not as reality or even as an image of reality, but as the projection of the image of
reality through a succession of filters.28 In the end, isn’t Fellini’s cinema a
cinematographic experiment at the limits of a self-referential cinema that has
continued to question our relation with the world of images?
17

Popular
Culture

Caricatures,
After leaving his home province of
Romagna to try his luck in Rome,
Federico Fellini earned a living as a
caricaturist for satirical newspapers.
Employed successively by 420, Marc’
juvenilia
Aurelio and Travaso, he worked in a
vein of schoolboy humour exploiting
the war of the sexes and the comic
effects of repetition. Caricature is an
art of distortion which only needs a
few lines to capture a situation, a pose
or a subject. With his pencil, the young
Fellini deftly conjured up a world that
was like a great parade, full of strange
faces and generously endowed
female creatures, a formula which he
would keep using throughout his long
career.
At the same time, he was starting
to write screenplays, working along
side Roberto Rossellini (Rome, Open
City, 1945, Paisà, 1946, Europa ’51,
1952), but also Pietro Germi (In the
Name of the Law, 1948), Luigi
Comencini (Behind Closed Shutters,
1950) and Giorgio Pastina (Came
riera bella presenza offresi, 1951).
In 1950, he co-wrote his first film, Italian poster for Roberto Rossellini’s L’Amore,
Variety Lights, with Alberto Lattuada. screenplay co-written by Fellini, 1948.
Not that Fellini ever gave up drawing.
As a filmmaker, he always carried
some pencils in his pocket and
expressed himself in images as much
as he did in language, using sketches
to convey the situations he wanted to
shoot to his actors and crew and,
starting in the 1960s, transcribing his
own dreams.
Federico Fellini, The two comrades, Il Travaso,

27 April 1947:
“— Comrade, I just fell from the fourth floor!
— But Comrade, it’s not mentioned in L’Unità!
— Comrade, then it’s not true. We’ll meet in the
cinema. Long live Togliatti!”
Federico Fellini, Il Travaso, 4 May 1947

Fellini and a friend, Christmas 1944. “— Anything else, sir?
— Another glass of water, please.”
Federico Fellini, 1940.
20

21

The rise of the illustrated press from the project, so Fellini was chosen great Fellini themes such as popular
spawned a new genre: the cinenovel, to make the film, his debut as a culture, as shaped by the illustrated
the ancestor of the photo-novel. This director. press and show business, religion
form enjoyed its greatest popularity The White Sheik relates the adven and its ceremonies, and provincials in
in post-war Italy, where millions of tures of Wanda and Ivan, a young Rome.
copies were sold every week. The first couple up from the provinces who are
version of The White Sheik (1952), honeymooning in Rome. Taking
the archetypical photo-novel, was advantage of her husband’s lack of
written by Michelangelo Antonioni attention, Wanda escapes from their
who sent a manuscript of some twenty packed programme and puts her time
pages entitled Cara Ivan to the in the capital to good use by paying a
producer Carlo Ponti, who in turn visit to the White Sheik, the hero of
gave Fellini and Tullio Pinelli – who her favourite photo-novel. During this
later became one of Fellini’s regular unhoped-for encounter she learns all
scriptwriters – the task to write the about the excesses of the world of
screenplay. But Antonioni withdrew entertainment. This film explores some
The photo-novel
Brunella Bovo, The White Sheik, 1952.
22

Ernesto Almirante in the role of film director, The White Sheik.
Alberto Sordi, The White Sheik, 1952.

Alberto Sordi and Brunella Bovo, The White Sheik, 1952.
Italian poster for The White Sheik, 1952.
23

Cover of the photo-novel based on La Strada, 1954.
Inside spread and cover (p. 25) of the photo-novel based on Variety Lights, 1950.
24

25

Fellini had a lifelong passion for comic
strips, in which narrative is condensed
into a handful of frames. Reminis
cences of those popular superheroes,
notably of the character Mandrake,
found their way into his films.
Created in 1934 by Lee Falk,
Mandrake, the music-hall magician,
Mandrake
embodies another recurring Fellinies
que theme: popular entertainment.
Fellini made numerous attempts to
adapt Mandrake’s incredible adven
tures, but to no avail. In fact, it was
the print press that gave him the
the Magician
chance to carry through his project.
As guest editor of the December 1972
issue of Vogue, Fellini, in collaboration
with the photographers Franco Pinna
and Tazio Secchiaroli, came up with a
photo-novel in which Marcello Mastro
ianni played the role of Mandrake.
The ageing Mastroianni also made
an appearance as Mandrake in The
Interview (1987), a film constructed
in the form of a mock documentary,
but this time for the purposes of
advertising. Here, Fellini was not only
having a go at his star’s image; he
was also questioning the value of
cinema when measured by the criteria
of television.
Federico Fellini as guest editor of a special issue of Vogue, photo-novel of the adventures of Mandrake,
December 1972.
26

Marcello Mastroianni as Mandrake in
the photo-novel in Vogue, 1972.
27

Whenever he was asked about his next
film, Fellini would reply: “Mastorna.”
In fact, he never managed to make
his film about this character who dis
covers the afterlife. The doomed film
The voyage
was postponed several times, before
it was permanently shelved.
Dino de Laurentiis, though, had
agreed to produce the film. At great
cost, Fellini had sets built of the
cathedral of Cologne and of a life-
of Mastorna
size aeroplane at Dinocittà (the
producer’s studio). He eventually
managed to shoot the first scenes but
then became seriously ill and the
project was put on hold.
In the early 1990s the journalist
Vicenzo Mollica suggested that he
revive the project. The two friends
shared a passion for comics: instead
of a film, Mastorna would be a comic
book! Mollica asked Milo Manara to
get involved. This was the start of a
strange exchange between Mollica,
Fellini and Manara. Fellini drew a
version of the story in the form of a Marcello Mastroianni during a screen test for Il viaggio di G. Mastorna, 1966.
storyboard and gave it to Mollica, who
owned one of the first fax machines
and forwarded the panels to Manara
in Northern Italy. In 1992, this process
eventually led to the publication of Il
viaggio di G. Mastorna, detto Fernet
in the magazine Ciak. Credited to both
Fellini and Manara, this was one of
Fellini’s last works.
Federico Fellini and Milo Manara, Il viaggio di

G. Mastorna, CIAK Racconta, 1992.
28 28

Federico Fellini, sketch for Il viaggio di Milo Manara, sketch for Il viaggio di Federico Fellini and Milo Manara, Il viaggio di
G. Mastorna, 1962. G. Mastorna, 1992. G. Mastorna, CIAK Racconta, 1992.
Marcello Mastroianni during a screen test for Il viaggio di G. Mastorna, 1966.

Whether as political symbol, attribute Ecclesiastical parade, Fellini’s Roma, 1972.
of popular culture or object of mockery,
parades are found in every form in
Fellini’s work, from fascist pageants
to processions of streetwalkers or
clowns.
“We were born with three images:
the king, Il Duce and the pope,” he
used to say.1 In his films we can still
sense the ridiculous pomposity of those
fascist parades marching through the Fascist parade, The White Sheik, 1952.
scene at a running pace, as well as a
mixture of fascination and derision
with regard to the Church. “I love the
choreography of the Catholic Church.
I love its unchanging, hypnotic repre
sentations, its sumptuous theatre, its
lugubrious dirges, the catechism, the
election of the new pontiff, and the
grandiose mortuary procedure. The
merits of the Church are those of any
mental construction which helps protect
us against the engulfing magma of
the unconscious.”2
Parade of bikers, Fellini’s Roma, 1972.
Parades
Procession of prostitutes in a brothel, Fellini’s Roma, 1972.
30 30

When Fellini moved to Rome at the
age of nineteen he lived in a family
boarding house on Via Albalonga. In
the evening he used to dine in a small
trattoria, where he would observe the
gargantuan eaters of spaghetti that
are part of Italian folklore. When the
weather improved, restaurant tables
spilled out across the pavement and
into the road, becoming a colourful
meeting place. The director recreated
this typically Roman ambience in the
dinner scene of Fellini’s Roma (1972).
“Everything here belongs to the belly,
becomes belly. […] A spectacle to be
devoured with the eyes, but also the
menace of all those eyes, mouths, faces
and overflowing bodies, eager to
swallow.”3
Diners
Dinner scene, La Domenica del Corriere, 29 May 1965.

Dinner scene, Fellini’s Roma, 1972.
Fellini on the set of La Dolce Vita, 1959. 32 32

Federico Fellini on the cover of Télérama on the
Dinner scene, Fellini’s Roma, 1972. occasion of the release of Fellini’s Roma, 4 June 1972.

Dinner scene in Cinecittà’s Studio 5, Fellini’s Roma, 1972. 34

Fellini’s mythology often invoked the
theatre of illusion. Beauty contests,
dance halls and carnivals, those
temples to the cult of appearance,
provided regular inspiration. Circus
and music hall also appear through
out his work, from Variety Lights
(1950) to I Clowns (1970). According
to the legend, the young Fellini was
so fascinated by travelling performers
that he ran away to follow a circus
caravan. “Immediately when I saw it I
felt traumatized, and at the same time
totally committed to that noise and
music, to those monstrous apparitions,
to those death-defying acts. I saw the
big top as a miracle factory where
things were done that were impossible
for most men. This kind of show, based
on wonder and fantasy, on pranks and
nonsense, and on the lack of any coldly
intellectual meaning, is just the thing
for me.”4
Giulietta Masina as Gelsomina, La Strada, 1954.
Federico Fellini and a clown, La Dolce Vita, 1960. The circus

Richard Basehart as the tightrope walker, La Strada, 1954.
36

Clowns, 8½, 1963. 37

Richard Basehart, La Strada, 1954.
Giulietta Masina and Anthony Quinn,
La Strada, 1954.
Giulietta Masina as Gelsomina, La Strada, 1954.
Anthony Quinn, La Strada, 1954.

Poster for Silnice (La Strada), 1954,
design Enrico Deseta.
Giulietta Masina, La Strada, 1954.

La Strada, 1954.
38

Poster for La Strada, 1954.
Anthony Quinn, La Strada, 1954.
La Strada, 1954.

La Strada, 1954.
Richard Basehart and Giulietta Masina,
La Strada, 1954.
Richard Basehart, La Strada, 1954.
39

Anthony Quinn, La Strada, 1954. 40

Carnival, I Vitelloni, 1953.
Marcello Mastroianni, City of Women, 1980.
42

Alberto Sordi, I Vitelloni, 1953.
The end of carnival, I Vitelloni, 1953.
43

Grotesques
But who are these weirdoes, these
living caricatures who amble through
Fellini’s films? They are the heirs to a
long tradition of grotesques, figures
out of commedia dell’arte, the
attributes of the spectacle. They make
up the world according to Fellini,
halfway between carnival and
squalor. Together, they form the great
parade of “Circus Fellini.”
Ginger and Fred, 1986.
Satyricon, 1969.
44

Max Born, Satyricon, 1969. Mario Romagnoli, Satyricon, 1969.
Ginger and Fred, 1986.

Satyricon, 1969.
Ginger and Fred, 1986. Satyricon, 1969.

The large sugar dress, photo for the special Ginger and Fred, 1986.
Fellini issue of Vogue, 1972. Federico Fellini, collage and drawing over
photograph.
from left to right

Federico Fellini, drawing, no date.
Federico Fellini, drawing, 1972.
Federico Fellini, drawing, November 1974.
Federico Fellini, drawing, July 1974.
Federico Fellini, drawing, July 1974.
Federico Fellini, drawing, no date.
Federico Fellini, drawing, February 1972.
Federico Fellini, drawing of Clemente Fracassi,
26 October 1974. 45

Casting
Fellini employed the same method
before each new shoot: “I send a small
advertisement to the newspapers which
says more or less: ‘Federico Fellini is
ready to meet all those people who
sessions
wish to see him.’ The following days I
meet hundreds of people. Every idiot
in Rome turns up to see me, including
the police. It’s a kind of surreal mad
house, it creates a very stimulating
atmosphere. I look at all of them
attentively. I steal something of each
visitor’s personality. […] I may see a
thousand in order to pick two, but I
assimilate them all. It’s as if they were
saying to me, ‘Take a good look at us,
each of us is a bit of the mosaic you
are now building up’.”5
At the interview, potential extras
were asked to leave a photo. This
repertoire of weird faces forms an
astonishing collection, which Fellini
himself classified by type: Interesting
faces, Exotic men, Pretty women,
Photo of would-be actor sent to Fellini.
Ample women with sensual faces, Federico Fellini, casting session for A Director’s
Grannies, Dancers, Ugly mugs, Notebook, 1969.
Generously endowed, Whorish girls,
Naïve and droll girls, Little fag faces,
Clowns, Sophisticated, Funereal
women, etc.
This is not the world according to
Fellini, but the world as it appeared
to Fellini, the world that answered his
call – the one that, rightly or wrongly,
considered itself Felliniesque.
Photo of would-be actor sent to Fellini.
46

Casting session for Fellini’s Casanova, 1976.
Photos of would-be
actors sent to Fellini.
47

Photos of would-be actors sent to Fellini.
48

49

One evening in November 1958,
a young Roman aristocrat was cele
brating his birthday in a fashionable
nightclub, the Rugantino, which was
popular with bright young things but
also with film stars, writers and intel
lectuals. That night, Anita Ekberg set
the joint on fire by launching into a
wild, barefoot dance. Eager to outdo
the star, Aiché Nanà, a young actress
desperate to make a name for herself,
raised the roof with a provocative
striptease.
An uproar ensued. The scene was
immortalised by Tazio Secchiaroli, one
of the first celebrity photographers,
and the next morning his pictures were
on the front page of all the magazines.
Italians were outraged, and worried
by the decadence of the nation’s high
society.
As for Fellini, who at the time was
in the middle of his screenplay for La
Dolce Vita (1960), the event inspired
him to write the scene with the strip
tease by the actress Nadia Gray.
The Rugantino
Music hall scene, Variety Lights, 1950. Striptease scene, La Dolce Vita, 1960.
50

Striptease scene, La Dolce Vita, 1960.
51

Nadia Gray’s striptease, La Dolce Vita, 1960.
52

“Turkish girl strips,” L’Espresso, 16 November 1958.
Aiché Nanà strips at the Rugantino, November 1958.
53

Paparazzi
In the 1950s, the American studios
were looking to cut costs. At the time,
Cinecittà, with its sophisticated infra
structure and its cheap skilled labour
was a commercial godsend for the
big Hollywood production companies.
Over the next years, these giants of
cinema invaded the place with a trawl
of film stars, love affairs and scandals
in their wake. Rome became known
as Hollywood-on-Tiber.
This was the birth of the celebrity
press, scandal sheets that published
photos taken on the sly. The Via Veneto
became the playground of a new kind
of photographer who was always
hunting for a scoop or a snapshot of Paparazzi photographing the arrival of Anita Ekberg, La Dolce Vita, 1960.
a star. Pictures that fetched high prices
grabbed the headlines of the gutter
press. In La Dolce Vita, Fellini shows
the entertainment world and casts an
amused eye on this game of appear
ances. The photographer in the film,
Paparazzo, played by Walter
Santesso, is modelled after Tazio
Secchiaroli, the most famous photo
grapher at the time. Fifty years later,
La Dolce Vita is a cult film and the term
paparazzi has become a household
word.
54

Ava Gardner on the front page of L’Espresso, 26 July 1956.
Photographers at work, L’Espresso, 17 February 1957.
Candid photos of Ava Gardner and Walter Chiari swimming, 26 August 1956.
Anouk Aimée and two photographers in the Via Veneto, La Dolce Vita, 1960.
55

Anita Ekberg and her husband Anthony Steel Anthony Steel chasing a photographer,
about to give chase to a photographer, 15 August 1958.
15 August 1958. Anita Ekberg greeting journalists with a bow
and arrow, 20 October 1960.
The actor Walter Chiari chasing Tazio Secchiaroli, 1958.

Federico Fellini, drawing of Walter Santesso as
Paparazzo, around 1960.
Photographer with his damaged camera, 1950s.
Walter Santesso, the photographer Paparazzo

in La Dolce Vita, 1960.
Tazio Secchiaroli in front of the Café de Paris,

Via Veneto, 1950s.
57 57

Sandro Simeoni, poster for La Dolce Vita, 1960.
58

59

In the 1940s, Ginger and Fred became
acclaimed music hall stars with their
imitation of the tap dancing of Ginger
Rogers and Fred Astaire. Forty years
later, forgotten by the public, they are
hauled back into the limelight by
television for a comeback, randomly
surrounded by a troupe of dwarves,
a lover of extraterrestrials and a
defrocked priest (played by photo
grapher Jacques-Henri Lartigue).
Among this Felliniesque crowd was
an amazing host of look-alikes, as if
to say that television is merely a pale
copy, that cinema is still the original.
To recruit his extras, Fellini care
fully organised casting sessions with
Deborah Beer, his set photographer.
Among the look-alikes of celebrities
from the worlds of cinema and
literature were two Woody Allens,
a Kojak, a Marlene Dietrich and
a Brigitte Bardot. Fellini even took on
literature, with look-alikes of Marcel
Proust and Franz Kafka.
Look-alikes
Marlene Dietrich and Kojak, casting for look- Ronald Reagan, Brigitte Bardot, Bette Davis, Woody Allen 1 and Woody
alikes, Ginger and Fred, 1986. Allen 2, casting for look-alikes, Ginger and Fred, 1986.
60 60

Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust and Elisabeth II,
casting for look-alikes, Ginger and Fred, 1986.

Bette Davis, casting for look-alikes, Ginger and Fred, 1986.

63

Anita Ekberg had caused a sensation
in La Dolce Vita. The following year,
Fellini offered Anita Ekberg a rather
unusual role in his new film, The Temp-
tations of Doctor Antonio (1962).
Here, a giant advertising poster shows
the generously endowed actress
reclining, encouraging passers-by to
drink more milk! This billboard stands
in the middle of a vacant lot, facing
the buildings of the EUR district, built
under Mussolini. This “gross
indecency” incurs the wrath of a local
resident, the very puritanical Doctor
Antonio. Outraged at this assault on
morality, he starts up a censorship
campaign, but then the splendid
creature comes down from her poster
Peppino De Filippo as Saint George, The Tempta-
and starts trying to seduce him. Fellini
tions of Doctor Antonio (Boccaccio ’70), 1962.
was once again exploring the theme
of morality ravaged by the images of
the modern world.
The Temptations of
Doctor Antonio Anita Ekberg on an advertisement poster,
“Drink more milk,” The Temptations of Doctor
Antonio (Boccaccio ’70), 1962.
64

The Temptations of Doctor Antonio (Boccaccio ’70),
1962.
Peppino De Filippo, The Temptations of Doctor

Antonio (Boccaccio ’70), 1962.
The Temptations of Doctor Antonio (Boccaccio ’70), 1962.
65

Ginger and Fred (1986) is a long
diatribe against private television and
the mediocrity of its fare. “For me,
television has nothing in common with
cinema: it reduces and mortifies films.
In fact, I don’t think there’s such a thing
as a televisual style. […] Television is
a domestic appliance, incapable of
conveying images by an authentic
filmmaker.”6 Fellini even interlarded
his film with mock advertisements and
over-the-top posters.
The filmmaker targets television
and casts a critical eye on this brave
new world in which commercials
persuade us that everything is for sale.
These were the decisive years when
the Italian government started
privatising the public channels and
Silvio Berlusconi laid the foundation
of a powerful media group. Soon the
businessman was arguing that films
on television should be broken up to
fit in commercials. Fellini was furious.
Mock advertisements
Group of young hippies, Fellini’s Roma, 1972.
Federico Fellini, sketches for a mock poster, The Voice of the Moon, 1990.
66

Mock advertisement posters, Ginger and Fred, 1986.
67

Fellini
at Work

The scriptwriters
“I dread the script. Odiously indispens
able. In order to work I need to create
a feeling of schoolboy camaraderie
with my collaborators, to share the
same memories, the same tastes, the
same jokes, in an atmosphere of
contestation and mockery towards
the work we are trying to do. Against
the film. I’ve always been lucky enough
to have this schoolboy comradeship
with the scriptwriters who have worked
with me, from Tullio Pinelli to Ennio
Flaiano, from Zapponi to Rondi and
to Tonino Guerra. When I have an
idea for the next film, I speak with
them about it, as if I was telling them
about something that I had partly
glimpsed and partly dreamed, some
thing that […] really happened to
someone I know, who could also be
me.”1
In 1956, at Fellini’s request, the
poet Pier Paolo Pasolini worked on
the script of Nights of Cabiria (1957).
Fellini had read his first novel, The
Ragazzi, and the two men had become
friends. Fellini was already working
Federico Fellini and the scriptwriter Tullio Pinelli, around 1955. Mario Passante in the scene of the pilgrimage,
with the scriptwriters Flaiano and
Nights of Cabiria, 1957.
Pinelli, but he believed that Pasolini
would infuse the typically Roman
scenes with a unique atmosphere,
and make the prostitutes and their
pimps vivid and convincing.
Pasolini remembers: “It was I who
invented the character of the crippled Pier Paolo Pasolini and Federico Fellini, Nights of Cabiria, 1957.
uncle who goes to the Sanctuary of
Divine Love. It is a true story, one that
I had heard. A hunchbacked pimp
takes his girls to the Sanctuary and
brings along his crippled uncle. But
no miracle occurs, and the uncle falls
down and hurts himself.”2
Federico Fellini, caricature of his scriptwriter

Ennio Flaiano.
70 70

Ennio Flaiano, Fellini and Giulietta Masina (from left to right),
Nights of Cabiria, 1957.

“When starting my films, I spend most
of my time sitting at my desk, doodling
tits and bums. It’s my way of beginning
my film, of deciphering it through these
doodles.”3 “Later, these sketches and
little notes also end up in the hands of
my collaborators: the set designer,
the costume designer and the make-up
artist all use them as models to get
their own work going.”4
Piero Gherardi, Fellini’s great set
and costume designer, worked with
him on I Vitelloni, Nights of Cabiria,
La Dolce Vita, 8½ and Juliet of the
Spirits (1965). He twice won the
supreme award, an Oscar, for his
costumes: first for La Dolce Vita, then
for 8½. Their first collaboration dates
back to 1948, when they worked Giulietta Masina, La Strada, 1954.
together on Alberto Lattuada’s film
Without Pity. They would continue
working together for the next twenty
years. Recalling the importance of the
costume designer’s role, Fellini said:
“Sometimes I even use the make-up
and costume to emphasise anything
that may bring out the person’s
psychology.”5
Piero Gherardi, Fellini’s set designer.

The costumes
Federico Fellini, drawing of Giulietta Masina in
the costume of Gelsomina, La Strada, no date.
72

Pina Gualandri, costume fitting for the role of the prostitute Matilda, Nights
of Cabiria, 1957.
73

Federico Fellini, preliminary sketch of Cabiria’s costume and hairstyle, Nights of Cabiria, around 1957.
Giulietta Masina, costume fitting for the role of Cabiria, Nights of Cabiria, 1957.
74

Giulietta Masina, Nights of Cabiria, 1957.
75

Behind
“I am incapable of looking at things
in a detached way, through the
camera for example. […] I couldn’t
care less about the lens. I need to be
in the thick of things. I need to know
the camera
everything about everyone, to make
love with everything around me.”6
“With the group, we are all in the
same boat so long as the filming lasts.
Then we part ways as if we never
met, like an army of mercenaries who
have been recruited by a different
lord, only to re-establish the same
strong ties a year later. I like that very
much. It is the highest form of social
life I know.”7
In the course of his career, Fellini
received twenty-four Oscar nomina
tions and won eight: four Oscars for
the best foreign language film (for La
Strada in 1956, Nights of Cabiria in
1957, 8½ in 1963 and Amarcord in
1974), three Oscars for the best
costumes (for La Dolce Vita in 1961
and 8½ in 1963, with costumes by
Piero Gherardi, and for Fellini’s
Casanova in 1976, with costumes by
Danilo Donati) and an Oscar for
lifetime achievement in 1993.
On the camera, Federico Fellini had written: Federico Fellini, Nights of Cabiria, 1957.
“Remember that this is a comic film,” 8½, 1963. Federico Fellini, Il Bidone, 1955.
Federico Fellini, 8½, 1963.
76

Federico Fellini, 8½, 1963.
77

Federico Fellini looks through the camera. Federico Fellini on the set of 8½, 1963.
Federico Fellini and his director of photography, City of Women, 1980.
Giuseppe Rotunno, on the set of Fellini’s
Casanova, 1976.
Federico Fellini and his film crew on the set of

On the set of Satyricon, 1969. Nights of Cabiria, 1957.
78

Federico Fellini in action.
Federico Fellini in the 1960s.
Federico Fellini looks through the camera.

Marcello Mastroianni, 8½, 1963.
79

When shooting a scene, Fellini always
tried to get his actors to manifest an
attitude or emotion. Words were of
little interest to him at this stage. In
fact, he was not much in favour of live
recording. He preferred his actors
simply to count rather than speak their
lines: “Count up to six, slowly and
bitterly, then continue up to twenty-
nine, but with a hint of contempt as
well.”8 “I put dialogue into the film
after I have made it. The actor plays
better that way, not having to
remember his lines. This is all the
more so because I often use non-
actors and, in order to make them
behave naturally, I get them to talk as
they would in real life.”9
The real work on the dialogues
thus began in the post-production
phase, and Fellini often held casting
sessions in order to find the voice that
would best fit the character.
Federico Fellini and Pupella Maggio, Amarcord, 1973.
Directing
Marcello Mastroianni, La Dolce Vita, 1960.
actors
Federico Fellini rehearsing with Marcello Mastroianni, La Dolce Vita, 1960.
80

Federico Fellini, Marcello Mastroianni and Anouk Aimée on the set of 8½, 1963. 81

Bernice Stegers, Federico Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni on the set of City of Women, 1980.
Federico Fellini and Eddra Gale as La Saraghina,

82 8½, 1963.

83

Studio 5
“Cinema is made up of images. An
image is developed with light and it is
light that creates the image. In this
sense, I think that cinema is really
closely connected to painting, and
therefore to light. In the studio, you
can command, control and model the
light and express yourself with it. On
location, this is more difficult. [...] For
me, the studio is the place where the
images you have seen in your
imagination can be made in a totally
controlled way, just as a painter does
on a canvas with his brush.[…]
Because cinema really is an artificial
and fictional form of expression, it is
normal that most films are made in
the studio. In the studio we can achieve
greater precision and veracity. It
allows us to be more faithfull to the
artificial and fictional nature of the
fantasy image that we have in us.”10
“The Via Veneto which Piero
Gherardi rebuilt was exact down to
the smallest detail, but it had one
thing peculiar to it: it was flat instead
of sloping. As I worked on it I got so
used to this perspective that my
annoyance with the real Via Veneto
grew even greater. […] When I pass
the Café de Paris, I cannot help
feeling that the real Via Veneto was
the one in Studio 5 [at Cinecittà]. […]
I also have the irresistible urge to act
with the same despotic control on the
real street as I do on the artificial set.
This is all rather complicated, one
day I should talk to someone who
understands psychoanalysis.”11
“I was born near the sea. It has given

me my most captivating memories.
Nowadays it seems to me as a
comforting mystery, it evokes an idea
of permanency, of eternity, of a
primordial element.”12
Studio reconstruction of the Via Veneto,

La Dolce Vita, 1960. 84

85

Artificial sea, Fellini’s Casanova, 1976.
86

Artificial sea, And the Ship Sails On, 1983. Model of the battleship, And the Ship Sails On, 1983.
Artificial sea, Amarcord, 1973.
87

The famous opening scene of La Dolce
Vita (1960), in which a helicopter
carries a statue of Christ through the
air, has a precedent. On 1 May 1956,
four years before the film was released,
a Catholic newsreel showed a heli
copter landing on Piazza del Duomo
in Milan, where a solemn procession
carried in a statue of Christ and lashed
it to the machine. The helicopter (a Bell
47, the same model as in La Dolce
Vita) and its strange passenger then
took off for the Vatican to the cheers
of the crowd. The irony is that this
Felliniesque opening sequence was
the reason that the film was censored
in Spain because of its blasphemous
nature!
“I never had any intention to moral
ize. I am not a moralist by nature.
The interpretation of the film [La Dolce
Vita] as a mirror of the times, a harsh
portrayal, the chronicle and trial of
an entire society, certainly was not my
idea. For me, La Dolce Vita is nothing
more than the story of the diurnal and
nocturnal wanderings of an undistin
The statue of Christ the Worker fastened to a helicopter, Milan, 1 May 1956.
guished journalist.”13
The helicopter
Christ of the Depths and helicopter accident in the Alps, illustrations in La Domenica del Corriere, 14 September 1958.
88

Helicopter transporting a statue of Christ, La Dolce Vita, 1960.
89

The City
of Women
90

91

Fellini,
Neorealism was an engaged form of
cinema that dealt with the economic
and social problems of Italy during the
years of reconstruction. Led by Cesare
Zavattini, Neorealist critics on the Left
Catholic
publicly attacked Fellini for betraying its
precepts in La Strada (1954), a film that
had been supported by the Church and
earned him the label of “Catholic film
maker.” Certainly, Fellini had begun to
make films that were more concerned
filmmaker?
with individual destiny. La Strada,
Il Bidone (1955) and Nights of Cabiria
(1957) have often been described as
“films of redemption,” and they do
evoke a search by the protagonists for
something that will save their soul. Fellini
himself spoke of “an irresistible, providen
tial force that is innate within us.”1
Torn between an omnipresent Catholic
culture and his own desires as a free
man, in 1957 he wrote to a Jesuit priest:
“Cabiria, my last creature, is also fragile,
tender and unlucky after so much bad
luck and the collapse of her innocent
dream of love, still believes in love and
life. My latest film ends with a lyrical
explosion with musical overtones,
a serenade sung in the woods; it is all
very dramatic because Cabiria carries
in her heart a hidden state of grace that
she has just discovered. It is kinder to
leave Cabiria the joy of telling us if this
grace is her finding God.”2
Giulietta Masina, coloured photo, Nights of Cabiria, 1957.
92

Giulietta Masina, La Strada, 1954.
Photos and poster for La Strada, 1954.
93

Giulietta Masina and François Périer, coloured photo, Nights of Cabiria, 1957.
Giulietta Masina, Nights of Cabiria, 1957.
94

François Périer, Nights of Cabiria, 1957. 95

Fellini’s female obsessions jostle and
teem from one film to the next, forming
one big family in which he manifestly
feels very much at home. The nympho
mania of La Saraghina in 8½ (1963)
is strangely akin to that of Volpina in
Amarcord (1973), and the mammary
munificence of the tobacconist in
Amarcord seems carbon-copied in
that of the farmer’s wife in City of
Women (1980)…
“La Saraghina in 8½ is a child’s
image of woman, one out of a
thousand different forms in which
a woman can express herself. This is
woman seen as rich in animal
femininity, huge and elusive and at
the same time sustaining, as seen
through the eyes of a teenager avid
for life and sex, an Italian teenager
inhibited and held back by priests,
Church, family and a disastrous
education. A teenager who, craving
a woman, imagines and desires one
who is a great quantity of women.”3
Maria Antonietta Beluzzi as the tobacconist, Bruno Zanin as Titta, Amarcord, 1973.
Female obsessions
Federico Fellini, The Leopard Woman.
Dream of September 1963

P. has become an enormous, extremely
soft form of transportation; lying down,
stretched out upon her vast belly,
clinging joyously to her immense tits
that rise up like round hills in front of
me, the great soft body that is wider
than the road it is stretched out on,
completely nude, slips along sweetly
like a white vessel. Her hips touch the
façades of the houses. “Oh what joy!
What a party!” I shout. “My great big
marvellous whore’s hips have gotten
even wider! It’s wonderful! I love being
up here!”4
96

97Dreams, dream of September 1963.
Federico Fellini, The Book of

98

99as Titta and Federico Fellini, Amarcord, 1973.
Maria Antonietta Beluzzi as the tobacconist, Bruno Zanin

Eddra Gale as La Saraghina, 8½, 1963.
100

Federico Fellini, The Book of Dreams, dream of 18 July 1980. “You see? I managed to see you for real.”
Josiane Tanzilli as Volpina, Amarcord, 1973.
Federico Fellini, preliminary sketch for the

character Volpina, around 1973. 101

In the 1950s, the pinup was emblem
atic of both changing morals and the
rise of a certain kind of men’s maga
zine. In this modern world where
images played such an important part,
it was enough for a woman to be
generously endowed for her to become
famous. And when it came to sex
symbols, Marilyn Monroe, in spite of
strong competition from Brigitte
Bardot, Jayne Mansfield and Anita
Ekberg, stood head and shoulders
above the rest.
As for Anita Ekberg, the voluptuous
beauty of this cover girl prompted Bob
Hope, her partner in Paris Holiday,
to quip that her parents should have
won “the Nobel Prize for architecture.”
Voted Miss Sweden in 1950, Ekberg
embarked on a film career while
appearing regularly on magazine
covers over the coming decade. Fellini
chose her for La Dolce Vita because
of what she represented. “Her beauty
was superhuman. The first time I saw
her portrait was in an American maga
zine. ‘Please God,’ I thought, ‘may
I never meet her!’ Years later, when I
saw her walking towards me in the
garden of the Town Hall, I experienced
the same feeling of wonder, of
enraptured awe, of unbelief that we
feel when confronted with exceptional
creatures such as the giraffe, the
elephant or the monkey bread tree…”5
Anita Ekberg
Anita Ekberg, La Dolce Vita, 1960
Federico Fellini, drawing of Anita Ekberg

inscribed to his set designer Piero Gherardi,
102 La Dolce Vita, 1960.

Anita Ekberg, La Dolce Vita, 1960.
Anita Ekberg and Federico Fellini, T he Interview, 1987.

Anita Ekberg, The Temptations of
Doctor Antonio (Boccaccio ’70), 1962.
103

Federico Fellini, The Book of Dreams, dream of 24 October 1965 (detail).
Dream of 24 October 1965 cadence of its wheels over the train

(Transcription of the text opposite track joints.
this drawing) While I’m playing with the little
The bar at the grade crossing comes girl and Anita with her new breasts a
down. I’m in my car, which has come railcar loaded with green grain draws
to a stop halfway across, awry. Anita further away, on the other side of the
is there, completely naked, with her lowered bar, with its slow and equal
breasts reduced by plastic surgery pace.
(like P. did). I play with a little girl (or Is that the idea for a new film that
a doll?). She’s very small (The same one as soon as it is born disappears while
that doctor who came dancing into I fool around with my usual neurotic
Signora Bernhard’s studio was holding head games? Is it a new psychological
in his arms?) attitude that I have not been able to
I make her fly from one arm to the bring to fruition? Why are they taking
other, pretend to toss her into the car. that green grain away? When will
A cargo train comes rolling past I see it again? When will I be able to
from left to right, with the rhythmic gather the ripe sheaves? 6

Anita Ekberg, magazine covers.
105

Roberto Rossellini: “Federico once
told me a story that he had made
up and that I filmed with the title
Il Miracolo, but he led me to believe
that it was a Russian story whose
author he’d forgotten. I thought of
Fellini for the role of the tramp whom
Anna Magnani takes for Saint Joseph.
He accepted.”7 Il Miracolo, the
second part of L’Amore (1948), was
Fellini’s first appearance on screen.
He grew a beard specially for the role
and dyed his hair blond. In the film,
the solitary Anna Magnani responds
to his silence with an incredible
monologue.
Much later, the actress made an
appearance in Fellini’s Roma (1972);
Federico Fellini and Anna Magnani on the set of Fellini’s Roma, 1972.
for the director, it was unthinkable not
Anna Magnani
to include her when evoking Rome.
In the film he follows her to her door
and, we hear his voice off screen:
“Can I ask you a question?” “No,
I don’t trust you. Ciao Federico, go
to bed.” This was to be Magnani’s
last film role, concluding their series
of encounters.
Anna Magnani, Fellini’s Roma, 1972. 106

Federico Fellini and Anna Magnani on the set of Roberto Rossellini’s film The Miracle, 1948.
107

All about
Let us dwell for a moment on the
symbolism of the posters for Fellini’s
Roma (1972). The Italian one shows
a dominant-looking prostitute. Here,
Fellini is illustrating the story of Rome
posters
as told by Titus Livius, who wrote that
the founders of the city, Remus and
Romulus, were brought up by Lupa
(the She-Wolf), this being the name not
of the animal but of the streetwalker
who took them in.
The French poster takes a more
classical approach to Rome’s founda
tion myth. A beautiful naked woman
adopts the posture of the she-wolf. Her
breasts – Fellini’s favourite anatomical
feature – have become the row of teats
that will feed the new Remus and
Romulus for – note this subtle touch –
the founders of the Eternal City do not
appear in this parody. The American
version is more pragmatic: a wolf is a
wolf! In this appropriation of the myth,
the narrative part is concentrated in
the space usually occupied by Remus
and Romulus, where what we see is
Circus Fellini, as if to tell us that
Federico is the true founder of Rome.
American poster, Fellini’s Roma, 1972.
French poster, Fellini’s Roma, 1972.
108

Federico Fellini, study of a prostitute,
Fellini’s Roma, 1972.
Prostitute, Fellini’s Roma, 1972.
Italian poster, Fellini’s Roma, 1972.
109

When working on the film Nights of
Cabiria (1957), in which Giulietta
Masina plays the role of an innocent
prostitute, Fellini did extensive research
into his subject. Indeed, his friend
Beno Graziani, with whom he often
walked through the suburbs of Rome,
recalls that all the prostitutes there
used to recognise the director and
call him by his first name.
For Fellini, “the prostitute is the
essential counterpoint to the Italian
mamma. Neither is conceivable with-
out the other. And just as our mothers
fed and clothed us, so – I am speaking
for my generation here – it was
inevitable that whores would introduce
us to sex. We owe them everything,
we are all in debt to those women
who have replaced our desire, hopes
and fantasies with an often shabby
and petty but sometimes equally
wonderful prospect.”8
In the visions sequence in Amarcord,

Fellini shows “the first whore, with her
huge swaying white and sulky arse
walking up the stairs of the brothel,
Brothel, Fellini’s Roma, 1972.
who always looked like she was on
Prostitutes in a brothel, Fellini’s Roma, 1972.
the verge of revealing something to us,
and who held us under her eternal
spell […].”9
For this scene – a subjective camera
follows the impressive rear of the
prostitute as she climbs the stairs – Federico Fellini, study of a prostitute.
Prostitutes
Fellini held a casting session to find
the actress with the backside that was
most suited for the role. It was then left
up to the make-up crew to fill in the
final details...
Prostitutes, Fellini’s Roma, 1972.
Article on the closure of brothels in Italy, L’Espresso, 21 September 1958.
110

Italian poster, Nights of Cabiria, 1957.
Brothel, Fellini’s Roma, 1972.

Federico Fellini, study of a prostitute climbing the stairs, no date. Casting the buttocks of the prostitute in
City of Women, 1980
112

113

To evoke Fellini’s relation to women
is, by the same token, to consider the
man’s role. His relation to Casanova
is a complex one in this respect.
When Fellini signed his contract
with producer Dino De Laurentiis, he
had never read the famous libertine’s
History of My Life. And the character
he discovered when he did was hardly
to his liking: “Casanova? I loathe him.
[…] The Italian male at his saddest:
a coward, a fascist. After all, what is
fascism if not belated adolescence?
Casanova is a super-vitellone, and
not a very nice one at that, a sinister
Pinocchio who refuses to be a ‘good
little boy.’”10
The heavy responsibility of playing
Casanova – and bearing the brunt of
Fellini’s aversion for the character – fell
to the Canadian Donald Sutherland.
Every morning, the director insisted on
uglifying his leading actor. The actor
spent three hours in make-up while
his forehead was being enlarged by
seven centimetres, his brows were
plucked and he was fitted with a false
Federico Fellini, Casanova in foetal position, around 1976.
nose and a false chin.
But very occasionally Fellini would
also confess to identifying with the
great seducer: “Casanova dances
with an imaginary woman who is a
ghost because that is his destiny or at
least the destiny that I have given to
the Casanova character, because, to
Casanova
cut a long story short, I identify myself
with him… Not as a lover of women,
but as a man who is incapable of
loving women because he is deeply in
love with a fantasy image of women.”11
Cicely Browne and Donald Sutherland, Fellini’s Casanova, 1976.
114

Donald Sutherland, Fellini’s Casanova, 1976. 115

Fellini
Although there was a strong personal able if we think of 8½ (1963), in
bond between Fellini and Mastroianni, which Mastroianni plays a director
the director was categorical: “It is not struggling for inspiration.
true that Marcello is me, my cinemato Mastroianni, who appeared in
graphic double, an alter-ego… I don’t six of Fellini’s films, plays himself in
and
put my hat on his head in order to A Director’s Notebook (1969) and
identify him with me, but to give him The Interview (1987), while Fellini’s
an idea, a suggestion. I try to make shadow hangs heavily over partly
him look like me, because for me autobiographical films such as La
that’s the most direct way I have of Dolce Vita, 8½ and City of Women.
thinking about the character and the Conversely, In Ginger and Fred
his
story. It’s a very complicated function, (1986), there is hardly a trace of
made possible only by deep friendship Fellini in the character played by
and an exacerbated exhibitionism.”12 Mastroianni. All we have is a series
Even so, it is often said that the actor of set photos in which the actor seems
was the director’s onscreen double. to mirror the filmmaker by wearing
This identification is perhaps justifi his coat and hat.
double
Self-portraits In my dreams,
I almost always see myself from
behind. I have hair and I’m thinner,
just like I was twenty or thirty years
ago. Here, this is how I see myself
and that’s how I’ll draw myself in the
dreams I write down in this book.
But this is how I should draw myself.13
Federico Fellini, self-portraits, The Book of Dreams.

Federico Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni, 1960s.
116

117 117

Federico Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni, 8½, 1963.

Federico Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni, 8½, 1963.
118 118

Federico Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni, La Dolce Vita, 1960.
Federico Fellini and Marcello Mastroianni, City of Women, 1980.
119

“Certain events that have inspired this which they never even get to kiss.
film [La Dolce Vita] took place this year The confusion was deliberately
[1958]. My collaborators and I only maintained on the film’s release by
had to read the papers to find exciting means of a promotional photograph
material.”14 that made their lips look closer than
For the famous fountain scene in they ever were when acting. By shoot
La Dolce Vita, Fellini was inspired by ing at a slight angle, the photographer
a series of photographs by Pierluigi, managed to create the illusion of
published in Il Tempo in September a kiss.
1958, showing Anita Ekberg bathing Twenty-seven years later, in
in the Trevi Fountain. Seven months The Interview (1987), Fellini brought
later, at Fellini’s request, the actress Marcello Mastroianni and Anita
replayed the scene, this time with Ekberg together once again, and
Marcello Mastroianni. showed them the mythical scene from
The image of Ekberg and Mastro La Dolce Vita. The ageing actors look
ianni in the fountain has been seen on helplessly. An alchemist of the
all over the world, making them a cinema, Fellini had altered the
mythical couple. However, this was sequence so that Mastroianni and
hardly borne out by the script, in Ekberg became a couple at last.
The myth of
the fountain
Anita Ekberg, Marcello Mastroianni and Federico Fellini
on the set of La Dolce Vita, 1960.
120

Anita Ekberg on the set of La Dolce Vita, 1960.
A crowd of onlookers, La Dolce Vita, 1960.
Set of La Dolce Vita, 1960.
Marcello Mastroianni, La Dolce Vita,

1960.
121 121

Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni, La Dolce Vita, 1960.
122

123

Anita Ekberg in a white dress in the Trevi fountain two years before La Dolce Vita, Tempo, 9 September 1958.
124

Lobby card (fotobusta) for La Dolce Vita, 1960.
Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni, The Interview, 1987.
125

Giulietta Masina and Federico Fellini
met in the early 1940s. At the time,
Fellini was writing the radio plays
in which she was acting. They got
married in 1943 and stayed together
for the rest of their lives. Giulietta
would outlive Fellini, who died in
1993, for only five months. For over
fifty years, they were an item both in
life and in the studio. Giulietta won
international plaudits for her portrayal
of Gelsomina in La Strada. She played
a circus clown who is sometimes
overwhelmed by sadness, a female
incarnation of the little tramp Charlie
Chaplin.
“Giulietta doesn’t like the way I look
Masina
at her. She probably thinks that my
gaze is not suggested by natural
attraction or professional experience,
but that it is the expression of an
authoritarian and capricious husband.
[…] Giulietta is unaware of her true
and Fellini
talent. She doesn’t know herself. She
mistrusts her comic genius and doesn’t
want to realise that what makes it so
special is precisely the set of expres
sions, between the buffoonish and the
dramatic, which her clown’s face is
capable of simultaneously express
ing.”15
Giulietta Masina, Ginger and Fred, 1986.
126

Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina, Paris Match, 1957.
Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina on the set of Nights of Cabiria, 1957.
Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina, Juliet of the Spirits, 1965.

Giulietta Masina, Vogue, special Fellini issue, December 1972.
127 127

Biographical
Imagination
128

129

“These days I am filming sequences, the lady who gave private Latin
which I have given the generic lessons, so decent, so reserved and
name ‘visions’: it is a long journey, passionate; the first whore, her huge
a protracted fall of the hero who white arse […] the blonder-than-
descends along a spiralling slide, blond female bikers of the ‘The Circle
is swallowed up, re-emerges and of Death’ in skin-tight black leather,
once again plunges into the bright all swagger and cruelty; the fishwife,
obscurity of his female mythology: wrapped up in cardigans like a
Rosina the chamber maid’s samurai, her arms and big breasts
monumental legs, avidly spied from glistening with sweat like the silvery
under the table when he was a child; life that writhed in her baskets. […]
the opulent dentist’s wife, the rustling I confess, my dear Simenon, that I
sound of her striptease in the semi- wish I never had to leave this part of
darkness of the cabin beach hut, the film, that I could stay there
before she steps out into the dazzling forever, in its fiery, drowsy warmth.”1
light of a beach in August accompan
ied by a swell who resembled Tarzan;
Visions
The first whore, “visions” sequence, The City of Women, 1980.
The opulent dentist’s wife and her Tarzan,

“visions” sequence, The City of Women, 1980.
The widow in the cemetery, “visions” sequence,

The City of Women, 1980.
130

The female bikers of the “Circle of Death,” “visions” sequence,
The City of Women, 1980.
Marcello Mastroianni, “visions” sequence, The City of Women, 1980.
131

“I feel as if I am always making
the same film: I have filmed images
and nothing but images, always
using the same material that was
perhaps presented each time from
a different point of view.”2
Lobby card (fotobusta) for I Vitelloni, 1953.
The peasant women of Saint Anthony, confession sequence, Amarcord, 1973.
Peter Gonzales Falcon as the young Fellini on

his arrival in Rome, Fellini’s Roma, 1972.
Federico Fellini, preliminary sketch, peasant
woman of Saint Anthony, Amarcord, 1973.
132

Federico Fellini and Peter Gonzales Falcon on the set of Fellini’s Roma, 1972. 133

134

The adolescents and the narrator, Amarcord, 1973.
135

“The vitelloni seen from behind on I Vitelloni, 1953.
that jetty stretching out into the sea,
a grey winter sea, under a low,
opaque and cloudy sky… My brother
holding his hat so the wind won’t
blow it away, the small scarf from
Trieste floating across Moraldo’s face,
the sound of the waves, the cry of
seagulls.”3
Federico Fellini, drawing of the vitelloni on the beach, around 1953.
136 136

137

The Book
In the early 1960s, Fellini started
seeing the psychoanalyst Ernst
Bernhard and developed a passion
for the work of Carl Gustav Jung.
Bernhard encouraged him to draw
of Dreams
and transcribe his dreams.
Between 1960 and 1990 Fellini
filled two big ledgers, the kind used
for production accounts, with his
annotations.
His assiduity in doing so suggests
that this was more than a spontaneous
exercise performed when he woke
up or suffered from bouts of insomnia.
These, after all, were hefty albums
and not the kind of little notebooks
one could keep on a bedside table.
The richness of the colours and the
occasional use of gouache also
confirm that Fellini sat down for long
sessions of drawing.
Not that he was unfailingly regular
over those thirty years in his practice
of putting his obsessions, fears and
anxieties on paper. The ledgers show
large gaps, notably during those
periods when he was filming.
The Book of Dreams can also be
read as an inventory of forms, motifs
and stories, an exercise in style that
the director performed, like a musician
doing his scales, in order to sustain
and stimulate his imagination.
However, there were many setbacks
before the historical document was
eventually published. Although Fellini
did not really concern himself with
his legacy, he was aware of the
document’s value and appointed six
different heirs to take care of the
book. After his death, the six agreed
on two things: they would keep the
precious volume in a safe which
would only be opened when the six
of them had met and decided what
to do with the book.
As the years passed, the six parts
of The Book of Dreams were either
acquired by or bequeathed to the
Fellini Foundation. When the institu
tion finally owned both ledgers, its
patience was further put to the test
because the next generation of heirs
still hadn’t had the opportunity to
meet. Finally, in 2007, the safe
was opened and the Foundation
immediately set about publishing a
facsimile edition of the book. The
whole story probably would have
pleased Fellini.
Federico Fellini, The Book of Dreams, dream of December 1974.
138

Dream of December 1974 Dream – silent explosion
In the big basket of a balloon The periphery of a seaside village.
together with Pope Paul VI, who’s It is night. Giulietta and I are walking
wearing a red pope’s beret on his along a beautiful path between small
head. The situation could even be houses enclosed by low walls and
considered dangerous because little gardens. Behind us a huge plane
there’s no balloon in sight above our that is landing makes two or three
little ship. But everything was going turns before disastrously disappearing
just fine and I wasn’t afraid. The into a hangar. We run to escape from
beach and seaside at Riccione are the explosion which takes place a
below, crowded with people looking moment later. In the sky I see that one
up into the air and pointing at some of the engines, which was flung into
thing. Suddenly a marvellous creature the air by the blast, is coming towards
wearing a bathing suit appeared, us. It gets bigger and bigger and
higher and vaster than Mount Blanc. comes nearer and nearer… but it
She was a woman, a goddess, she doesn’t fall down on us, its trajectory
looked like. She looked into the blue takes it past us and it lands further
sky without seeing us, and then from down the road.
her incredibly beautiful, soft mouth
she released an “oh” of wonder and
the whole sky filled up with white
clouds.4
Federico Fellini, “silent explosion,” The Book of Dreams.
139

Federico Fellini, The Book of Dreams, dream of 1 April 1975.
140

Hypnagogic vision of Dream of 20 August 1984
1 April 1975 “All that we can do is try to become
P., naked and pink like a gigantic aware that we are part of this
newborn, seated on a cloud, immobile unfathomable mystery that is created.
in the middle of a bright blue sky. We obey its unknowable laws, its
I could feel that it was time to intervene rhythms, its changes. We are a
and I started blowing on the cloud, mystery among mysteries.”6
saying, “It’s time to fertilize what’s
underneath!” Driven by a powerful
breath like that of a god, P.’s cloud
started floating slowly and calmly
through the space. P. gathered up her
big fabulous breasts in her hands with
a solemn gesture, and an ordered,
shining rainfall fell down on the earth.
Well, whatever!5
Federico Fellini, The Book of Dreams,

dream of 20 August 1984.
141

Federico Fellini, The Book of Dreams, dream of 8 May 1982. 142

Federico Fellini, drawing of a dream representing Fellini and his scriptwriter, The Book of Dreams.
“Zapponi: Very moving…
The clown: My father… hei! Father… hei!!”
143 143

Fellini
8½ (1963) tells the story of a director
struggling for inspiration. He is played
by Marcello Mastroianni, who is like
Fellini’s on-screen double.
The film marks a turning point in
Superstar
Fellini’s work, as his thoughts about
creativity and the nature of cinema
begin to push him beyond the frontiers
of the real and into an exploration of
the imaginary. Childhood memories,
the unconscious and dreams now
become prominent themes. Fellini him
self also became one of the recurring
subjects of his own cinema, as he
began to theatricalise his own image,
a fact reflected in the posters for 8½.
The French posters played on the
synergy between Fellini and Mastro
ianni: a large 8 wearing Mastroianni’s
hat and spectacles is sitting in the
director’s chair on which we can read
the name FELLINI in capital letters.
The series of Italian lobby cards –
the fotobustas – show a more subtle
take on the same idea. On each card
two photos are placed next to each
other: in the middle, a colour image
of a scene with Mastroianni, and in
the margin a black and white photo
showing Fellini directing the film.
This juxtaposition of Mastroianni and
Fellini, of the film and what is happen
ing behind the scenes, indicates that
the director has become the object of
his own cinema. The film’s obscure-
sounding title is in fact simply a
reminder that it was movie number
eight-and-a-half: Variety Lights
(1950), which he codirected with
Alberto Lattuada, counts for only one
half, as do his two shorts, A Marriage
Agency (1953) and The Temptations
of Doctor Antonio (1962). In the films
that followed, Fellini explored the
same themes and continued to assert
his presence, either by adding his
name to the titles of his films – Fellini’s
Satyricon (1969), Fellini’s Roma
– or by playing himself in the role of
director, as in Fellini’s Roma and
The Interview.
On 29 March 1993, a few months

before his death, as the crown of his
Federico Fellini imitating Groucho Marx.
career, Fellini receives the life-time
award at the Academy Awards in
Hollywood. He has only thirty seconds
to give his speech – not a second more:
“I want to thank all of you to make me
feel this way. In these circumstances
it is easy to be generous and to thank
everybody. I would like, naturally,
first of all, to thank all the people who
worked with me. I cannot nominate
everyone. Let me only mention one
name of an actress who is also my
wife. Thank you, dearest Giulietta, and
please, stop crying.”7
144 144

Federico Fellini, March 1956. 145

Federico Fellini, Balthus and his wife Ketsuko. Federico Fellini and Roberto Rossellini on the set of La Dolce Vita, 1960.
Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni at Cinecittà during the filming of Fellini’s Casanova.
Federico Fellini and Jacques-Henri Lartigue as a priest, Ginger and Fred, 1986.
Federico Fellini on the set of 8½, 1963.
146 146

Federico Fellini on the set of 8½, 1963.
Italian poster for 8½, 1963.

French poster for 8½, 1963.
Federico Fellini on the set of La Dolce Vita, 1960.
147

Federico Fellini and Martin Potter on the set of
Satyricon, 1969.
Federico Fellini on the set of Satyricon, 1969.
148

Federico Fellini and Sandra Milo on the set of
8½, 1963.
Federico Fellini.

Federico Fellini on the set of Satyricon, 1969.

Federico Fellini, Cinecittà, 1960.
149

150

151

Notes 5 Federico Fellini, Cinecittà, Paris:
Nathan, 1989, pp. 113-115.
edited by Damien Pettigrew,
New York: Abrams, 2003.
6 Tulio Kezich and Vittorio Boarini, Carissimo Simenon, Mon cher Fellini,
op. cit., p. 498. Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile/Cahiers
All quotations have been translated 7 Geneviève Agel, Les Chemins de du cinéma, 1998 (with Georges
from the French by Walter van der Star, Fellini, Paris: Cerf, 1956, p. 7. Simenon).
unless otherwise stated. 8 Fellini, Faire un film, op. cit., La mia Rimini, Rimini: Guaraldi, 2003.
p. 147. Il libro dei sogni, Milan: Rizzoli, 2007.
Popular Culture 9 Federico Fellini and Georges Federico Fellini: The Book of Dreams,
Simenon, Carissimo Simenon, edited by Tulio Kezich and
1 Françoise Pieri, Federico Fellini: Mon cher Fellini, Paris: Cahiers Vittorio Boarini, New York:
conteur et humoriste, 1939-1942, du cinéma, 1998, p. 66. Rizzoli, 2008.
Perpignan: Institut Jean Vigo, 10 Tulio Kezich, Fellini, Paris:
2000, p. 192. Gallimard, 2007, p. 321. Studies and memoirs
2 Federico Fellini, Cinecittà, Paris: 11 Peter Bondanella, The Cinema
Nathan, 1989, p. 105. of Federico Fellini, Princeton: Geneviève Agel, Les Chemins de
3 Jean Collet, La Création selon Princeton University Press, 1992, Fellini: Suivi de Journal d’un
Fellini, Paris: José Corti, 1990. p. 317. bidoniste, Paris: Cerf, 1956.
4 Françoise Pieri, op. cit., p. 93. 12 Fellini, Cinecittà, op. cit., p. 52. Giovanna Bertelli, Divi e Paparazzi,
5 L’Arc, nr. 45, Paris: Duponchelle, 13 Tulio Kezich and Vittorio Boarini, La Dolce Vita di Fellini, Genève:
1990, p. 64. op. cit., p. 555. Le Mani, 2009.
6 Michel Ciment, “Entretien avec 14 Federico Fellini, “Paris en parle Peter Bondanella, The Cinema of
Federico Fellini,” Federico Fellini cette semaine,” L’Express, 9 July Federico Fellini, Princeton:
Dossier Positif-Rivages, Paris: 1959, p. 60. Princeton University Press, 1992.
Rivages, February 1988, p. 113. 15 Fellini, Cinecittà, op. cit., p. 59. Gilles Ciment (ed.), Federico Fellini,
Marseille: Rivages, 1988.
Fellini at Work Biographical Imagination Bernardino Zapponi, Mon Fellini,
Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 2003.
1 Federico Fellini, Faire un film, 1 Federico Fellini and Georges Tullio Kezich, Fellini, Paris: Gallimard,
Paris: Le Seuil, 1996, p. 248. Simenon, Carissimo Simenon, 2007.
2 Interview for Belgian television Mon cher Fellini, Paris: Cahiers Aurelio Magistà, Dolce Vita Gossip:
directed by André Delvaux, du cinéma, 1998, p. 66. star, amori, mondanità e kolossal
1961. 2 Giovanni Grazzini, Fellini par negli anni d’oro di Cinecittà,
3 Giovanni Grazzini, Fellini par Fellini, Paris: Calmann-Lévy, Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2007.
Fellini, Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1984, pp. 78-79.
1984, p. 12. 3 Ibid., p. 89. Periodicals
4 Ibid., p. 13. 4. Tulio Kezich and Vittorio Boarini
5 Federico Fellini, Cinecittà, (eds.), Federico Fellini: The Book Fellini Amarcord, Rivista di studi
Nathan, Paris, 1989, p. 49. of Dreams, New York: Rizzoli, felliniani, quarterly review
6 L’Arc, nr. 45, Paris: Duponchelle, 2008, p. 524. published since 2001 by the
1990, p. 30. 5 Ibid. Fondazione Fellini in Rimini.
7 Fellini, Cinecittà, op. cit., p. 113. 6 Ibid., p. 525.
8 Ornella Volta, “Le film que Fellini 7 Tulio Kezich, Fellini, Paris: DVDs
ne tourne pas,” Federico Fellini Gallimard, 2007, p. 393.
Dossier Positif-Rivages, Paris: Fellini au travail, quatre films autour
Rivages, 1988, p. 76. de Fellini (Carlotta Films, 2009).
9 L’Arc, op. cit., p. 66. Fellini, André Delvaux (1961)
10 Jean Gili, “Ce mot magique,
Cinecittà – Entretien avec
Selected Ciao Federico, Gideon Bachmann
(1969).
Federico Fellini,” Federico Fellini bibliography Secret Diary of Amarcord, Maurizio
Dossier Positif- Rivages, Paris: Mein and Liliana Betti (1973).
Rivage, 1988, pp. 179-180. And Fellini’s Casanova?, Gianfranco
11 Fellini, Cinecittà, op. cit., p. 122. Angelucci and Liliana Betti
12 Geneviève Agel, Les Chemins de For a comprehensive list of publica (1975).
Fellini, Paris: Cerf, 1956, p. 94. tions we refer to the bibliography
13 Fellini, Cinecittà, op. cit., p. 39. published under the auspices of the
Fondazione Federico Fellini in Rimini:
The City of Women Marco Bertozzi, BiblioFellini, Rome:
Scuola Nazionale di Cinema/
1 Renzo Renzi, Premier Plan Fondazione Federico Fellini, 2002.
nr. 12: Federico Fellini, Lyon:
SERDOC, 1960, p. 39. Writings by Federico Fellini
2 Federico Fellini, Les Propos de
Fellini, Paris: Buchet/Chastel, Les Propos de Fellini, Paris: Buchet/
1980, p. 97 Chastel, 1980.
3 Federico Fellini, Faire un film, Fellini par Fellini, entretiens avec
Paris: Le Seuil, 1996, p. 145. Giovanni Grazzini, Paris:
4 Tulio Kezich and Vittorio Boarini Calmann-Lévy, 1984.
(eds.), Federico Fellini: The Book Cinecittà, Paris: Nathan, 1989.
of Dreams, New York: Rizzoli, Faire un film, Paris: Le Seuil, 1996.
2008, p. 493. I’m a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon, 152

Chronology 1945
Participates in the screenwriting of
A Director’s Notebook for the
American TV-channel NBC.
Rome, Open City by Roberto Rossellini. 1969
1946-1949 Satyricon.
20 January 1920 Becomes a regular contributor to the 1970
Born in Rimini. newspaper Il Travaso. The Clowns, made for Italian
1925-1926 1946 television.
Attends the nursery school run by Co-writer and assistant of Roberto 1972
the nuns of San Vincenzo in Rimini, Rossellini on Paisà (Paisan). Beginning Fellini’s Roma.
followed two years later by the Carlo of his collaboration with screenwriter 1973-1982
Tonni primary school. Discovers the Tullio Pinelli. Second period of recording his
world of Grand Guignol, the movies 1948 dreams.
with Guido Brignone’s Maciste Meets Marcello Mastroianni, a 1973
all’Inferno, and the American comics colleague of Giulietta Masina in Amarcord, Academy Award for best
of Windsor McCay, George McManus the theater. Encounters Nino Rota on foreign language film.
and Frederick Burr Opper. the set of Senza Pietà (Without Pity). 1973
Summer 1927 Co-writes the screenplay of Roberto Maurizio Mein and Liliana Betti,
“Runs away” from boarding school to Rosselllini’s The Miracle, the second Fellini’s assistants, direct a
join the circus with Pierino the Clown episode of the film L’Amore, in which documentary for the Italian TV
1930 he makes his first appearance as channel RAI on the making of
Attends the Ginnasio Giulio Cesare an actor. Amarcord: The Secret Diary of
where he befriends Luigi “Titta” Benzi. 1950 Amarcord.
August 1937 Variety Lights, coproduced with 1975
Publishes his first cartoons of balilla Alberto Lattuada. Gianfranco Angelucci and Liliana
(fascist youth group members) in 1952 Betti, Fellini’s assistants, direct a
musketeer costumes in the only issue Finishes The White Sheik. documentary on the making of
of La Diana published by the Balilla 1953 Casanova with Alain Cuny, Vittorio
Troop of Rimini. Opens the cartoon A Marriage Agency, fourth episode Gassman, Marcello Mastroianni,
shop Febo together with painter of the film Love in the City. Alberto Sordi and Ugo Tognazzi:
Demos Bonini. Draws caricatures I Vitelloni, winner of the Golden Lion And Fellini’s Casanova?
under the pseudonym Fellas. At the at the Venice Film Festival. 1976
same time, he draws portraits of 1954 Fellini’s Casanova.
famous actors for the Fulgor cinema. La Strada, winner of the Academy 10 April 1979
1938-1939 Award for best foreign language film. Death of Nino Rota.
Publishes humorous articles in 1955 Orchestra Rehearsal.
Domenica del Corriere and in the Il Bidone. 1980
weekly 420. 1957 City of Women.
1939 Nights of Cabiria, winner of the 1983
Leaves Rimini for Rome and enrolls in Academy Award for best foreign And the Ship Sails On.
law school at the University of Rome. language film. For her role, Giulietta 1984
There is no record of his ever having Masina receives the award for best Makes two TV commercials for
attended a class. Earns a living by actress at the Cannes Film Festival . Campari and Barilla.
drawing in restaurants and writing 1959 1986
sketches for opening variety acts in Meetings with Jungian psychoanalyst Ginger and Fred. Publishes the
the cinema. He eventually finds work Dr. Ernst Bernhard. graphic novel Viaggio a Tulun (Trip to
as a cub reporter for the newspapers 1960 Tulum) with artwork by Milo Manara.
Il Piccolo, Il Popolo di Roma and La Dolce Vita, Golden Palm at the 1987
CineMagazzino. Cannes Film Festival and Academy The Interview, 40th Anniversary Prize
1939-1943 Award for best costume design. at the Cannes Film Festival.
Writes on a regular basis for the 1960-1968 1990
satirical magazine Marc’Aurelio and First period of recording his dreams. The Voice of the Moon.
joins the editorial board where he 1961 1992
meets Ettore Scola, Cesare Zavattini Belgium television devotes a series Makes three TV commercials for Banca
and Bernardino Zapponi. of four programs to Fellini, produced di Roma. Publishes the graphic novel
1941-1943 by André Delvaux. Il viaggio di G. Mastorna, detto
Writes for the radio series Cico and 1962 Fernet, with artwork by Milo Manara.
Pallina, about the adventures of two The Temptations of Doctor Antonio, 29 March 1993
newlyweds, in which the actress Giuli second episode of the film Boccaccio Receives the Academy Honorary
etta Masina plays the voice of Pallina. ‘70. Award for lifetime achievement.
1942 1963 31 October 1993
Starts his career as a screenwriter 8½, Academy Awards for best foreign Federico Fellini dies in Rome.
for film. Meets Giulietta Masina in the language film and best costume design. 23 March 1994
fall of 1942. 29 June 1965 Giulietta Masina dies in Rome.
30 October 1943 Death of Dr. Ernst Bernhard, which
Marries Giulietta Masina. deeply affects Fellini. Script of Il viaggio
Summer 1944 di G. Mastorna, written with Brunello
Opens the cartoon shop the Funny Rondi and Dino Buzzati.
Face Shop, together with Enrico Juliet of the Spirits.
De Seta, where they earn a living 1968
by drawing caricatures of American Toby Dammit, third episode of Spirits
soldiers. of the Dead. 153

Filmography L’Ultima carrozella, 1943
Screenplay: Aldo Fabrizi, Federico
Il Mulino del Po, 1949
Screenplay based on the novel
Fellini, Piero Tellini Il mulino sul Po by Riccardo Bacchelli:
Director: Mario Mattoli Riccardo Bacchelli, Corrado
Screenplays by Fellini Bonfantini, Luigi Comencini,
Tutta la città canta, 1945 Federico Fellini, Alberto Lattuada
Imputato alzatevi!, 1939 Screenplay: Vittorio Metz, Marcello Director: Alberto Lattuada
Screenplay: Vittorio Metz, Mario Marchesi, Steno, Federico Fellini
Mattoli, Federico Fellini (uncredited) (uncredited) La Città Dolente, 1949
Director: Mario Mattoli Director: Riccardo Freda Screenplay: Anton Giulio Majano,
Aldo De Benedetti, Federico Fellini,
Lo Vedi come sei?, 1939 Roma, città aperta Mario Bonnard
Screenplay: Vittorio Metz, Steno, (Rome, Open City), 1945 Director: Mario Bonnard
Mario Mattoli, Federico Fellini Screenplay: Alberto Consiglio,
(uncredited) Sergio Amidei, Roberto Rossellini, Il Cammino della speranza,
Director: Mario Mattoli Federico Fellini 1950
Assistant director: Federico Fellini Story: Federico Fellini, Pietro Germi,
Non me lo dire!, 1940 Director: Roberto Rossellini Tullio Pinelli
Screenplay: Vittorio Metz, Marcello Screenplay: Federico Fellini,
Mario Mattoli, Federico Fellini Paisà (Paisan), 1946 Tullio Pinelli
(uncredited) Screenplay: Sergio Amidei, Director: Pietro Germi
Director: Mario Mattoli Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini,
in collaboration with Alfred Hayes, Francesco, giullare di Dio,
ll Pirata sono io, 1940 Klaus Mann, Marcello Pagliero 1950
Screenplay: Vittorio Metz, Steno, Assistant director: Federico Fellini Screenplay based on Les Fioretti
Mario Mattoli, Federico Fellini Director: Roberto Rossellini di San Francesco: Federico Fellini,
(uncredited) Roberto Rossellini, with the help of
Director: Mario Mattoli Il Delitto di Giovanni Episcopo, Father Félix Morlion and Father
1947 Antonio Lisandrini
I Cavalieri del deserto Adaptation of the novel Giovani Assistant director: Federico Fellini
(Gli Ultimi Tuareg), 1942 Episcopo by Gabriele D’Annunzio: Director: Roberto Rossellini
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Vittorio Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Aldo Fabrizi,
Mussolini (as Tito Silvio Mursino) Federico Fellini, Alberto Lattuada, Persiane chiuse
Director: Gino Talamo, Osvaldo Piero Tellini (Behind Closed Shutters), 1950
Valenti Director: Alberto Lattuada Screenplay: Massimo Mida, Gianni
Puccini, Franco Solinas, Sergio
Avanti c’è posto, 1942 Il Passatore, 1947 Sollima, Federico Fellini (uncredited)
Screenplay: Aldo Fabrizi, Cesare Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Director: Luigi Comencini
Zavattini, Piero Tellini, Federico Fellini Tullio Pinelli
Director: Mario Bonnard Director: Duilio Coletti La Città si defende, 1951
Screenplay: Federico Fellini,
Documento Z3, 1942 La Fumeria d’Oppio Pietro Germi, Giuseppe Mangione,
Screenplay: Sandro De Feo, Alfredo (Ritorna Za-la-Mort), 1947 Tullio Pinelli
Guarini, Ercoli Patti, Federico Fellini Screenplay: Raffaello Matarazzo, Director: Pietro Germi
(uncredited) Ettore M. Margadonna, Federico
Director: Alfredo Guarini Fellini, Mario Monicelli, Tullio Pinelli Cameriera bella presenza
Director: Raffaello Matarazzo offresi..., 1951
Quarta pagina, 1942 Screenplay: Agenore Incrocci,
Screenplay: Piero Tellini, Federico Senza Pietà (Without Pity), Aldo De Benedetti, Federico Fellini,
Fellini, Edoardo Anton, Ugo Betto, 1948 Ruggero Maccari, Nicola Manzari,
Nicola Manzari, Spiro Manzari, Screenplay based on an idea by Tullio Pinelli, Furio Scarpelli
Giuseppe Marotta, Gianni Puccini, Ettore M. Margadonna: Federico Director: Giorgio Pàstina
Steno, Cesare Zavattini Fellini, Alberto Lattuada, Tullio Pinelli
Director: Nicola Manzari Director: Alberto Lattuada Il Brigante di Tacca de lupo,
1952
Campo de ’fiori, 1943 L’Amore (episode Il Miracolo Screenplay based on the play
Screenplay: Aldo Fabrizi, Federico (The Miracle)), 1948 Il Brigante di Tacca de lupo by
Fellini, Piero Tellini, Mario Bonnard Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Riccardo Bacchelli: Federico Fellini,
Director: Mario Bonnard Tullio Pinelli, Roberto Rossellini Pietro Germi, Tullio Pinelli,
Assistant director and actor: Fausto Tozzi
Chi l’ha visto?, 1943, Federico Fellini Director: Pietro Germi
distributed in 1945 Director: Roberto Rossellini
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Europa ’51, 1952
Piero Tellini In Nome della legge Screenplay: Sandro De Feo,
Director: Goffredo Alessandrini (In the Name of the Law ), 1949 Diego Fabbri, Mario Pannunzio,
Screenplay based on the novel Ivo Perilli, Roberto Rossellini
Apparizione, 1943 Piccola Pretura by Giuseppe Guido Assistant director: Federico Fellini
Screenplay: Piero Tellini, Lucio De Lo Schiavo: Aldo Bizzarri, Federico Director: Roberto Rossellini
Caro, Giuseppe Amato, Federico Fellini, Pietro Germi, Mario Monicelli,
Fellini (uncredited) Tullio Pinelli
Director: Jean de Limur Director: Pietro Germi 154

Dov’è la libertà...?, 1953 I Vitelloni, 1953 Le tentazioni del Dottor
Screenplay: Vitaliano Brancati, Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Antonio (The Temptations of
Ennio Flaiano, Antonio Pietrangeli, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano Doctor Antonio), second episode
Vincenzo Talarico, Roberto Rosselini, Director of photography: of the film Boccaccio ’70, 1962
Federico Fellini Otello Martelli Screenplay: Federico Fellini,
Assistant director: Federico Fellini Music: Nino Rota Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano,
shooting a scene with Toto Cast: Franco Interlenghi, in collaboration with Brunello Rondi
Director: Roberto Rossellini Alberto Sordi, Franco Fabrizi, and Goffredo Parise
Leopoldo Trieste, Riccardo Fellini, Director of photography:
Fortunella, 1958 Leonora Ruffo, Jean Brochard Otello Martelli
Screenplay: Federico Fellini Production: PEG Films, Cité Films Music: Nino Rota
Director: Eduardo De Filippo Cast: Peppino de Filippo,
La Strada, 1954 Anita Ekberg, Donatella della Nora,
Sweet Charity, 1969 Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Antonio Acqua
Screenplay based on the script of Tullio Pinelli, in collaboration with Other episodes directed by:
Le Notti di Cabiria: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano Luchino Visconti, Mario Monicelli,
Ennio Flaiano Director of photography: Vittorio de Sica
Director: Bob Fosse Otello Martelli Production: Carlo Ponti
Music: Nino Rota
Viaggio con Anita, 1979 Cast: Giulietta Masina, Otto e mezzo (8½), 1963
Screenplay: Tullio Pinelli, Anthony Quinn, Richard Basehart, Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Brunello
Federico Fellini (uncredited) Aldo Silvani, Marcella Rovere, Rondi, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano
Director: Mario Monicelli Livia Venturini Director of photography:
Production: Carlo Ponti – Dino de Gianni di Venanzo
Laurentiis Music: Nino Rota
Cast: Anouk Aimée, Marcello
Directed by Fellini Il Bidone, 1955 Mastroianni, Sandra Milo,
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Claudia Cardinale, Rossela Falk,
Luci del varietà Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli Madeleine Lebeau, Caterina Boratto
(Variety Lights), 1950 Director of photography: Production: Angelo Rizzoli
Co-directed with Alberto Lattuada Otello Martelli
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Alberto Music: Nino Rota Giulietta degli spiriti
Lattuada, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano Cast: Broderick Crawford, (Juliet of the Spirits), 1965
Director of photography: Richard Basehart, Lorella De Luca, Screenplay: Federico Fellini,
Otello Martelli Franco Fabrizi, Giulietta Masina, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano,
Music: Felice Lattuada Alberto De Amicis, Maria Werlen in collaboration with Brunello Rondi
Cast: Peppino de Filippo, Production: Titanus Director of photography:
Carla Del Poggio, Giulietta Masina, Gianni di Venanzo
John Kitzmiller, Folco Lulli, Le notti di Cabiria Music: Nino Rota
Dante Maggio, Carlo Romano (Nights of Cabiria), 1957 Cast: Giulietta Masina, Silva Koscina,
Production: Capitolium film. Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Sandra Milo, Valentina Cortese, Mario
Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, in Pisu, Lou Gilbert, Silvana Jachino
Lo sceicco bianco collaboration with Brunello Rondi Production: Federiz
(The White Sheik), 1952 Directors of photography: Aldo Tonti,
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Otello Martelli Toby Dammit, third episode of
Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano Music: Nino Rota the film Tre passi nel delirio (Spirits
Director of photography: Cast: Giulietta Masina, of the Dead), 1968
Arturo Gallea Amedeo Nazzari, François Périer, Screenplay: Federico Fellini,
Music: Nino Rota Aldo Silvani, Franca Marzi, Bernardino Zapponi
Cast: Brunella Bovo, Leopoldo Trieste, Pina Gualandri, Dorian Gray, Director of photography:
Alberto Sordi, Giulietta Masina, Franco Fabrizi, Mario Passante Giuseppe Rotunno
Fanny Marchiò, Ernesto Almirante, Production: Dino de Laurentiis Music: Nino Rota
Enzo Maggio Cast: Terence Stamp, Jane Fonda,
Production: PDC / DFI Luigi Royere La Dolce Vita, 1960 Peter Fonda, Françoise Prévost,
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, James R. Justice, Anny Duperey,
Un’agenzia matrimoniale Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, Serge Marquand, Andreas Voutsinas
(A Marriage Agency), fourth in collaboration with Brunello Rondi Other episodes directed by:
episode of the film L’Amore in città Director of photography: Roger Vadim, Louis Malle
(Love in the City), 1953 Otello Martelli Production: PEA, Alberto Grimaldi
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Music: Nino Rota
Tullio Pinelli Cast: Anita Ekberg, Marcello Block-notes di un regista
Director of photography: Mastroianni, Anouk Aimée, Yvonne (A Director’s Notebook), 1969
Gianni di Venanzo Furneaux, Alain Cuny, Magali Noël, Screenplay: Federico Fellini,
Music: Mario Nascimbene Lex Barker, Valeria Ciangottini Bernardino Zapponi
Cast: Antonio Cifariello, Production: Giuseppe Amato, Director of photography:
Livia Venturini commissioned by Riama Film – Pathé Pasquale De Santis
Other episodes directed by: Consortium Cinéma Music: Nino Rota
Dino Risi, Carlo Lizzani, Alberto Playing themselves: Federico Fellini,
Lattuada, Cesare Zavattini, Francesco Giulietta Masina, Marcello
Maselli and Michelangelo Antonioni Mastroianni, Catarina Boratto
Production: Faro Film Production: Peter Goldfarb and NBC 155

Fellini Satyricon Prova d’orchestra La voce della luna
(Satyricon), 1969 (Orchestra Rehearsal), 1979 (The Voice of the Moon), 1990
Screenplay: Bernardino Zapponi, Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Screenplay: Federico Fellini.
Federico Fellini after Pétrone in collaboration with Brunello Rondi Loosely based on the novel Il poema
Director of photography: Director of photography: dei lunatici (The Lunatic’s Poem)
Giuseppe Rotunno Giuseppe Rotunno by Ermanno Cavazzoni
Music: Nino Rota Music: Nino Rota Director of photography:
Cast: Martin Potter, Hiram Keller, Cast: Baldwin Haas, Clara Colosimo, Tonino Delli Colli
Max Born, Mario Romagnoli, Alain Elisabeth Labi, Ronaldo Bonacchi, Music: Nicola Piovani
Cuny, Gordon Mitchell, Capucine David Maunsell, Ferdinando Villela, Cast: Roberto Benigni, Paolo Villagio,
Production: Alberto Grimaldi Francesco Aluigi Nadia Ottavioni, Marisa Tomasi,
Production: Daime Cinematografica Sim, Suzy Blady, Angelo Orlando
I Clowns (The Clowns), 1970 and the RAI, Albatros Produktion Production: Mario Cecchi Gori and
Story and screenplay: Vittorio Cecchi Gori, RAI-Uno
Federico Fellini, Bernardino Zapponi La Città delle donne
Director of photography: (City of Women), 1980
Dario di Palma Screenplay: Federico Fellini,
Music: Nino Rota Bernardino Zapponi,
Playing themselves: Mimo Billi, in collaboration with Brunello Rondi
Scotti, Rizzo, Pistoni, Giacomo Furia, Director of photography:
Galliano Sbarra, les quatre Giuseppe Rotunno
Colombaioni, Federico Fellini, Music: Luis Enriquez Bacalov
Anita Ekberg Cast: Anna Prucnal, Marcello
Production: Federico Fellini, Mastroianni, Bernice Stegers,
Ugo Guerra, Elio Scardamaglia Donatella Damiani, Iole Silvani,
Fiammenta Baralla, Ettore Mannis
Roma (Fellini’s Roma), 1972 Production: Opera Film Production
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, and Gaumont
Bernardino Zapponi
Director of photography: E la nave va
Giuseppe Rotunno (And the Ship Sails On), 1983
Music: Nino Rota Screenplay: Tonino Guerra,
Cast: Peter Gonzales, Fiona Florence, Federico Fellini, in collaboration with
Britta Barnes, Marne Maitland, Andrea Zanzotto
Anna Magnani, Marcello Director of photography:
Mastroianni, Alberto Sordi, Giuseppe Rotunno
Federico Fellini Music: Gianfranco Plenizio
Production: Turi Vasile Cast: Freddie Jones, Norma West,
Barbara Jefford, Peter Cellier,
Amarcord, 1973 Maurice Barrier, Jonathan Cecil,
Screenplay: Tonino Guerra, Victor Poletti, Jean Schlegel
Federico Fellini based on an idea Production: Franco Cristaldi, RAI,
by Federico Fellini Vides Produzione, Gaumont
Director of photography:
Giuseppe Rotunno Ginger e Fred
Music: Nino Rota (Ginger and Fred), 1986
Cast: Bruno Zanin, Pupella Maggio, Screenplay: Federico Fellini,
Armando Brancia, Nandino Orfei, Tonino Guerra, Tullio Pinelli
Ciccio Ingrassia, Maria Beluzzi, Director of photography:
Magali Noël, Josiane Tanzilli Tonino Delli Colli
Production: Franco Cristaldi Music: Nicola Piovani
Cast: Franco Fabrizi, Marcello
Il Casanova di Fellini Mastroianni, Giulietta Masina,
(Fellini’s Casanova), 1976 Frédérick Ledebur, Augusto Poderosi,
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Toto Mognone, Jacques-Henri Lartigue
Bernardino Zapponi, in collaboration Production: Alberto Grimaldi
with Andrea Zanzotto. Loosely based
on History of My Life by Giacomo Intervista (The Interview),
Casanova 1987
Director of photography: Screenplay: Federico Fellini,
Giuseppe Rotunno in collaboration with
Music: Nino Rota Gianfranco Angelucci
Cast: Donald Sutherland, Director of photography:
Tina Aumont, Cicely Browne, Tonino Delli Colli
Carmen Scarpitta, Clara Algranti, Music: Nicola Piovani
Daniella Gatti, Margareth Clementi, Cast: Sergio Rubini, Paola Liguori,
Olimpia Carlisi Maurizio Mein, Nadia Ottavioni,
Production: Alberto Grimaldi and Lara Wendell, Antonella Ponziani,
Universal-Fox- Gaumont-Titanus Anita Ekberg, Marcello Mastroianni
Production: Ibrahim Moussa, Aljosha
Productions, RAI-Uno 156

Illustration credits Collection Fondation Fellini pour le
cinéma, Sion, © ADAGP, Paris,
Private Collection, courtesy Carlotta
Films, Paris: 114 (b)
2009 Private Collection, courtesy Fondation
44, 45 (drawings), 101 (lb), 114 (t), Jérôme Seydoux – Pathé, Paris: 80
The illustration references are as 139, 143 (rb)
follows: If there are more than one Collection Fondation Fellini pour le Sandro Simeoni, collection Fondation
illustrations on the page the following cinéma, Sion, © Archivio Jérôme Seydoux – Pathé: 58-59
references will apply: Bachmann-Beer / Cinemazero: 9, Tazio Secchiaroli, Collection
l (left), r (right), t (top), m (middle), 20 (lb), 68-69, 70 (rb), 107 (l), Christoph Schifferli, Zurich, ©
b (bottom). These references can be 118 (rm) David Secchiaroli, Milan: 53 (rb),
combined, for example ltb means it Collection Fondation Fellini pour le 149 (m)
refers to the top and bottom images cinéma, Sion, © Fondazione Tazio Secchiaroli, © Collection David
on the left side of the page. Corriere della Sera, Milan: 12 (b), Secchiaroli, Milan: 27, 28-29, 29
32 (t), 88 (b) (rb), 45 (third row l), 53 (ltb), 56 (t
Alessandro von Normann, courtesy Collection Fondation Fellini pour le / m), 76 (l), 78 (rt), 79 (lb), 83,
Emanuele von Normann: 119 (t) cinéma, Sion, © Il Travaso: 20 (r) 112 (lb), 127 (lb), 133, 149 (l)
Collection Christoph Schifferli, Collection Fondation Fellini pour le
Zurich: 32 (l), 38 (ltb), 39 (lmb / cinéma, Sion, © Milo Manara: 28, The excerpts from The Book of Dreams
rb), 43 (t), 45 (b), 46 (b), 57 (lt), 29 (rt) are reproduced here with kind
75, 76 (rb), 79 (l third row), 103 Collection Fondation Fellini pour le permission of Rizzoli. Translated from
(rt), 117, 127 (rb), 149 (rt) cinéma, Sion, © Reporters the Italian by Aaron Maines and
Collection Christoph Schifferli, Associati, Rome: 125 (t) David Stanton, © Rizzoli International
Zurich, courtesy Carlotta Films, Collection Fondation Fellini pour le Publications.
Paris: 148 (r) cinéma, Sion, © Vogue, Paris: 16,
Collection Christoph Schifferli, Zurich, 26, 27 Most film images used in this book
courtesy Fondation Jérôme Collection Fondation Jérôme Seydoux belong to their respective producers
Seydoux – Pathé, Paris: 54-55, – Pathé, Paris: 36 (l), 51, 52, 55 or distributors. Our sincere apologies
90-91, 102 (t), 103 (lt) (b), 84-85, 120, 121 (t / lb), 146 for copyright owners who, despite
Collection Ciné-Image, Paris: 21 (rt), 150-151 our efforts, have been unintentionally
Collection Cinémathèque Française, © Collection Fondazione Federico overlooked. We will correct these
© ADAGP, Paris, 2009: 72 (rb), Fellini, Rimini: 10, 12 (t), 17, 57 errors in the next edition of this book
74 (t) (rt), 66 (b), 70 (lb), 96 (r), 97, 101 insofar as they have been reported
Collection Cineteca del Comune di (r), 102 (b), 104 (l), 109 (lt), 110 to us.
Bologna: 2, 22, 23 (lt), 38 (rt), 39 (lt), 112 (lt), 116 (t), 132 (rb), 136
(rm), 42 (t), 43 (b), 50 (r), 57 (lb), (l), 138, 140, 141, 142
70 (lt / rm), 71, 72 (lb), 72 (t), 73, Collection Michel Giniès, Paris: 38
74 (b), 76 (rt), 78 (rb), 78 (rm), 87 (rb), 57 (rb), 107 (rb), 118 (lb)
(b), 89, 93 (lt), 93 (rt), 94 (mb), 95, Collection Michel Giniès, Paris,
98-99, 101(lt), 107 (rt), 132 (lb), courtesy Carlotta Films, Paris: 103
134-135, 136-137, 144, 148 (lt) (lb)
Collection Cineteca del Comune di Collection Vincenzo Mollica, Rome
Bologna, courtesy Carlotta Films, 20 (lt), 24 (t)
Paris: 44 (l), 45 (t), 64 (t), 65, 78 Collection Vincenzo Mollica, Rome,
(lb), 86, 106 (t), 110 (ltm), 111 © ADAGP, Paris, 2009: 29 (l)
(b), 127 (lt), 132 (rt), 146 (m), Collection Vincenzo Mollica, Rome,
149 (rb) © Milo Manara: 29 (m)
Collection David Secchiaroli, Milan: Deborah Beer, collection Fondation
6-7, 13 (b), 56 (b) Fellini pour le Cinéma, Sion,
Collection EYE, Amsterdam: 38 (lm), © Archivio Bachmann-Beer /
147 (rt) Cinemazero: 42 (b), 44 (r), 45
Collection Fondation Fellini pour le (second row / third row r), 60, 61,
cinéma, Sion: 23, 33 (t), 36 (rtb), 62-63, 67, 82, 87 (l), 112 (r),
37, 38 (rm / mb), 39 (lt / rt), 113, 119 (b), 126, 130, 131,
40-41, 45 (third row m), 46 (t / l), 300, 146 (rb)
47 (l), 48, 49, 50 (l), 70 (rt), 72 G.B. Poletto, © Archivio Storico del
(m), 78 (lt), 79 (l second row m / Cinema – AFE, Rome: 34-35, 106
r), 80 (l), 80 (rtm), 87 (rt), 88 (a), (b), 109 (lb), 110 (lb)
103 (rb), 93 (lb), 96 (l), 110 (lb), Michelangelo Durazzo, © Agence
116 (b), 118 (rb), 125 (b), 132 (lt), ANA, Paris: cover, 47 (r), 77, 81,
146 (lt), 147 (lt), 146 (lb), 160, 333 118 (rt), 147 (rb)
Collection Fondation Fellini pour le Paul Ronald, © Archivio Storico del
cinéma, Sion et Collection parti Cinema – AFE, Rome: 37, 64 (b),
culière (Whisper): 104 (r), 105 100, 118 (lt)
Collection Fondation Fellini pour le Private Collection: 14, 15, 18-19, 24
cinéma, Sion, courtesy Carlotta (b), 25, 53 (t), 55 (newspapers),
Films, Paris: 30, 31, 33 (b), 66 (t), 78 (lt), 92, 93 (lm / rb), 94 (t),
76 (lb), 78 (lm), 108, 109 (r), 115 101 (lm), 111 (t), 121 (rmb), 122-
Collection Fondation Fellini pour le 123, 124, 127 (rt), 128-129, 145,
cinéma, Sion, courtesy Fondation 147 (lb), 149 (rm)
Jérôme Seydoux – Pathé, Paris: Private Collection Beno Graziani,
148 (lb) Paris: 8 157

Acknowledgements Oscar Righini
RTBF, Brussels
Hibon, Jeu de Paume, Paris
Michel Giniès
Warner Bros. Nederland, Amsterdam Peter Goldfard
Beno Graziani
The exhibition Fellini – The Exhibition My thanks go out to Gianluca Nathalie Guiot, David d’Equainville,
could not have been organised Farinelli whose constant encourage Maud Prangey, Nina Goussé,
without the active participation of our ments have inspired me to bring this Éditions Anabet, Paris
lenders and the film copyright project to a conclusion. Thanks to Kate Guyonvarch
holders. Our sincere gratitude goes Stéphane Marti who has the ability to Elisabetta Iurcev, Barilla Holding SpA,
out to them. move mountains. Thanks to Didier Parma
Quilain, my partner from the earliest Tullio Kezich
Works days. Martina Knabe, Beta Film,
Oberhaching
Fondation Fellini pour le cinéma, Sion And finally, I owe a debt of gratitude Roberto Koch, Constrato, Rome
Fondazione Federico Fellini, Rimini to all those who have provided Emmanuelle Kouchner
Cineteca di Bologna, Bologna indispensable help: Gaëlle Lassée, Marie Boué, Renaud
Fondation Jérôme Seydoux – Pathé, Anouk Aimée Temperini, Flammarion, Paris
Paris Damien Bachelot Milo Manara
Cinemazero, Pordenone Gideon Bachmann Roberto Mannoni, Cineteatro 5,
Christoph Schifferli, Zurich Daniela Barbiani Cinecittà
Piero Servo, Archivio Storico del Xavier Barral Gianfranco Maragnello, Museo
Cinema – AFE, Rome Giovanna Bertelli d’Arte Moderna di Bologna –
David Secchiaroli, Milan Vittorio Boarini, Guiseppe Ricci, MAMBO, Bologna
Antonio Maraldi, Cesena Enrica Bedosti, Fondazione Federico Alessandra Mauro, Forma, Milan
Centro Cinema, Cesena Fellini, Rimini Antonio Maraldi, Centro Cinema,
Vicenzo Mollica, Rome Vincent Paul Boncourt, Fabien Braule, Cesena
Cinémathèque française, Paris Victor Moisan, Céline Cléris, Carlotta Stéphane Marti, Gerald Morin,
Michel Giniès, Paris Films, Paris Daniel Joliat, Fondation Fellini pour
Agence ANA, Paris Éric Bullot le cinéma, Sion
Donatella Durazzo, New York Morena Campani Claudia Maruffa, Pierluigi
Paul Ronald Alessandro Canestrelli, Emanuela Magliocca, Nazario Dal Poz,
Emanuele Von Normann, Rome Acito, Ilaria Cecchi, Reporters L’Espresso, Rome
Gideon Bachmann Associati, Rome Maria Grazia Meda
Reporters Associati, Rome Jean-Louis Capitaine, Alexandre Victoria Metzger, RTBF, Bruxelles
Fondazione Corriere della Sera, Milan Boyer, Ciné-image, Paris Ignasi Miró, Montse Sánchez, Mireia
Ciné-image, Paris Pascale Cassagnau Gubern, Fundació LaCaixa, Barcelona
Nino Comba, Paris Claudia Cardinale Frédéric Mitterrand
and all those who preferred to remain Umberto et Edoardo Cicconi, Vincenzo Mollica
anonymous Fondazione Allori, Rome Magali Noël
Gabrielle Claes, Jean-Paul Dorchain, Martine Offroy, Gilles Venhard,
Films Cinémathèque royale, Brussels Corinne Faugeron, Gaumont, Paris
Matthieu Charon Dominique Païni
A-Film, Amsterdam Clément Chéroux Carlo Patrizi, Marco Patrizi
Archivio Storico, François Cheval Richard Peduzzi, Lili Hinstin, Vittoria
Gideon Bachmann Fabrizio Cioni Matarrese, François Laurent, Evelyne
Banca di Rome, Rome Walter Civirani Rollet, Académie de France à Rome
Barilla Holding, Parma Jean-Marie Colombani – Villa Médicis, Rome
Beta Film, Oberhaching Nino Comba Emanuela Pelizzola, Campari, Milan
Broadcaster Text International, Andrea Crozzoli, Andrea Riccardo, Laurent Perreau
Amsterdam Cinemazero, Pordenone Tullio Pinelli
Campari Group, Milan Martine d’Astier, Donation Jacques- Serge Plantureux, Galerie Plantureux,
Carlotta Films, Paris Henri Lartigue, Charenton-le-Pont Paris
Cinémathèque royale, Brussels Sylviane de Decker Didier Quilain, Olympus France,
Cinemazero, Pordenone Dominique Delouche Rungis
Cinemien / Homescreen, Amsterdam Catherine Delvaux Thys Oscar Righini
Cineteca del Comune di Bologna, Donatella Durazzo Jacqueline Risset
Bologna Anita Ekberg Cyril Rojinski
Cineteca Nazionale – Centro Christophe Eon, Odile Le Gal, Paul Ronald
Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Rome Laurent Hutin, Janvier, Paris Giuseppe Rotunno
Eureka / The Masters of Cinema Davide Faccioli, Arianna Gadaldi, Rossana Rummo, Sara Garbagnoli,
Series, London Galerie Photology, Milan Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Paris
EYE Distribution, Amsterdam Gian Luca Farinelli, Anna Fiaccarini, Tatti Sanguinetti
Fondation Fellini pour le cinéma, Sion Andrea Meneghelli, Alessandra Bani, Gracia and Christoph Schifferli
Gaumont, Paris Giampaolo Parmigiani, Rosaria Ettore Scola
Peter Goldfard, New York Gioia, Manuela Marchesan, Cecilia David Secchiaroli
Hollywood Classics, London Cenciarelli, Guy Borlée, Cineteca del Gérard Ségard
Intramovies, Rome Comune di Bologna, Bologna Catterina Seia, Fabio Del Giudice,
Lumière, Amsterdam / Ghent Caroline Geraud, Vogue, Paris Sergio Turco, Archivio Storico, Banca
Minerva Pictures, Rome Jean Gili di Roma – Unicredit, Rome
Park Circus, Glasgow Marta Gili, Anne Racine, Véronique Piero Servo, Archivio Storico del
Pathé Distribution, Paris Dabin, Judith Czernichow, Danièle Cinema – AFE, Rome 158

Jérôme Seydoux, Christine Hayet,
Pascale Paulet, Pathé Distribution,
Colophon The exhibition is made possible
with collaboration and support from
Paris Fondation Fellini pour le Cinéma
Sophie Seydoux, Stéphanie Salmon, (Sion, Switzerland) and Fondazione
Sandra Escalante, Fondation Jérôme This book was published on Federico Fellini (Rimini, Italy).
Seydoux – Pathé, Paris the occasion of the exhibition
Agnès Sire, Fondation Henri Cartier- Fellini – The Exhibition
Bresson, Paris June 30 – September 22, 2013
Jacques du Sordet, Agence ANA, Paris
Sergio Spinelli EYE
Bernard Stiegler IJpromenade 1
Patrick Talbot 1013 KT Amsterdam,
Philippe Terrier-Hermann the Netherlands
Alexandre Therwath +31-20-589 14 00 Publishers: EYE, Amsterdam /
Sergio Toffetti, Fulvio Baglivi, info@eyefilm.nl Amsterdam University Press
Francesca Angelucci, Laura Argento, www.eyefilm.nl
Antonella Felicioni, Cineteca
Nazionale, Rome Exhibition
Serge Toubiana, Laurence Plon,
Jean-François Rauger, Olivier Père, Compilation exhibition: Sam Stourdzé,
Joël Daire, Jacques Ayroles, Isabelle in collaboration with EYE
Regelsperger, Cinémathèque Production: NBC photographie
française, Paris Amsterdam University Press
Francesca Tramma, Andrea Moroni, EYE Herengracht 221
Federica Terrile, Fondazione Corriere Director: Sandra den Hamer 1016 BG Amsterdam
della Sera, Milan Director of Exhibitions: Tel. +31-20-420 00 50
Carole Troufléau Jaap Guldemond www.aup.nl
Camille Viazaga Associate Curator: info@aup.nl
Emanuele von Normann Marente Bloemheuvel
and warm thanks to Véronique Terrier- Project Coordinators: Sanne Baar; ISBN 978 90 8964 582 1
Hermann Claartje Opdam NUR 674 / 644
and to Lou Stourdzé Exhibtion Design: Claus Wiersma
Graphic Design: Joseph Plateau © 2013 Sam Stourdzé / EYE / AUP
Film Programmer: Jan van den Brink
Debate and Reflection: All rights reserved. Without limiting
Gerlinda Heywegen the rights under copyright reserved
Curator Filmrelated Collections: above, no part of this book may be
Soeluh van den Berg reproduced, stored in or introduced
Director of Presentation and into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
Communication: Ido Abram in any form or by any means
Publicity and Marketing: (electronic, mechanical, photo-
Inge Scheijde; Marnix van Wijk copying, recording or otherwise)
Technical Production: without the written permission of both
Rembrandt Boswijk; Martin Schrevelius the copyright owner and the authors
Audiovisual Equipment: Beamsystems of the book.
Installation: Landstra & De Vries
Printed and Bound in Europe.
Publication
This book is distributed in the US and
Text and Compilation: Sam Stourdzé Canada by the University of Chicago
Editing: Marente Bloemheuvel, Press.
Jaap Guldemond
Translations: Walter van der Star
Copy Editing: Chantal Nicolaes
Publication Coordination AUP:
Jeroen Sondervan, Chantal Nicolaes /
Amsterdam University Press
Graphic Design: Joseph Plateau
Graphic Designers, Amsterdam
Project Coordinators: Sanne Baar,
Claartje Opdam
Paper: Supercol, Magno Gloss
Font: Futura
Printing and lithography: Die Keure,
Bruges (Belgium)
Binding: Hexspoor, Boxtel
Acknowledgements
Sam Stourdzé,
Carole Troufléau
159


Bloemheuvel, F.M. - Fellini, Federico - Guldemond, Jaap - Star, Walter Van Der - Stourdzé, Sam - Fellini-Amsterdam University Press, EYE (2013)

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Bloemheuvel, F.M. - Fellini, Federico - Guldemond, Jaap - Star, Walter Van Der - Stourdzé, Sam - Fellini-Amsterdam University Press, EYE (2013)

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Fellini

HOLGER_Fellini boek opmaak.indd 1 12-02-14 17:03

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The City of Women

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Before making his actual debut as a director, Fellini mainly concentrated on

HOLGER_Fellini boek opmaak.indd 4 12-02-14 17:03

The publication includes four main chapters. Popular Culture concentrates on

Sandra den Hamer

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1 Beno Graziani and Federico Fellini.

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The aberrant, grotesque, ragged clowns, with their total irrationality,

HOLGER_Fellini boek opmaak.indd 9 12-02-14 17:03

HOLGER_Fellini boek opmaak.indd 10 12-02-14 17:03

Images according to Jung 12

In City of Women, Fellini pursues the experiment on which he had embarked in

HOLGER_Fellini boek opmaak.indd 11 12-02-14 17:03

The circulation of images

Doctor Antonio (1962), or in the televised comeback of Ginger and Fred…

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Felliniesque reality grip on the popular classes. In 1955, pope Pius

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9 Photos and letters sent to Fellini by would-be

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A recursive cinema views Anna Magnani.

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Federico Fellini, The two comrades, Il Travaso,

Federico Fellini, Il Travaso, 4 May 1947

Federico Fellini, 1940.

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Alberto Sordi, The White Sheik, 1952.

Italian poster for The White Sheik, 1952.

HOLGER_Fellini boek opmaak.indd 23 12-02-14 17:04

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Federico Fellini and Milo Manara, Il viaggio di

HOLGER_Fellini boek opmaak.indd 28 12-02-14 17:04

Marcello Mastroianni during a screen test for Il viaggio di G. Mastorna, 1966.

HOLGER_Fellini boek opmaak.indd 29 12-02-14 17:04

Parade of bikers, Fellini’s Roma, 1972.

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Dinner scene, La Domenica del Corriere, 29 May 1965.

Fellini on the set of La Dolce Vita, 1959. 32 32

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Giulietta Masina as Gelsomina, La Strada, 1954.

Federico Fellini and a clown, La Dolce Vita, 1960. The circus

HOLGER_Fellini boek opmaak.indd 36 12-02-14 17:05

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Anthony Quinn, La Strada, 1954.

Giulietta Masina and Anthony Quinn,

HOLGER_Fellini boek opmaak.indd 38 12-02-14 17:06