Category: Filmography

Ginger e Fred

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Ginger e Fred

Year: 1985
Format: Colour
Runtime:  125 min
Production:  PEA (Roma), Revcom Films in associazione con Anthea (München), in collaborazione con Rai Uno.
Studio: Cinecittà
Word sales: internazionale Sacis, italiana Istituto Luce, Italnoleggio Cinematografico
Viewed censorship: 81020 30/10/1985Amelia, a former dancer nicknamed “Ginger”, widow and owner of a small industry, goes down to Termini station. He must appear on television to dance, thirty years later, with his old partner Pippo, in art “Fred”. It’s Christmas time, there’s a lot of confusion. Ginger gets on a bus where she meets strange characters; she arrives at a large hotel where all the staff is in front of the TV, taken from a football match. Fred has not yet arrived, and Ginger goes down the street, where she is surrounded by a group of threatening bikers. He returns to his room, hears snoring and discovers that it is Fred, aged, beaten to a pulp, who has agreed to attend the show only for money. The two would like to at least try their old number, but they can not for the bailamme of strange characters, guests, like them, of the broadcast And here it is. They do eventually, but it’s a disaster. Only the compliments of the TV president convince them to participate in the show: when it comes to them it is a success. At the station, at the time of departure, they are recognized and sign autographs. Then, after Fred gets some borrowed money from Ginger, they separate. She leaves. The lights on the tracks go out and only the TV with its pounding commercials remains.

poster – courtesy of © Webphoto & Services

Crew

Director: Federico Fellini
Subject: Federico Fellini, Tonino Guerra
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Tonino Guerra, Tullio Pinelli
Photography: Tonino Delli Colli, Ennio Guarnieri
Operator: Aldo Marchiori, Carlo Tafani, Gianni Fiore
Assistant operator: Gianfranco Torinti, Antonio Scaramuzza, Marco Sperduti, Luca Luparini
Music: Nicola Piovani (directed by the author)
Stage design: Dante Ferretti
Assistant set designer: Franco Ceraolo
Special effects: Adriano Pischiutta
Costumes design: Danilo Donati
Layout: Gian Franco Fumagalli
Architect: Nazzareno Piana
Costume designer assistant: Rosanna Andreoni
Paintings: Rinaldo Geleng, Giuliano Geleng
Choreography by Tony Ventura
Editing: Nino Baragli, Ugo De Rossi, Ruggero Mastroianni
Editing assistant: Marcello Olasio
Secretary of edition: Norma Del Pace Giacchero
Assistant director: Gianni Arduini
Assistant director: Filippo Ascione, Daniela Barbiani, Eugenio Cappuccio, Anke Zindler
Trick: Alfredo Tiberi
Hairdresser: Aldo Signorelli, Rosa Luciani, Giancarlo Marin
Manufacturer: Alberto Grimaldi
General organization: Luigi Millozza
Production Director: Walter Massi, Gianfranco Coduti, Roberto Mannoni, Raymond Leplont
Production inspector: Tullio Lullo, Fernando Rossi, Vieri Spadoni, Franco Marino
Production secretary: Alessandro Mancini, Lyda Garozzo, Carla Ferroni, Maurizio Pigna, Filippo Spoletini, Marcello Mancini
Dubbing director: Mario Maldesi
Mixage: Fausto Ancillai

Cast

Giulietta Masina: Ginger
Marcello Mastroianni : Fred – ep. Roma
Franco Fabrizi : presenter
Frederick Ledenburg : Admiral
Augusto Pederosi : transvestite
Martin Maria Blau : assistant director
Jacques Henri Lartigue : the flying friar
Toto Mignone : Toto
Ezio Marano : intellectual
Antonie Saint Jean : assistant
Frederick Thun : kidnapped
Antonio Lorio : TV inspector
Barbara Scoppa : journalist
Elisabetta Flumeri : journalist
Salvatore Billa : Clarke Gable
Broom Spinola : mother voices passed
Stefania Marini : the TV secretary
Francesco Casale : mafioso
Gianfranco Casale : mafioso
Gianfranco Alpestre : lawyer
Filippo Ascione : pianist
Elena Cantarone : nurse
Cosimo Chiusoli : the wife of the despised
Claudio Ciocca : cameraman
Sergio Ciulli : son dead voices
Federica Paccosi : dancer
Alessandro Partexano : sailor
Tiziana Bucarella
Leonardo Petrillo : Marcel Proust
Renato Grilli : Franz Kafka
Daniel Aldrovandi : Marty Feldmann
Barbara Montanari : Bette Davis
Barbara Golinska : Marlene Dietrich
Luigi Duca : Adriano Celentano
Eolo Capritti : Kojak

Awards

1986
Silver ribbon for best actor
1985-86
Silver ribbon for best actress
1985-86
Silver ribbon for best scenography
1986
Silver ribbon for best costumes
David di Donatello for best actor
David di Donatello for best music
David di Donatello for best costumes
David René Clair Award to Federico Fellini for the film
Nomination BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards) for Best Foreign Film

Reviews

A witness of a civilization which is beginning to destroy itself through a system of communications which adulterates knowledge, the cinema of the new Fellini is therefore a lament about the unreliability of the messages transmitted between peoples, individuals and institutions, not inspired by absolute values, but metaphors of provisional truths. It is the groan of an artist who in each of his characters, in their clandestine loves, in their intrigues, in their celestial or brutal movements reads the grimaces of society and the illusions of some candid soul. Therefore, a disconcerting cinema if once again the power of representation, the incisiveness of the portraits, the tragicomic of certain situations did not reverse the anguish of mockery. [… ] Putting the theme of imitation at the center of the story, and reconstructing almost everything in the studio, Ginger and Fred is the best film that so far has been made about the unreality in which we live, encoded on TV. It is to be glad that it was Fellini, a master of cinema, to remind us, bitterly playing, that we have all been doubles for quite a while, and perhaps that is why on earth we feel lost. We don’t know who to look like anymore.
(Giovanni Grazzini, Il cinemondo. Ten years of film 1976-1986, Laterza, Roma-Bari, 1987)

The approach to La dolce vita is not accidental, and not only for the rather banal reason that an author – a Fellini, especially – always continues to make the same film. What the magazine magazines had been 26 years ago for La Dolce Vita, the world of television with its megashows is for Ginger and Fred. There is no doubt that Fellini continues to be himself: storyteller, magician, illusionist, histrion, mystifier, willing to do anything to play the cards of the show, just to celebrate the Representation, to suggest that, Despite everything, life has its own deep sweetness, indispensable […] Fellini’s gaze seems changed: he has become more despondent. If La dolce vita could be called a journey through disgust, Ginger and Fred is a sea crossing of vulgarity. And vulgarity is that of television, of the flood of advertising, of the civilization of consumption. This is also evident from the few but unequivocal signals that the film sends to the outside world on the TV megashow: those on the degradation of Rome, for example.
(Morando Morandini, “The Day”, 14 January 1986)

A film shot masterfully and that renews the success of a famous trademark. But what kind of film is it? Just a short film to give Juliet and Marcello a chance? Or a film born of an expressive need and such as to add something to what we knew about Fellini and his world? The almost unanimous response of the French newspapers, concerned about the Berlusconi invasion, is that Ginger and Fred is a denunciation of the cultural genocide perpetrated in the degeneration of the television phenomenon. Others argue that it is not just a pamphlet against TV, but against the whole of society today: a sort of Rehearsal Orchestra Part II […] The stoic sense of Ginger and Fred is that maybe there is nothing to understand, you just have to live. We must learn to float as Marcello did in La dolce vita; even if the waters slowly become those of the Styx as in the planned and never realized The journey of G. Mastorna; even though nowadays you have the impression of floating on a polluted sea like Ginger and Fred.
(Tullio Kezich, “La Repubblica”, 13 January 1986)

Imagine the film as a show born from the reunited fantasies of Costanzo, Tortora, Aiazzone, Ed Sullivan, Rai 3 documentary section, Silvio Noto, the old Italnoleggio and Jerry Lewis. To all this Fellini gives the artist’s touch, that quid that transforms the night into light, into sublime the vulgar, in Berlusconi the formless videotape. We said “vulgar” not in reference to some fragments, as the scene of the inventor of the edible briefs that gives proof; nor to that quality so difficult to steal our comedy twilight that only irrelevant: weak, old, children and crippled. But to the magic of knowing how to talk about everything to everyone, to the popular science of winning the public, that Fellini certainly knows at least as well as Pippo Baudo and Mike, and manages with the instinct of the fox that does not need to sign contracts with Canale 5. (Roberto Silvestri, “Il Manifesto”, 25 January 1986)

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E la nave va

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E la nave va

Year: 1983
Format: Colour
Runtime:  132 min
Production: RAI Radiotelevisione e Vides Produzione (Italia), Gaumont (Francia). Teatro di posa: Cinecittà
Viewed censorship: 79229 31/10/1983A liner, Gloria N., is ready to sail. We are in the port of Naples, it is July 1914. Around the pier a crowd of street urchins and street vendors, while quickly the passengers arrive to board. Also arrives the ashes of a famous singer, Edmea Tetua; it is to spread these at sea that the cruise to Erimo was organized. On board there is also a journalist, Orlando, who entertains passengers, mostly singers, conductors, admirers of Edmea. A singer wants to learn the secrets of her skill; an Italian nobleman transforms his cabin into a temple dedicated to Edmea. From the hold rises the unbearable stench of a rhinoceros, which is then hoisted on the deck and washed. Serb shipwrecks who fled after the attack in Sarajevo are picked up. Life on board comes alive, until the ashes of Edmea are scattered in the sea. A Serb launches a bomb against an Austro-Hungarian warship and this cannons the Gloria N. that sinks; even the Austro-Hungarian flagship sinks and explodes. The journalist Orlando finds himself on a lifeboat together with the rhino, which ruminates placidly.

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Crew

Director: Federico Fellini
Subject: Federico Fellini, Tonino Guerra
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Tonino Guerra
Lyrical texts: Andrea Zanzotto
Photography: Giuseppe Rotunno (Technicolor)
Operator: Gianni Fiore
Assistant operator: Gian Maria Majorana, Luigi Bernardini
Music: Gianfranco Plenizio (directed by the author)
Orchestra and choir: RAI Radiotelevisione italiana
Choirmaster: Ines Meisters
Teacher collaborator: Elvio Monti
Stage design: Dante Ferretti
Costumes design: Maurizio Millenotti
Costume designer assistant: Barbara Mastroianni
Choreography: Leonetta Bentivoglio
Architect: Nazzareno Piana, Massimo Razzi
Layout: Massimo Tavazzi, Francesco Lo Schiavo
Paintings and frescoes: Rinaldo Geleng, Giuliano Geleng
Painter set designer: Italo Tomassi
Sculptures: Giovanni Gianese
Effects: Adriano Pischiutta
Editing: Ruggero Mastroianni
Editing assistant: Adriana Olasio, Leda Bellini, Rosanna Landi
Assistant director: Giovanni Arduino
Assistant Director: Andrea De Carlo
Secretary of edition: Norma Giacchero
Production Director: Lucio Orlandini
Screenplay: Catherine Breillat (French crew)
Assistant director: Terry Nahon (French crew)
Production Director: George Dybman (French crew)
Production Inspector: Willy Rahau (French crew)
Adaptation of the Italian dialogues: Roberto De Leonardis

Cast

Freddie Jones as Orlando
Barbara Jefford: Ildebranda Cuffari singer
Vittorio Poletti: Aureliano Fuciletto singer
Peter Cellier as Sir Reginald Dongwy
Elisa Mainardi: Teresa Valegnani singer
Norma West: Lady Violet Dongwy
Paolo Paoloni : Master Albertini
Sara Jane Varley as Dorotea
Fiorenzo Serra: the Grand Duke of Harzock
Pina Bausch: Princess Lherimia
Pasquale Zito: the Count of Bassano
Janet Suzman as Edmea Tetua
Linda Polan as Ines Ruffo Saltini
Philip Loche: Prime Minister
Jonathan Cecil as Ricotin
Maurice Barrier: Ziloev singer
Fred Williams as Sebastiano Lepori
Elizabeth Kaza: producer
Mara Zampieri: Ildebranda Cuffari singer
Elizabet Norberg Schulxz: Ines Ruffo Saltini singer
Nucci Condò: Teresa Valegnani singer
Giovanni Bavaglio: Aureliano Fuciletto singer
Carlo Di Giacomo: Sebastiano Lepori singer
Boris Carmeli: Ziloev singer
Bernadette Lucarfini: Second Serbian soprano singer
Bruno Beccaria: Serbian tenor singer

Awards

1984
Silver Ribbon for Best Director
1983-1984
Silver ribbon for best photo
1983-1984
Silver ribbon for best scenography
1986
Silver ribbon for best costumes
Silver ribbon for best special effects
David di Donatello for Best Film
David di Donatello for Best Screenplay
David di Donatello for best photo
David di Donatello for best scenography
David Luchino Visconti Award to Federico Fellini in tribute to his career
Sant Jordi award for best foreign film

Peculiarites

“I would like to see billboards in the entrance to the cinema saying: ‘There is nothing but what you see’. Or: ‘Do not try to see what is behind, or you risk not seeing even what is in front’. [… ] The film simply tells a voyage by ship to disperse the ashes of a famous singer of the 1920s. Some friends told me that it’s a terrible movie, that it has something obscurely threatening, while I think it has its own happiness. [… ] In E la nave va I expressed, more or less sincerely, more or less artificially […] the sense of bewilderment that invades us. The fear of the worst is a state of mind or a presentiment with which we have lived for a long time and which does not seem destined to abandon us. [… ] I do not think that the rhinoceros that sails on the ‘Gloria N.’ has anything to do with the monster that appears on the beach in the finale of La Dolce Vita. A symbol is such because it cannot be explained, because it goes beyond the concept, beyond reason, because it contains irrational or mythical elements. Why am I being forced to explain this? In any case, the rhinoceros that is on the ship, if it has a meaning, this meaning must be understood in a totally opposite sense. The monster of La dolce vita was a mirror of the degeneration of the protagonist, while the rhinoceros of E la nave va could suggest an interpretation, for example, of this type: the only attempt to avoid disaster, not to fall into catastrophe, could be the one directed to recover the unconscious, deep, healthy part of ourselves. It’s in this sense that you could explain the phrase “get fed on rhino milk”. But it is always a bit clumsy explanations, as is the awkward approach of the rhinoceros to the monster of La dolce vita. A fantasy, if authentic, contains everything, and needs no explanation”.
(Fellini. Telling of me, conversations with Costanzo Costantini, Editori Riuniti, Rome, 1996, pp. 182-185)

Reviews

The sea is fake, the battleship is a silhouette, the whole film was shot in the studio. Why, then, does the audience accept? I replied that the truth of his images imposes itself on the viewer with the evidence of a dream. As in life we never have the choice of the dream, but it is the dream that chooses us, so E la nave va bussa come un sogno alla nostra porta, anzi la sforza – says Caillois – “come un visitatore impaziente e scostumato” […] Felliniano senza fellinismi, or almost; film on the music that tends to music (but the lack of Nino Rota is heard…); all placed under the sign of mourning, but serene and as gently detached; rich in many beauties, but without spectacular prevarications; alarming and here and there anguished, but also funny, cheerful, pervaded by a quiet and cautious love for life, And the ship goes is a different film: it appears as the first stage of Fellini’s third age. This diversity is also felt in the attitude towards the figures and figurines that crowd the ship, among which we must mention at least the enigmatic blind princess Pina Bausch. Fellini mutes his taste of caricature, of playful mockery, of the monstrous: there is affection but with critical detachment towards these characters and there is above all respect.
(Morando Morandini “The Day”, 7 October 1983)

Yet this is a film with many secret drawers, full of double bottoms and surprises. Easy to understand even for a child, immediately multipliable in an extreme variety of suggestions and meanings. And the ship goes is first and foremost a thing to look at because it is beautiful, overflowing with animation and colors. Then something to think about: not systematically, not in the spirit of those who seek an answer to a problem. Among the contradictions of Fellini, enemy of every form of “engagement”, there is also that of not being able to escape the moment in which he lives. And not even to the temptation of the “guru” who, after being so urged, unwillingly issues a sentence, a viaticum, something that helps to live: the image of Orlando on the same boat as the rhinoceros, like an Ishmael who pulled Moby Dick on the wreck of the ship. The Witness and the Monster, the Intelligence and the Nature in its totality: bound together on the last thing that floats, on the water, after the shipwreck of all the great ships of history, indispensable to each other, indispensable, bound forever. A film that can be faced without the hassle of super-scientists and super-engagements, just the fairy tale of which Fellini has talked so much. But also a film to be browsed image by image, back and forth, seeing and seeing it again in the unfailing expectation that the miracle of agnition will be accomplished. Because in that crowd of funny and caricatured characters, happy or threatening, there in a corner of the group photo, between a lady and an officer, between a Serb and a stoker, there are also us.
(Tullio Keich “La Repubblica”, 7 October 1983)

If La nave va wanted to be a great show, a great show is, confirming the great creative vitality of Fellini, so young to renew his language without tensions and apparent travails, following a biological and fantastic rhythm together, transients from the exuberant grotesque masks to a solar, vivid approach with the characters-symbol of his visions. The prologue, amazing, contains the key of the film, with the arrival of passengers who board the ship Gloria N; shot with the modes of the Pathé newsreels, movements uncoordinated, Veiled ladies, knights with mustaches advancing in procession with the bonnet containing the ashes of the famous opera singer Edmea Tetua that will be scattered at the end of the cruise on a Mediterranean island. Gradually the sounds emerge, and through the cuttlefish and black and white colors emerge.
(Alfio Cantelli “Il Giornale”, 7 October 1983)

La città delle donne

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La città delle donne

Year: 1980
Format: Colour
Runtime:  145 min
Production: Opera Film Produzione (Roma), Gaumont (Paris)
Word sales: Gaumont – Italy
Viewed censorship: 74981 27/03/1980

A train crosses the countryside: in a compartment snoozes Snàporaz, a distinguished 50-year-old man. A handsome stranger appears, and the man follows her. In the toilet, the two begin to flirt, then the woman suddenly steps off the train into a mysterious landscape. And behind her, Snàporaz. An international conference of feminists is taking place at the Grand Hotel Miramare. As the search for the mysterious passenger continues, Snàporaz, mistaken for a journalist, is attacked. Rescued by a soubrette on skates, in his escape he slips down the stairs and plummets into the cellars, where he meets a big man who, on a motorcycle, accompanies him to the station; the virago, as soon as they are in open country, tries to rape him. And Snàporaz flees again pursued by enraged women. He takes refuge in the castle of Dr. Katzone, his former schoolmate intent on celebrating his career as a libertine. There he meets his wife, who, drunk, covers him with insults, and the savior soubrettina. After retracing some stages of his sentimental upbringing, he is captured by feminists. His woman-shaped hot air balloon is deflated by machine gun fire. As he is plummeting, Snàporaz wakes up in the train, sitting in front of his wife, just before the convoy takes a long tunnel.

Crew

Director: Federico Fellini
Subject: Federico Fellini, Bernardino Zapponi
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Bernardino Zapponi
Script collaboration: Brunello Rondi
Photography: Giuseppe Rotunno (Technovision – Color)
Cameraman: Gianni Fiore
Music: Luis Bacalov
Conductor: Gianfranco Plenizio
Songs: “Una donna senza uomo è” (words and music by Mary Francolao), “Donna addio” (verses by Antonio Amurri)
Ballet: Mirella Agujaro
Choreography consultant: Leonetta Bentivoglio
Set design: Federico Fellini
Set design: Dante Ferretti
Assistant set designer: Claude Chevant
Architect: Giorgio Giovannini
Assistant architect: Nazzareno Piana
Furniture: Bruno Cesari, Carlo Gervasi
Scenotechnician: Italo Tomassi
Sculptures: Giovanni Chianese
Paintings and frescoes: Rinaldo Geleng, Giuliano Geleng
Costumes: Gabriella Pescucci, Piattelli (for Mastroianni)
Costumes assistant: Maurizio Millenotti, Marcella De Marchis
Assistant Director: Maurizio Mein
Assistant director: Giovanni Bentivoglio, Anonio Amurri
Assistant director: Jean Louis Godfroy (2nd unit)
Special effects: Adriano Pischiutta
Sound: Tommaso Quattrini, Pierre Paul Marie Lorrain
Makeup: Rino Carboni
Editing: Ruggero Mastroianni
Editing assistant: Bruno Sarandrea, Roberto Puglisi
Editing assistant: Adriana Olasio
Executive producer: Franco Rossellini
General Organization: Lamberto Pippia
Production director: Francesco Orefici, Philippe Lorain Bernard (2nd unit)

Cast

Marcello Mastroianni : Snàporaz
Anna Prucnal : the wife of Snàporaz
Bernice Stegers : the lady on the train
Ettore Manni : Dr. Sante Kartzone
Iole Silvani : the fat peasant motorcyclist
Donatella Damiani : Donatella the soubrettina
Fiammetta Baralla : “Ollio”
Helen G. Calzarelli
Catherine Carrel
Marcello Di Falco : homosexual at the Kartzone party
Silvana Fusacchia
Gabriella Giogelli : the fishwife
Dominique Labourier
Stephane Emilfork
Sylvie Mayer
Meerberger Nahyr
Sibyl Sedat
Katren Gebelein
Alessandra Panelli : housewife with baby in arms
Nadia Vasil
Loredana Solfizi
Fiorella Molinari
Rosaria Tafuri : Sara the second soubrettina
Sylvie Wacrenier
Carla Terlizzi : a feminist
Jill Lucas : one of the twins
Viviane Lucas : one of the twins
Mara Ciukleva : the eighty-five-year-old old lady
Mimmo Poli : participates in Kartzone’s party
Nello Pazzafini : appears in the final scene in the stadium
Armando Paracino : one of the three old magicians in the memory sequence
Umberto Zuanelli : one of the three old magicians in the memory sequence
Pietro Fumagalli : one of the three old magicians in the memory sequence

Awards

1980
Silver Ribbon for best director
Silver Ribbon for best cinematography
Silver Ribbon for best costumes

Peculiarites

“I have always been attracted to dreams, but of all my films only The City of Women is almost entirely a dream. Everything in the film has a hidden meaning, just like in a dream, except the beginning and the end, when Snaporaz is awake in the sleeping car. It is the nightmarish flap of Guido’s dream in Eight and a Half.”
(Charlotte Chandler, I, Federico Fellini, Mondadori, Milan, 1995, p. 2269)

Reviews

With more anguish than amusement, Fellini takes up the paths of Amarcord in a progressive loss of illusions about man’s role in the contemporary world. The film has the stated limitation of keeping within the autobiographical area, albeit capriciously dilated, without pushing its regressive force to that rediscovery of the “great dreams” of primitive humanity theorized by Jung.
(Tullio Kezich, The Brand New Millefilm. Five years at the cinema 1977-1982, Il Formichiere, Milan, 1983)

Having arrived at the threshold of old age […] Fellini as a director has (fortunately and ours) entered that splendid maturity in which a sacred monster manages to deepen its treasures of skill for the sole pleasure of doing so. There is, behind the festival of images, colors, a pleasure to make of cinema that from the first scenes becomes also yours, as a spectator, as you have not happened to try for a long time. Then what do you care if Fellini conceptually discovers hot water? You let yourself be carried away by the ride of inventions, and you can still amaze yourself (like a little boy who recently discovered cinema), at every sequence, at every shot. If in the City of women the suspense for the story, or for the ingredients (you do not care anything about how they will end Snàporaz or Katzone, you know very well that at a given point will arrive Rimini and the extras busty) there is the suspence of the images, of the scenic finds (you warn very well that Fellini is going to invent, but the invention you never know how and to what point it arrives to you). (Giorgio Carbone, “The Night”, Milan, 29 March 1980)

A fairy tale that Fellini enjoyed telling him (to the viewer) intentionally retracing all the stages of his cinema, here giving space, once again, to memories, as in Otto e mezzo and Amarcord, there making the point again on the present, as in La Dolce Vita and in Prova d’orchestra, alternating the nightmare to the dream, the vision to the joke and the anecdote, multiplying and varying languages and techniques, rediscovering and rereading the imagined and the real with an inspiration and a fertility of inventions to leave often fascinated and amazed.
(Gian Luigi Rondi, “Il Tempo”, Rome, 29 March 1980)
Opera […] untied but in its own coherent way, united by the extraordinary catalogue of unexpected and stimulating images, The City of Women is Fellini’s most imaginative and unbridled film, what does not mean that it is the best. Some parts repeat, even if dilated and refined, some recurring themes of the director (Rimini, the amusement park), so that it cannot be said that the originality of the finds can always hide some drop in tone and even taste. It is however a work in front of which it is difficult to get bored, provided […] not to practice exegesis unnecessarily punctilious, but to surrender to the pure enjoyment of the images.
(Angelo Solmi, “Today”, 18 April 1980)

“What kind of film is this?” she asks at some point in the Snàporaz-Fellini story. We reply that, despite some excess of greedy figurativeness, La città delle donne is a great film where, beyond the metaphor, pitiless as much with the woman as with the man, we find some components of the best Fellini: the mythological inspiration of the Dolce vita, the magical thrill of Juliet of the spirits, the nostalgia of Amarcord, the fairytale ambiguity of Otto and a half, of which it can be said the continuation.
(Domenico Meccoli, “Epoca”, 5 April 1980)

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Prova d’orchestra

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Prova d’orchestra

Year: 1979
Format: Colour
Runtime:  70 min
Production: Daime Cinematografica S.p.A. and Rai – TV (Roma), Albatros Produktion G.M.B.H. (Monaco)
Word sales: Gaumont – Italy
Viewed censorship: 73109 19/02/1979

Rehearsals for a symphony concert are taking place inside an old oratory. Instrumentalists arrive in small groups and take their places. There are also, in one corner, union representatives. A TV reporter interviews the musicians: each talks about his instrument and experiences. As the maestro arrives, speaking in a distinct German accent, the rehearsal begins quietly. Then suddenly it is interrupted by protests from the orchestral players. The conductor leaves the hall for his dressing room where the journalist follows him to interview him. Meanwhile, in the oratorio it is revolution: everything is protested, from the conductor to the scores; anarchy and disorder reign, with the walls daubed with writing and symbols of revolt. Suddenly the building begins to shake, shaken by increasingly loud blows until a giant steel ball smashes through the walls, and in the collapse the harpist dies. After moments of confusion and cries of terror, silence returns and the rehearsal resumes. Back on the podium, the conductor gives his orders, like a dictator.

Crew

Director: Federico Fellini
Subject: Federico Fellini
Screenplay: Federico Fellini
Script collaboration: Brunello Rondi
Photography: Giuseppe Rotunno (Technicolor)
Music: Nino Rota
Music consultant: Carlo Savina
Conductor: Carlo Savina
Set Design: Dante Ferretti
Furniture: Nazzareno Piana
Editing: Ruggero Mastroianni
Editing assistant: Adriana Olasio
Special Effects: Adriano Pischiutta
Costumes: Gabriella Pescucci
Assistant Director: Maurizio Mein
Assistant Director: Christa Reeh, Giovanni Bentivoglio
Cameraman: Gianni Fiore
Dubbing director: Carlo Baccarini
General organization: Lamberto Pippia
RAI Production Delegate: Fabio Storelli

Cast

Baldwin Baas: the conductor
Clara Colosimo: the harpist
Elisabeth Labi: the pianist
Ronaldo Bonacchi: the contrabassoon player
Ferdinando Villella: the cello
Giovanni Javarone: the tuba
David Mauhsell: the first violin
Francesco Aluigi: the second violin
Andy Miller: the oboe
Sibyl Mostert: the flutist
Franco Mazzieri: the trumpet
Daniele Pagani: the trumpet
Luigi Uzzo: the violin
Cesare Martignoni: the clarinet
Umberto Zuanelli: the copyist
Filippo Trincia: the orchestra manager
Claudio Ciocca: the syndicalist
Angelica Hansen: violin
Heinz Kreuger: violin
Federico Fellini: voice of the interviewer

Awards

1979
Silver Ribbon for best music

Peculiarites

“I had other plans, it wasn’t urgent, I didn’t feel the urgency to do this. It didn’t correspond to a need. I felt the need at one point, when they killed Moro. Yes, when I heard that they had killed Moro. It made a huge impression on me. But not the fact itself, I was expecting it. But the thinking about it, to understand the deeper meaning of what had happened and why it had happened. What had those who had killed him wanted to do? What had happened to all of us living in this country? Why had we been reduced to this point? Between this and the film there was no direct connection, or at least I didn’t realize it. I perceived the connection a long time later, when the film was already finished, indeed when it was already on the schedule. It is not that from the beginning I did not attach meanings to the film that it has, but I had no consciousness of why at some point it became urgent for me to do so. Well, then I knew: it was Moro’s assassination.”
(Franca Faldini, Goffredo Fofi, Il cinema italiano d’oggi, 1970-1984. Told by its protagonists, Mondadori, Milan, 1984, p. 258)

Reviews

Fellini succeeds in blending, in little more than a little less than 70 minutes of spectacle, grotesque, nostalgic, truth, prophecy, disquiet and anxiety, in a truly unusual amalgam without a half a minute only of the dense evocative, representational or forecast-oriented discourse being wasted or falling inert. He has moments of poignant and dramatic poetic force, but he has no need (as at other times even to him could happen) to prepare them with a duller flow of images; he has no desire to prolong in echoes and reflections, even the highest achievements. Unsurpassed in constructing, within the work, “fragments” of touching quality, Fellini in this film manages to discourse in an unyielding continuity, albeit by fragments!
(Leone Piccioni “Il Tempo,” Nov. 25, 1978)

It is a disturbing film. One can make different readings of it. They are all true, contemporary, the same. I want to say that no hierarchy can be established between the parable on the current Italian political chaos (and its place in the current planetary imbalance), the reflection on the role of the media, the metaphysical meditation on the function of man in society, his necessity, his becoming, his relationship with creation […] What Fellini certainly tells us about is music. That is, of art, of creation, of the means to go beyond the ephemeral, death, banality. What Fellini tells us is that mediocrity is unbearable. Because limiting the scope of the film to its analyzable, logical, parabolic dimension means nothing. Orchestra Rehearsal is a heartbreaking cry, half appeal and half stigmatization; it is in any case, and subterraneously, a cry of hope. For Fellini, despite the painful and moving contradiction of the last few minutes, never stopped hoping.
(Mireille Amiel “Cinéma 79,” no. 247-248, juillet-août 1979)

Like all televised Fellini from Block-notes of a director to I clowns, it has a lightness of touch and a capacity for synthesis now hard to find in major works. In the portraits of the orchestral players, the flair of the old caricaturist is confirmed, but exalted in a Gogolian dimension, while the figure of the conductor is partly an occasion for an autobiographical outburst, partly a self-criticism driven to paradox (after an inspired Jungian-esque speech on the need to play one’s instrument well, the character fires off a series of orders in German). Overall, the film, mastered with superior skill, is a brilliantly contradictory essay: funny and sad, positive and desperate, catty and testy.
(Tullio Kezich The Hundred Films 2. A year of cinema 1978-1979, Il Formichiere, Milan, 1979)

At one point, at the moment of maximum degradation (and this is said in terms of structures not aesthetic values: in fact these are probably the best moments in the film) the famous iron mallet intervenes, a prelude to the advent of a new order. Of Revolution, of Restoration, of Providence? No, it is only the symbol of itself, the symbol of the symbolic. At the moment of the drift, when nothing is codified anymore, the hypothesis of a return to the order of the symbolic, to the languages of certainty, to the compactness, iron, of the work asserts itself. Along with the big iron ball, it is cinema that re-enters television, bringing to it its special effects, its clouds of smoke, its studio sets, the fantastic, the strong emotions, everything that cinema can do but TV cannot. It is cinema “for” TV, it is the orchestra beginning to play again.
(Alberto Farassino” La Repubblica,” March 15, 1979)

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Il Casanova di Federico Fellini

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Il Casanova di Federico Fellini

Year: 1976
Format: Colour
Runtime:  170 min
Production: PEA
Word sales: Titanus
Viewed censorship: 69484 01/12/1976

During the Venetian carnival Giacomo Casanova agrees to show his amorous valor with Sister Magdalena and thus please the woman’s voyeur lover, the French ambassador from whom Casanova hopes to gain benefits. But he is arrested by the Inquisition on charges of black magic. He escapes from the Piombi prison and is in Paris as a guest of the Marquise d’Urfé who wants to obtain from him the secret of immortality. Then Casanova leaves Paris and resumes his frenzied activities as a seducer. Among his loves is the unhappy one with Henriette, who makes him despair and abandons him. In Rome he participates in an amatory contest with a Pololano, winning it. In Rome he also meets the pope and his mother, who by then has little interest in his fortunes. Finally, old age, employment as a librarian, his charm fading, the oblivion of the courts, until the loneliness of a dance with a mechanical doll, a memory of an increasingly distant past.

Crew

Director: Federico Fellini
Subject: loosely based on “Storie della mia vita” by Giacomo Casanova
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Bernardino Zapponi
Photography: Giuseppe Rotunno (Technicolor)
Cameraman: Massimo Di Venanzo
Assistant Cameraman: Wolfgango Soldati, Bruno Garbuglia
Music: Nino Rota
Conductor: Carlo Savina
Songs: “La grande mouna” by Tonino Guerra, “La mantide religiosa” by Antonio Amurri, “Il cacciatore di Wurtemberg” by Carl A. Walken
Verses in Venetian dialect: Andrea Zanzotto
Set design: Federico Fellini
Set design: Danilo Donati
Costumes: Danilo Donati
Assistant costumes: Gloria Mussetta, Raimonda Gaetani, Rita Giacchero
Architect: Giantito Burchiellaro, Giorgio Giovannini
Set design assistant: Antonello Geleng
Editing: Ruggero Mastroianni
Editing assistant: Adriana Olasio, Marcello Olasio, Ugo De Rossi
Assistant directors: Maurizio Mein, Liliana Betti, Gerard Morin
Editing secretary: Norma Giacchero
Production inspector: Gilberto Scarpellini, Alessandro Gori, Fernando Rossi
Furniture: Emio D’Andria
Sound: Oscar De Arcangelis
Sound assistants: Franco De Arcangelis, Massimo De Arcangelis
Mixage: Fausto Ancillai
Choreography: Gino Landi
Choreography assistant: Mirella Agujaro
Scenotechnician: Italo Tomassi
Paintings: Rinaldo Geleng, Giuliano Geleng
Drawings for the magic lantern: Roland Topor
Sculptures: Giovanni Giannesi
Makeup: Rino Carboni (Giannetto De Rossi and Fabrizio Sforza for Donald Sutherland)
Hairstyling: Vitaliana Patacca
Assistant hairstylists: Gabriella Borzelli, Paolo Borzelli, Vincenzo Cardella
Special effects: Adriano Pischiutta
Producer: Alberto Grimaldi
General Organization: Giorgio Morra
Production Manager: Lamberto Pippia
Production assistant: Alessandro von Normann, Mario Di Biase
Production secretary: Titti Pesaro, Luciano Bonomi

Cast

Donald Sutherland : Giacomo Casanova
Tina Aumont : Henriette
Cicely Browne : the Marquise Durfé
Carmen Scarpitta : Mrs. Charpillon
Diane Kourys : Mrs. Charpillon
Clara Algranti : Marcolina
Daniela Gatti : Giselda
Margareth Clementi : Sister Magdalena
Mario Cencelli : Dr. Mobius the entomologist
Silvana Fusacchia : another daughter of the entomologist
Chesty Morgan : Barberina
Adele Angela Lojodice : the mechanical doll
Sandra Elanie Allen : the giantess
Clarissa Maryè Roll : Annamaria
Alessandra Belloni : the princess
Marika Rivera : Astrodi
Angelica Hansen : hunchback actress
Marjorie Belle : countess of Waldestein
Marie Marquet : the mother of Casaova
Daniel Emilfork-Berestein : Du Bois
Luigi Zerbinati : the Pope

Awards

1976
Oscar for best costume design
1977
Silver Ribbon for best cinematography
1976-1977
Silver Ribbon for best set design
1976
Silver Ribbon for best costumes
1977
David di Donatello for best music
1977
Oscar nomination for best non-original screenplay
BAFTA Award (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) for best set design
BAFTA Award (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) for best costume design
BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards) nomination for best cinematography

Peculiarites

“At first I had thought of casting Gian Maria Volonté in the role of Casanova. It would have been beneficial to the Italian actor, after so many tormented figures who had made humanity leap forward, to play a character destined, by contrast, to make it leap backward, but successive postponements had led to a breakdown of contracts. I had thus entrusted the role of Casanova to Donald Sutherland, a sperm candelon with a masturbator’s eye, as far removed as one could imagine from an adventurer and ladies’ man like Casanova, but a serious, trained, professional actor.”
(Fellini. Telling about myself, conversations with Costanzo Costantini, Editori Riuniti, Rome, 1996, p. 138)

Reviews

Casanova as he was never interested Fellini in the least. What he saw was another of the ghosts, the dreamlike projections, that habitually filled his imagination. Monster among monsters, disturbing larva among the many that crowd his reveries as an artist who grew up amid the religious conditioning of a small Adriatic town and landed in a Rome that always spoke to him especially as the privileged seat of an ecclesiastical society and custom.
(Mauro Manciotti, “Il Secolo XIX,” Dec. 22, 1976)

Casanova is, perhaps, Fellini’s best film since Otto e mezzo, probably the most free from Fellinism, certainly the most unified and compact (and there is little point in arguing whether it was really necessary to reach the 2 hours and 43 minutes in length) for richness and genius of figurative inventions, narrative tightness, wisdom in balancing the horrific with the tender and the fabulous with the ironic, ability to move from the caricatural to the visionary. It has always been one of the peculiarities of his talent, but here, even with some repetition, it is maintained at a high level of homogeneity, resting on a phonic fabric that, in its refined mystilinguism, is as admirable as the stupendous color palette of Rotunno’s photography.
(Morando Morandini, “Il Giorno,” Dec. 11, 1976)

Casanova is not a cinematic novel; it has no logical progression or real narrative links. The connections between the nine or ten chapters are quick and precarious, reminiscent of captions in “comics.” Federico Fellini’s grand circus belongs to the avant-garde, as the American filmmakers of the “underground” have well understood since the days of Eight and a Half. Despite the billions spent lavishly, we are not in the parts of what Flaubert called “industrial art”; we are closer to the monolithic, “privatism” and brazenness of an Andy Warhol. Therefore, the comparison that current events suggest between Barry Lindon and Casanova registers more dissimilarities than convergences. Kubrick takes seriously the nineteenth-century novel and the eighteenth-century setting, the sociological and political connotations of the affair: he has the air of having read and annotated an entire library, of having his own moral judgment about the era and the character. Fellini has flipped through the Casanovian Histoire like the phone book, has on the surface to offer nothing but impressions, resentments, mockery. However… There is a though here, too: if Kubrik’s re-enacted 1700s has its own deep cultural motivations, Fellini’s dreamed-up 1700s has the alarming and mysterious quality of a prophetic vision. Perhaps Jung would have said that Il Casanova is a prophecy about the past.
(Tullio Kezich, “La Repubblica,” Dec. 11, 1976)

Rich, multifaceted, varied in tone, perhaps not immune to some slackening of rhythm, Il Casanova imposes itself on our admiration especially in the parts in which its protagonist, as he grows older, acquires a humanity that was previously avariciously denied him, and thus engages us.
(Dario Zanelli, “Il Resto del Carlino,” Dec. 19, 1976)

Fellini Satyricon

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Fellini Satyricon

Year: 1969
Format: Colour
Runtime: 138 min
Production: P.E.A. (Roma), Les – Productions Artistes Associeés (Paris)
Word sales: P.E.A. (Roma)
Viewed censorship: 5455603/09/1969

Two young men, Encolpius and Ascyltus, are in love with an effeminate boy named Giton. Ascyltus ‘steals’ Giton from Encolpius and sells him to Vernacchio, an actor of vulgar pantomimes. Encolpius manages to take Giton back, and they hid in a palace inhabited by depraved people. Giton – who is allowed to choose one of the two young men – prefers Ascyltus. Encolpius intends to commit suicide, but he’s saved by an unexpected earthquake. Encolpius meets an old poet called Eumolpus, who takes him to the court of Trimalchio, a freed man, where a wild and decadent party is taking place. At the Villa, Eumolpus is heavily beaten, and Trimalchio takes his guests to the tomb where he will be buried. Encolpius is enslaved and meets Giton, and Asciltus on pirate Lichas’ ship, a middle-aged merchant working for the Emperor. Giton is obliged to make sex with a young girl while Encolpius, after having been defeated by Lichas in a Greco-Roman wrestling match, marries her. We continue to follow Encolpius through a series of adventures: he becomes impotent and is cured by Enotea’s Holy Fire, and then he’s forced to fight against the Minotaur. When Ascyltus is murdered, Encolpius decides to board Eumolpus’ ship, that is bound for North Africa. When Eumolpus dies Encolpius refuses to eat his corpse, and thus gives up the possibility of becoming his heir.

Crew

Director: Federico Fellini
Story: liberamente tratto da Petronio Arbitro
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Bernardino Zapponi
Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno
Camera operator: Giuseppe Maccari
Optical effects: Joseph Natanzon
Music: Nino Rota con la collaborazione di Ilhan Mimaroglu, Tod Docksader, Andrew Rudin
Production design idea: Federico Fellini
Production design: Danilo Donati, Luigi Scaccianoce
Costume design: Danilo Donati
Set decorator: Danilo Donati
Assistant production designer: Dante Ferretti, Carlo Agate
Wardrobe assistant: Franco Antonelli, Renzo Bronchi, Dafne Cirrocchi
Painting consultant: Rino Scordia
Pictorial supervisor: Italo Tomassi
Architecht: Giorgio Giovannini
Film editing: Ruggero Mastroianni
Assistant editor: Adriana Olasio
Edition: Enzo Ocone
Script supervisor: Norma Giacchero
First assistant director: Maurizio Mein
Second assistant director: Liliana Betti, Lia Consalvo
Makeup artist: Rino Carboni
Hair Stylist: Luciano Vito
Consultant for Latin language: Luca Canali
Still photographer: Mimmo Cattarinich
Producer: Alberto Grimaldi
Production manager: Enzo Provenzale
Production supervisor: Lamberto Pippia, Gilberto Scarpellini, Fernando Rossi
Production secretary: Michele Pesce

Cast

Martin Potter : Encolpio
Hiram Keller : Ascilto
Max Born : Gitone
Salvo Randone : Eumolpo
Mario Romagnoli : Trimalcione
Magali Noël : Fortunata
Capucine : Trifena
Alain Cuny : Lica
Fanfulla : Vernacchio
Danika La Loggia : Scintilla
Giuseppe Sanvitale : Abinna
Genius : liberto arricchito
Lucia Bosè : la matrona suicida
Joseph Wheeler : il suicida
Hylette Adolphe : la schiavetta
Tanya Lopert : l’imperatore
Gordon Mitchell : il predone
Luigi Montefiori : Minotauro
Marcello Di Falco : proconsole
Elisa Mainardi : Marianna
Donyale Luna : Enotea
Carlo Giordana : il capitano della nave
Pasquale Baldassarre : l’ermafrodita
Lina Alberti : l’idolo d’oro – parte tagliata al montaggio

Awards

1970
Silver Silver Ribbon for Best Supporting Actor: Fanfulla
1970
Silver Silver Ribbon for Best Cinematography, Color: Giuseppe Rotunno
Silver Silver Ribbon for Best Production Design: Danilo Donati and Luigi Scaccianoce
Silver Silver Ribbon for Best Costume Design: Danilo Donati
Academy Award Nomintaion for Best Direction

Peculiarites

“Petronious Satyricon is a mysterious text, first of all because it is fragmentary. But this fragmentary character symbolizes the very fragmentary nature of the Ancient World as we conceive it today. This is why the text and the world it represents are so fascinating. During the shootings I was faced with an unknown landscape, the fog was so thick that only for few seconds it dissolved and allowed me to see the landscape. The Ancient World is to me like a lost and unknown world. The only way I can approach it is through creativity and imagination, without resorting to any historical background or information”.
(Federico Fellini, Un regista a Cinecittà, Mondadori, Milan, 1988, p. 127)

Reviews

“Fellini’s Rome bears no relation to the Rome we learned about in school books, and it touches upon a special topic, namely two-wheeled chariots. It is not set in history, but rather in a part of the unconscious where the episodes reported by Petronius are included among Fellini’s ghosts (…) His Satyricon is a journey through fairytales for adults. It is evident that Fellini – as he finds out that these ancient characters share his own human and artistic doubts – wonders if man’s universal and eternal condition does not lead to the awareness of the transience of life”.
(Giovanni Grazzini, Corriere della Sera, 5 September 1969)

“Fellini defined Satyricon as “a science fiction essay on the past“, as if the Romans of that decadent age were being observed by flying saucers’ astonished inhabitants. Curiously enough, in this effort of objectivity, the director has created a film that is very subjective, and requires a psychoanalytic approach to be analyzed. It is pointless to debate whether the film proposes a plausible interpretation of ancient Rome, or whether it resembles Petronius’ descriptions. The least surprising parts are those that come closest to Petronius’s text or that have some vague historical significance.” The author’s creativity is fully developed in the visit of “Suburra”, in Alan Cluny’s grotesque wedding where he is dressed as a woman, in the final struggle with the fake Minotaur. It is almost always a claustrophobic, nocturnal and unhealthy atmosphere”.
(Tullio Kezich, “Panorama”, 18 September 1969)

“Satyricon is an extraordinary effort of translating something mysterious and unknown into symbolically powerful images. It is like a long dream full of adventures where he episodes differ in terms of quality and taste. Fellini, in any case, discovered Ancient Rome in a very original way, far from banalities and clichés. Satyricon does include monsters and shivering, and death dimension is always present. Death is probably the very theme linking all the different film episodes”.
(Angelo Solmi, “Oggi”, 17 September 1969)

I clowns

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I clowns

Year: 1970
Format: Colour
Runtime: 93 min
Production: Rai – Radio Televisione Italiana (Italia) – O.R.T.F. (Francia) – Bavaria Film (R.F.T.) Compagnia Leone cinematografica
Word sales: Italnoleggio
Viewed censorship: 5707217/10/1970

A circus tent is being installed and a child looks on curiously. Clowns remind him of some real-life characters, including an energetic dwarf, “Cotechino”, the stationmaster, “Madonna”, who’s continuously quarrels with her colleagues, “Giudizie”, who’s going back to World War I…We then move on to the present day. A television investigation is under way, and Fellini is looking for old clowns and is willing to listening to them telling him their memories. After visiting the “Liana Orfei” circus, Fellini and his crew go to Paris, where they interview Tristan Remy, a writer dealing mainly with clowning history. Fellini helps the writer track old clowns, namely the few survivors of a no longer existing world. The Director shoots their aged and sad faces. He owes them the joy they were capable of giving their audience.

poster – courtesy of © Webphoto & Services

Crew

Director: Federico Fellini
Story: Federico Fellini, Bernardino Zapponi
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Bernardino Zapponi
Cinematography: Dario Di Palma (Technicolor)
Camera operator: Blasco Giurato
Music: Nino Rota
Musical director: Carlo Savina
Costume design: Danilo Donati
Film editing: Ruggero Mastroianni
Assistant editor: Adriana Olasio
First assistant director: Maurizio Mein
Second assistant director: Liliana Betti
Script supervisor: Norma Giacchero
Makeup artist: Rino Carboni
Special effects: Adriano Pischiutta
Hair Stylist: Paolo Franceschi
Production design: Renzo Gronchi
Set decorator: Renzo Gronchi
Mixage : Alberto Bartolomei
Producer: Elio Scardamaglia, Ugo Guerra
Production manager: Lamberto Pippia

Cast

Liana Orfei : se stessa
Rinaldo Orfei : se stesso
Nando Orfei : se stesso
Franco Migliorini : se stesso
Anita Ekberg : se stessa
Billi : clown
Scotti : clown
Fanfulla : clown
Reder : clown
Valentini : clown
Merli : clown
Rizzo : clown
Pistoni : clown
Furia : clown
Sbarra : clown
Carini : clown
Terzo : clown
Vingelli : clown
Fumagalli : clown
Zerbinati : clown
I 4 Colombaioni : clowns
I Martana : clowns
Maggio : clown
Janigro : clown
Maunsell : clown
Peverello : clown
Sorrentino : clown
Valdemaro : clown
Bevilacqua : clown
Maya Morin : la troupe
Lina Alberti : membro della troupe
Alvaro Vitali : membro della troupe
Gasparino : membro della troupe
Alex : clown francese
Bario : clown francese
Père Loriot : clown francese
Ludo : clown francese
Charlie Rivel : clown francese
Maiss : clown francese
Nino : clown francese
Pierre Etaix : se stesso
Victor Fratellini : se stesso
Annie Fratellini : se stessa
Baptiste Rémy : se stesso
Tristani Rémy : se stesso
Pipo : se stesso
Rhum : se stesso
Buglioni : se stesso
Hugue : se stesso

Awards

1971
Silver ribbon for Best Costume Design

Peculiarites

“When I say: ‘the clown’, I mean the August. There are in fact two figures: White and August clowns. The White clown personifies elegance, grace, harmony, intelligence, brightness – all traits that are described as ideal and unique traits. The White clown thus becomes the Mother, the Father, the Master, the Artist, the Handsome one – to sum up – ‘what has to be done’. Consequently the August clown, who would be under the spell of these perfect traits, rebels. He sees shining ‘sequins’ on costumes, but their snootiness makes them unattainable. The August clown is the child who soils himself; he’s the one who gets drunk, rolls on the ground and continuously raises objections. This is the fight between reason and instinct, reason and the freedom of instinct.” The White clown and the August clown are the Primary School Teacher and the Child, the Mother and the Little Rogue. We may even say they are the Angel with a blazing sword and the Sinner.”
(Federico Fellini, Fare un film, Einaudi, Torino, 1980, p. 117)

Reviews

“There is a bit of everything in these Clowns: Anita Ekberg’s feline appearances circus Orfei’s cages, and the whole of Fellini’s talent. The main elements of Fellini’s creativeness are all there, his sweet and nasty traits, his modesty, his affection, his credulity and skepticism”.
(Guglielmo Biraghi, “Il Messaggero”, 31 August 1970)

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Intervista

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Intervista

Year: 1987
Format: Colour
Runtime:  113 min
Production: Aljosha Productions (Ibrahim Moussa), in collaborazione con Cinecittà e Rai Uno
Word sales: Academy
Viewed censorship: 82589 22/05/1987

Fellini is shooting at Cinecittà a film based on America, the novel by Kafka. Pressed by questions from Japanese journalists, the director recounts his first visit, in 1940, to the Roman studios; he was also a journalist, in his early days, who came to Cinecittà to interview a famous diva. Fellini’s memories (hierarchies in orbace, the blue tranvetto for Cinecittà that crosses the Roman countryside, the imperial elephants, the Indians, etc.) crowd and intertwine with the questions of his frenetic interviewers, who film everything. Here is the young Fellini who finally interviews the diva, and meanwhile his current assistant director is looking for new faces in the subway. Then the police arrive, warned by a phone call of the presence of a bomb; then Marcello Mastroianni enters the scene wearing Mandrake’s tails. And the magic wand of these will make the images of La Dolce Vita appear, between the applause of those present and the tears of Anita Ekberg. The next day America resumed shooting, but a hurricane interrupted the shooting. A band of Indians attacked Cinecittà with TV antennas as spears. The filming of the film ends, and everyone greets each other wishing Merry Christmas.

Crew

Director: Federico Fellini
Subject: Federico Fellini
Screenplay: Federico Fellini
Photography: Tonino Delli Colli (Eastmancolor – Dolby Stereo)
Music: Nicola Piovani with a tribute to Nino Rota
Sound: Dolby Spectar Recording
Stage design: Danilo Donati
Costumes design: Danilo Donati
Editing: Nino Baragli
Assistant director: Daniela Barbiani, Filippo Ascione
Assistant director: Fiammetta Profili
Secretary of edition: Norma Giacchero
Dubbing director: Carlo Baccarini
Sound effects: Luciano Anzelotti, Massimo Anzelotti
Mixage sound engineer: Romano Pampaloni
General organization: Gino Milozza
Production Director: Roberto Mannoni
Producer Esecutiv: Pietro Notarianni
Manufacturer: Ibrahim Moussa
Production inspector: Michele Janczreck
Editing: Lillo Capoano
RAI Production Delegate: Silvio Specchio
Production secretary: Mario Mearelli

Cast

Federico Fellini: himself
Sergio Rubini: the journalist
Paola Liguori: the diva
Maurizio Mein: assistant director
Nadia Ottaviani : the vestal
Lara Wendel: the bride
Antonella Ponziani: the girl
Pietro Notarianni: the fascist hierarch
Anita Ekberg: herself
Marcello Mastroianni: himself
Maria Teresa Battaglia
Antonio Cantafora
Roberta Carlucci
Ettore Geri
Eva Grimaldi
Armando Marra
Leonello Pio Di Savoia
Gemana Dominici
Adriana Facchetti
Mario Miyakawa
Patrizia Sacchi
Antonello Zanini: the “Chiodo” and all the film crew

Awards

1987
Festival de Cannes: Special prize for the 40th anniversary to Federico Fellini for the film and the ensemble of his work
1987
Grand Prix – Gold Trophy at Moscow Festival
1988
César nominated for best film

Peculiarites

“I’ll never tire of thanking Ekberg and especially admiring her. She’s witty, wise, humble. The grace and willingness with which he agreed to reappear in Intervista, in contrast to the glorious image of La dolce vita, moved me. For the occasion, Marcello and I went to visit her in her house in the Castelli Romani, where she lives as a rural deity, serene, quiet, imperturbable, without the course of the years disturbing her in the slightest. We then remembered the experience of La dolce vita. I may have been a little cruel to her, but it was not my intention”.
(Fellini. Telling of me, conversations with Costanzo Costantini, Editori Riuniti, Rome, 1996, p. 199)

Reviews

A second reading of the film confirms our impression of Cannes. Interview is the singular fruit of a conscientious Fellini who, because of the black mood that has long accompanied him (justified by the growth of the years and the resentment towards the TV with which he is forced to live), either for the fringing of the creative breath, traces the many funny and painful ideas of his mythology and jokes about to exorcise the blackmail, identifying with a Cinecittà never so fully evoked as a factory of charlatans and poetry.
(Giovanni Grazzini “Corriere della sera”, 2 October 1987)

It has been said that Interview is Otto e mezzo with Fellini in person instead of Mastroianni, so many less sentimental messes, so much more wisdom. But it is the wisdom of an old clown, now able to “smile at life and all its contents” (to say it with the words of another emulator of Charlot, Zeno Cosini). Federico smiles at the diligence with which the Japanese commit themselves to steal the last truth; he smiles at the edge of the tear on the aging (beautiful exaggerated post) of Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg compared to their charismatic images in La dolce vita, smiles at the incidents that punctuate the making of the film. But underneath, he also smiles at us who take all these fantasies of his for absolute truth. Interview is the page of an apocryphal diary full of real feelings: the feeling of the changing time, the threat of an barbaric future (television equal assault of Indians), the indecipherability of a bleak past (fascism and its cinema) or mythologized (the youth).
(“Tullio Kezich La Repubblica”, 2 October 1987)

Interview is a superb film lesson. It is in all senses: for the masterful use of the expressive means of cinema, but also for what cinema is, as such (in its making, in its planning, as a sediment of memory and also as “death at work”). Cinema in its making because those who do it, as we said, as constantly behind and in front of the camera; cinema in its planning itself, because Fellini thinks and makes the auditions for a hypothetical future film inspired by America by Kafka; cinema as a sediment of memory, since Fellini relives the deliberately fantastic and lying key the first time he went as a journalist to Cinecittà; cinema as “death at work”, because, never as here, precisely in the dazzling, but also heartbreaking, reunion of Fellini and Mastroianni with Ekberg, the “Anitona” of La dolce vita, you experience on a physical level the truth of the old saying, attributed to Cocteau.
(Callisto Cosulich “Evening Country”, 2 October 1987)

To understand and love Interview, and understand its limits as it suits, it is enough to know its productive genesis: born as a television program, it has become a TV-movie and, finally, a film-film for cinemas, as if Fellini had grown in his hands. It’s a little movie, in a way, but what grace and grace and panache. Of course you can say, you’ve seen it before. But it’s also ungenerous to say when you think of the pleasure it gives. It can only be said who has not known, or wanted, to abandon himself to his festive rhythm, to his nature of film that grows on himself as if by parthenogenesis, to the alternation of melancholy and joy, of disarmed sincerity and impudent play of prestidigitation, to the wisely organized disorder, to its harmonious serenity even if slightly sad, that of a filmmaker who no longer needs to demonstrate his talent or to justify his fruitful contradictions.
“Morando Morandini Il Giorno”, 6 October 1987)

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La voce della luna

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La voce della luna

Year: 1990
Format: Colour
Runtime: 118 min
Production: Mario e Vittorio Cecchi Gori, per la C.G. Group Tiger Cinematografica e la Cinemax, con la collaborazione della Rai-Radiotelevisione italiana. Teatri di posa: Stabilimenti Cinematografici Pontini SpA
Word sales: Penta Distribuzione
Viewed censorship: 8539301/02/1990

Hinting at the lunar-obsessed lyrics of Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi, the tale focuses on Micheluzzi Brothers capturing the moon while Ivo – who’s just been dismissed from a mental hospital – tries to seduce Aldina Ferruzzi, the woman he’s in love with. Although she is not interested in him, Ivo equates her blond beauty with that of the moon, and thinks all his mental problems and frustrations are due to this. Meanwhile, the three madmen have caught the moon using gigantic farming equipment, and fastened it inside a stable using a rope. What ought to be a sacred event gives instead rise to a lot of confusion, and priests and politicians turn it into a political rally. The latter rapidly degenerates into violence, as a madman shoots the TV set, which bursts. Now Ivo is alone, and listens to the moon.

Crew

Director: Federico Fellini
Story: liberamente ispirato al romanzo “Il poema dei lunatici” di Ermanno Cavazzoni
Screenplay: Federico Fellini
Screenplay collaboration: Tullio Pinelli, Ermanno Cavazzoni
Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli (Technicolor)
Colour processor: Carlo La Bella
Music: Nicola Piovani
Production design: Dante Ferretti
Costume design: Maurizio Millenotti
Wardrobe assistant: Alfonsina Lettieri, Carlo Poggioli
Film editing: Nino Baragli
First assistant director: Gianni Arduini
Second assistant director: Daniela Barbiani, Marco Polimeni
Camera operator: Marco Spelduti
Assistant camera: Massimo Intoppa, Roberto De Franceschi
Architecht: Massimo Razzi, Nazzareno Piana
Set decorator: Francesco Lo Schiavo
Choreography: Mirella Agujaro
Sound: Tommaso Quattrini
Edition: Lillo Capuano
Executive producer: Bruno Altissimi, Claudio Saraceni
Production manager: Roberto Mannoni
General manager: Pietro Notarianni, Maurizio Pastrovich
Production supervisor: Piero Spadoni, Nicola Mastrolilli

Cast

Roberto Benigni : Ivo Salvini
Paolo Villaggio : il prefetto Gonnella
Nadia Ottaviani : Aldina Ferruzzi
Marisa Tomasi : Marisa la vaporiera
Sim : l’oboista
Syusy Blady : la sorella di Aldina
Angelo Orlando : Nestore
Dario Ghirardi : il giornalista
Dominique Chevalier : il primo fratello Micheluzzi
Nigel Harris : Giuanin il secondo fratello Micheluzzi
Vito : terzo fratello Micheluzzi
Eraldo Turra : l’avvocato
Giordano Falzoni : il professore
Ferruccio Brembilla : il medico
Giovanni Javarone : il becchino
Lorose Keller : la duchessa
Patrizio Roversi : il figlio del prefetto Gonnella
Uta Schmidt : la nonna
Stefano Antonucci

Awards

1991
Silver Ribbon Best Score Also for In nome del popolo sovrano (1994), Il male oscuro (1990) and Il sole anche di notte (1990)
1989-1990
David Best Actor
David Best Production Design
David Best Editing

Peculiarites

“While I was playing with a little bit of earth, just some grains, and I passed them from one hand to the other as if my hands were a funnel, and I uttered a sound: ‘whuu’. I was a quiet child, and I easily enjoyed myself. At a given point, while I was playing, I felt a light wind blowing through my hair. Then I understood- but it’s hard to describe this feeling – I was firmly planted on the ground, and I had the impression my small legs were my roots. Dense and hot blood was being pumped inside my whole body. Blood was coming up to my head, and I heard the same sound (‘whuu’) I had uttered while I was playing. I felt exhilarated, light and powerful (powerful in the lower part, and light in the upper part of my body): I had been turned into a poplar! In La voce della luna I asked Benigni to tell us this story.”
(Federico Fellini, Imago. Appunti di un visionario, conversazione-intervista a cura di Toni Maraini, Semar, Roma, 1994, pp. 29-30)

Reviews

“Despite the calm melancholy of the film’s end and the need for silence (a sentence in which the lunar hero is Fellini’s spokesman), in my opinion La voce della luna is Fellini’s saddest film. This holds true not only because of its death-related themes (echoing Mastorna’s works that Fellini had studied for decades), but also because of madness (reference is made to ‘Le donne libere di Magliano’ by Tobino – a film he did not want to make or didn’t succeed in making), old age, loneliness, dismay. In La voce della luna Fellini also makes some sad comments on the vulgar and terrible period he is living in. The shots of “Gnocchi” (Dumplings’) Day and Miss Flour election are very eloquent. La voce della luna is a fairy tale fighting against background noise”.
(Morando Morandini, “Il Giorno”, 1 February 1990)

“Fellini’s very bitter fairy tale is based on an archetypal ‘village’ that is characterized both by unknown sweet traits and by the decay caused by prevailing consumerist attitudes. In a such a universe, only innocent Saturninus’ creativity can possibly lead to rediscovering man’s kindness, sincere and passionate love, and the ‘happy madmen’’ poetry. Other pure and simple characters are Salvini – who’s madly in love with foolish Aldina – and Gonnella who, after being denied any ‘power’, refuseseverything and everyone. Fellini is a great master and this film – despite all his surreal jokes and paradoxes – is still very tragic”.
(Sauro Borelli, “L’Unità”, 2 February 1990)

“La voce della luna is one of Federico Fellini’s most fascinating and poetic adventures, based on smiles and jokes, and a disillusioned, heartbreaking and worrying vision of the world we live in. Through legends, fairy tales and oddities, Fellini presents his endless universe of symbols, memories, inventions; without ever repeating himself, he hints at all his films. In this last masterpiece, however, Fellini filters every stylistic element, and proposes other original elements, thus unveiling his amazing imagination. We find a a kaleidoscope of characters in a story that is made up of bitter, sweet and merciless traits, humor and melancholy, exuberance and elegance, psychological dreams and a great variety of themes. La voce della luna is a magic, hilarious, surreal and grotesque fairytale. It describes today’s myths and rites (television, fast-food, discos…). It hints at yesterday’s dreams (‘Bassa Padana’ or lower Po river area, the friendly attitude of Emilia-Romagna region’s inhabitants, country fairs, the Gnocchi (dumplings)’ Day, Miss Flour, jokes … ). If you consider Amarcord as the village of memory, than you can say that La voce della luna gives us a shelter in our contemporary world”.
(Vittorio Spiga, “La Nazione”, 1 February 1990)

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Roma

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Roma

Year: 1972
Format: Colour
Runtime: 119 min
Production: Ultra Film (Roma), Les Productions Artistes Associeés (Paris)
Word sales: Italnoleggio
Viewed censorship: 59913 08/03/1972

 

Early in the ‘30s, a young man who’s staying at a boarding school run by priests imagines Rome based on his teachers’ statements and the Fascist regime’s rhetoric. In 1939, when he turns twenty, he goes to Rome and discovers the city’s real nature: people living in a cheap hotels, popular restaurants outdoors, children playing on the streets. Then, in 1972, there are massive traffic jams in the ring-road, and Fellini is shooting a film in a city crowded with tourists. He’s criticized by young people who claim is not interested in politics. This reminds us of a small variety show theatre, where viewers are running away because of an air-raid warning. Then the scene is set at an underground construction site, when works have to be stopped because some archeological remains are found. Then hippies gathering in Piazza di Spagna are shown, followed by the clients of a brothel in the Forties. There is also a clergy fashion show, a party in Trastevere (“festa de noantri”), and a real mess, with policemen clubbing people and bikers riding in the night.

poster – courtesy of © Webphoto & Services

Crew

Director: Federico Fellini
Story: Federico Fellini, Bernardino Zapponi
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Bernardino Zapponi
Cinematography: Giuseppe Maccari (Technicolor)
Assistant camera: Pietro Servo
Assistant camera: Roberto Aristarco, Michele Picciaredda
Music: Nino Rota
Musical director: Carlo Savina
Production design idea: Federico Fellini
Production design: Danilo Donati
Costume design: Danilo Donati
Assistant production designer: Giorgio Giovannini, Ferdinando Giovannoni
Set decorator: Andrea Fantacci
Assistant costume designer: Romano Massara, Rita Giacchero
Film editing: Ruggero Mastroianni
Assistant editor: Adriana Olasio, Leda Bellini
First assistant director: Maurizio Mein
Second assistant director: Paolo Pietrangeli, Tonino Antonucci
Special effects: Adriano Pischiutta
Makeup artist: Rino Carboni
Hair Stylist: Amalia Paoletti
Script supervisor: Norma Giacchero
Mixage : Renato Caduer
Choreography: Gino Landi
Frescoes and portraits: Rinaldo Geleng, Antonello Geleng, Giuliano Geleng
General manager: Danilo Marciani
Production manager: Lamberto Pippia

Production supervisor: Alessandro Gori, Fernando Rossi, Alessandro Sarti

Cast

Marcello Mastroianni : intervistato
Anna Magnani : intervistato
Gore Vidal : intervistato
John Francis Lane : intervistato
Alberto Sordi : intervistato
Peter Gonzales : Fellini a diciott’anni
Fiona Florence : Dolores giovane prostituta
Marne Maitland : guida alla catacombe
Britta Barnes
Pia De Doses : la principessa
Renato Giovannoli
Elisa Mainardi
Paule Riut
Paola Natale
Marcelle Ginette Bron
Mario Del Vago
Alfredo Adami
Stefano Mayore
Gudrun Mardou Khiess
Giovanni Serboli
Angela De Leo
Libero Frissi
Dante Cleri : un padre di famiglia
Mimmo Poli : un avventore
Galliano Sbarra : presentatore avanspettacolo
Alvaro Vitali : si esibisce al teatro Jovinelli
Norma Giacchero : intervistatrice di Mastroianni

Federico Fellini : se stesso

Awards

1972
Festival de Cannes: Award Best Technique
1973
Critic Award SFCC (Le Syndicat Français de la Critique de Cinéma) Best Foreign Film
1973

Nomination BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards) Best Production Design

Peculiarites

“But a mysterious suggestion seemed to neutralize the all show: the camera crew made up of Roman citizens, who never get upset by either miracles or disasters […] The hieratic, unattainable, rich, sumptuous and impressive figure of the Pope became gradually more silent. We were almost hypnotized. It was an evocative power that was stronger that our awareness that we had brought it about, we had conveyed it and prompted it.”

(Federico Fellini, Un regista a Cinecittà, Mondadori, Milan, 1988, pp. 100-105)

“In short, the impression you get of this city is only one: ignorance. Rome is inhabited by ignorant people who don’t want to be disturbed, and I think the Church is responsible for this. (…) An ignorant who loves his family. This man is (…) a grotesque ‘grown-up child’ who is honoured by the Pope continuously spanking him. […] he has no curiosity, and he does not believe that you need to be curious (…) This peculiar atmosphere stems from the fact that the Roman fathers and, the Roman mothers act like nurses, as it were. Romans do not pay their children any simpering compliments. They simply tell them: ‘You have a cute face, it looks like your buttocks”.

(Federico Fellini, Fare un film, Einaudi, Torino, 1980, p. 146)

Reviews

“When we watch this film we should not only look for Rome, but for Fellini himself, and todays’ Fellini […] Fellini’s muses symbolize memory here (a commemoration of war-time Rome), and memories are deformed by imagination (the grande raccordo anulare or ring-road is seen as hell). In these episodes […] Fellini confirms his talent while evoking situations and characters. Here Fellini’s own reality […] replaces reality, becomes reality itself […] The more you understand the Director’s coordinating effort and the more you consider it over-ambitious. Let’s follow the apparent confusion and perceive unity in such a disorder”.
(Sergio Frosali, “La Nazione”, 17 March 1972)
“Shots like those on the ring-road, the brothel, the clergy fashion show make up pure cinema. This style mixes up fictional memories and fake chronicle and becomes poetry. In other moments it is a sort of baroque fury combining kitsch, deformed and hideous elements. Notwithstanding some lack of balance, the films always attains the goals the director had set himself. He does this while alternating Bosch’s nightmares, Goya’s black horror and Grosz’ scratches”.
(Gian Luigi Rondi, “Il Tempo”, 19 March 1972)
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Amarcord

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Amarcord

Year: 1977
Format: Colour
Runtime:  127 min
Production: F.C. Produzioni (Rome), P.E.C.F. (Paris)
Word sales: Dear International

Viewed censorship: 6369915/12/1973

In 1930s Rimini, teenager Titta grows up amid Catholic upbringing and Fascist rhetoric. His father, Aurelio, is an anarchist and antifascist foreman: on his shoulders in addition to his two children, his wife and his elderly, rather sprightly father, also lives his loudmouthed, layabout brother-in-law, Uncle “Pataca.” His brother Teo, on the other hand, is locked up in an asylum. The small town is populated by singular characters, such as Volpina the nymphomaniac, Giudizio the madman, Biscein the boaster, the lawyer with easy rhetoric, the exhibitionist motorcyclist, and the blind man who plays the accordion. Titta attends the city high school, where interrogations alternate with pranks on teachers and classmates. His erotic-sentimental life is divided between the unattainable Gradisca, the tobacconist’s big breasts, and summer dances at the Grand Hotel spied from behind hedges. With the village he shares the passing of the seasons, with fires to celebrate the arrival of spring, and events, the passage of the Mille Miglia and that of the ocean liner Rex, the visit of the fascist hierarch and the snowfall. His mother’s death and Gradisca’s marriage mark the end of his adolescence.

poster – courtesy of © Webphoto & Services

Cast tecnico
Regia: Federico Fellini
Soggetto: Federico Fellini, Tonino Guerra, da un’idea di Federico Fellini
Sceneggiatura: Federico Fellini, Tonino Guerra
Fotografia: Giuseppe Rotunno
Operatore: Giuseppe Maccari
Aiuto operatore: Massimo Di Venanzo, Roberto Aristarco
Musica: Nino Rot
Direttore d’orchestra: Carlo Savina
Ideazione scenografia: Federico Fellini
Scenografia: Danilo Donati
Costumi: Danilo Donati
Architetto: Giorgio Giovannini
Collaboratore alla scenografia: Antonello Geleng, Massimo Geleng
Assistente costumista: Rita Giacchero, Aldo Giuliani
Montaggio: Ruggero Mastroianni
Assistente al montaggio: Adriana Olasio
Suono: Oscar De Arcangelis
Segretario di edizione: Norma Giacchero
Aiuto regia: Maurizio Mein
Assistente alla regia: Liliana Betti, Gerald Morin, Mario Garriba
Trucco: Rino Carboni
Effetti speciali: Adriano Pischiutta
Acconciature: Amalia Paoletti
Arredamento: Andrea Fantacci
Pittore scenografo: Italo Tomassi
Produttore: Franco Cristaldi
Direttore di produzione: Lamberto Pippia
Ispettore di produzione: Alessandro Gori, Gilberto Scarpellini

Cast
Bruno Zanin : Titta
Pupella Maggio : Miranda la madre di Titta
Armando Brancia : Aurelio il padre di Titta
Stefano Proietti : Oliva il fratello di Titta
Giuseppe Lanigro : il nonno di Titta
Nandino Orfei : il “pataca” zio di Titta
Ciccio Ingrassia : Teo lo zio matto
Carla Mora : Gina la cameriera
Magali Noël : la Gradisca
Luigi Rossi : l’avvocato
Maria Antonella Beluzzi : la tabaccaia
Josiane Tanzilli : la “Volpina”
Domenico Pertica : il cieco di Cantarel
Antonino Faà di Bruno : il Conte di Lovignano
Carmela Eusepi : la figlia il Conte di Lovignano
Gennaro Ombra : Biscein
Gianfilippo Carcano : Don Balosa
Francesco Maselli : Bongioanni il professore di scienze
Dina Adorni : signorina De Leonardis la professoressa di matematica
Francesco Vona : Candela
Bruno Lenzi : Gigliozzi
Lino Patruno : Bobo
Armando Villella : Fighetta il professore di greco
Francesco Magno : il preside Zeus
Gianfranco Marrocco : il ragazzo Conte Portavo
Fausto Signoretti : il vetturino Madonna
Donatella Gambini : Aldina Cordini
Fides Stagni : la professoressa di belle arti
Fredo Pistoni : Colonia
Marcello Di Falco : il Principe
Bruno Scagnetti : Ovo
Alvaro Vitali : Naso
Ferdinando De Felice : Cicco

Premi
1974
Oscar per miglior film straniero
Nastro d’argento per miglior regia
Nastro d’argento per miglior soggetto originale
Nomination Oscar per miglior regia
Premio Bodil (Copenaghen) per il miglior film europeo
Premio NYFCC (New York Film Critics Circle) per il miglior film e per la miglior regia
Premio della critica SFCC (Le Syndicat Français de la Critique de Cinéma) per il miglior film straniero
Premio Kinema Jumpo (Tokyo) per la regia del miglior film straniero
1975
Nastro d’argento per miglior sceneggiatura originale
David di Donatello per miglior regia
Nomination Oscar per migliori soggetto e sceneggiatura originali

Curiosità
“Non è la memoria che domina i miei film. Dire che i miei film sono autobiografici è una disinvolta fregnaccia. Io la mia vita me la sono inventata. L’ho inventata apposta per lo schermo. Prima di girare il primo film non ho fatto altro che prepararmi a diventare alto e grosso abbastanza e a caricarmi di tutta l’energia necessaria per arrivare un giorno a dire ‘azione!’. Ho vissuto per scoprire e creare un regista: niente altro. E di niente altro ho memoria, pur passando per uno che vive la sua vita espressiva sui grandi magazzini della memoria. Non è vero niente. Nel senso dell’aneddoto, di autobiografico, nei miei film non c’è nulla. C’è invece la testimonianza di una certa stagione che ho vissuto. In tal senso, allora sì, che i miei film sono autobiografici: ma allo stesso modo in cui ogni libro, ogni verso di poeta, ogni colore messo su tela, è autobiografico”. (Federico Fellini in “Il film “Amarcord” di Federico Fellini, a cura di Gianfranco Angelucci e Liliana Betti, Cappelli, Bologna, 1974, p. 95)

Critiche

“Amarcord è un film da amare senza ulteriori riserve. Fellini approfitta della riconquistata serenità per tendere a un racconto quasi oggettivo. Tornando alle radici provinciali e beffarde della propria formazione, il regista di I vitelloni recupera spregiudicatamente la struttura della barzelletta, si sforza di non commuoversi e di non tirare conclusioni. Tutto il film porta la sigla di un maestro, ma alcune pagine si impongono con maggiore evidenza: un pranzo-litigio in famiglia degno di Eduardo, la gita in campagna con lo zio matto (un sublime Ciccio Ingrassia), il ballo degli studenti davanti al Grand Hotel chiuso per l’inverno, la magica apparizione notturna del transatlantico Rex: un simbolo dei miti di un’epoca stupidina, così pregnante che sarebbe piaciuto a C.G. Jung”. (Tullio Kezich”Il mille film. Dieci anni al cinema 1967-1977″, volume primo, Il Formichiere, Milano, 1977)

“In Amarcord, che in romagnolo vuol dire appunto “Mi ricordo”, Federico Fellini mostra di saper sfuggire al ricatto della nostalgia e di mettere a frutto i fantasmi del passato. Innestando nella sua vena visionaria una consapevolezza sociologica che dai tempi della Dolce vita sembrava smarrita, Fellini ci dà un capo d’opera che è insieme un magico, doloroso itinerario fra gli orti dell’adolescenza e un giudizio lucidissimo, nonostante la lente grottesca, delle vergogne che abbiamo alle spalle, delle radici meschine di cui ancor oggi si nutre la realtà dell’Italia, e la fanno goffo melodramma, tragedia buffa, ribalta di infantilismi. (Giovanni Grazzini, “Gli anni settanta in cento film”)

“Amarcord è il film più semplice, più indifeso e meno aggressivo di Fellini da parecchi anni a questa parte; ed è la ragione per cui ci piace. […] La nuova misura che il regista trova qui ha qualcosa di delicato e di modesto che finisce, tanto più che è inattesa in lui, per catturarci. Lo stregone non ricorre più a incantesimi magniloquenti, quanto a una specie di realismo magico sotterraneo, dove la magia magari ottunde un poco la realtà, però nel contempo ce la restituisce filtrata in risvolti meno appariscenti del solito, ma più sottili e profondi. (Ugo Casiraghi, “L’Unità”, Milano, 19 dicembre 1973)

“Federico Fellini ha evocato con maestria un universo di fantasmi, tirati fuori dalle tasche del tempo senza allegria né ferocia, in un’operazione mentale alla fine elegiaca. I passi più riusciti di Amarcord hanno al centro Gradisca: la sua vicenda erotica ha un tono di qualità espressionistica di alto stile, mentre la finale cerimonia nuziale all’aperto ha qualcosa di derisorio che sottolinea la vanità dei nostri impegni rituali. Alternando il mesto al sardonico, il trionfalismo delle “fogarazze” e della corsa automobilistica all’ospedale e ai funerali, Fellini ha descritto un “epos” provinciale che non traligna mai nella sguaiataggine o nel patetico. Giunto al sommo dell’arte sua, Fellini ha imparato a fermarsi a tempo servendosi di un montaggio severo e implacabile (Morando Morandini, “Il Giorno”, Milano, 19 dicembre 1973)

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Block-notes di un regista

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Block-notes di un regista – Fellini: A Director’s Notebook

Year: 1969
Format: Colour
Runtime: 60 min
Production: N.B.C.
Viewed censorship: non richiesto

It is a fake documentary following Fellini along the remains of Il viaggio di G. Mastorna’s set and then on his inspections to find relics of ancient times and during Satyricon auditions.

Crew

Director: Federico Fellini
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Bernardino Zapponi
Cinematography: Pasquale De Santis
Music: Nino Rota
Film editing: Ruggero Mastroianni
Assistant editor: Adriana Olasio
Producer: Peter Goldfarb
General manager: Lamberto Pippia
Script supervisor: Norma Giacchero
First assistant director: Maurizio Mein, Liliana Betti
Series unit manager: Joseph Nash
Dialogue director: Christopher Cruise
English dialogues: Eugène Walter

Cast

Federico Fellini
Giulietta Masina
Marcello Mastroianni
Caterina Boratto
Marina Boratto
David Maumsell
prof. Genius
Cesarino
Bernardino Zapponi
Lina Alberti

Peculiarites

“Fellini always liked small and unimportant things. That short film had to become a creative piece of evidence of the passage from “Mastorna” to the following “Satyricon”. It was meant as a series of notes, small talk, notes, just a “cacatina” (niece piece of shit), as Federico called it. The screenplay was promptly written. The beginning of the film would show the impressive remains of “Mastorna”’s production design, as if they were coming from a shipwreck. They were, in fact, real Roman remains. A group of stray hippies lived where. We made this up, in oder to emphasize a crazy atmosphere; “Mastorna” was their city, “which was named Dementia”. So I wrote a ‘fake’ poem, attributed to one of those fake tramps (some authors or some Cinémathéques went on periodically asking me for the original text or the name of the author of those verses for years, and I had to tell them it was a ‘fake within a fake’)”.
(Bernardino Zapponi, Il mio Fellini, Marsilio, Venice, 1995, pp. 26-27)

Reviews

“There are indeed some sequences in Fellini’s Notebook that are exceptionally good, as in the wreckage of buildings and spaceship in “Mastorna”, or when seeking faces of the ancient world among strongly-built common people for “Satyricon”, or else during a night visit to the Coliseum, mysteriously rich in vice and loneliness, or the day the director is receiving acquaintances and newly met people in his office, who would like to perform as background actors in his next movie. Here Fellini does not aim at being objective in describing himself, but is rather showing his own fantastic world as if it were objective. Thus we discover […] that the sequence of exasperated surreal visions about sex and loneliness, humor and tenderness, […] it is actually the only way Fellini can look at reality. It is an urgent need to distort reality, distressingly”.
(Lino Miccichè, “Avanti!”, 7 May 1969)

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Toby Dammit

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Toby Dammit

Year: 1968
Format: Colour
Runtime: 37 min
Production: P.E.A. (Roma), Les Films Marceau (Paris), Cocinor (Paris)
Word sales: P.E.A. (Roma)
Viewed censorship: 5205124/07/1968

Toby Dammit, a former Shakespearean actor, and a drug-addict and an alcoholic at present, is in Rome. He’s going to be the main character of the first Catholic western film. After helping a young girl who has lost the ball she was playing with, Dammit starts having visions of the girl and her ball. After being given a Ferrari by the film producer Dammit drives his new car very fast. Some workers try to stop Dammit close to a fallen bridge across a ravine, but he speeds ahead. When his car reaches the other side, Dammit’s head has been cut off by a cable running across the ravine. The young girl appears again, she picks Toby Dammit’s head up, as if it were a ball …

poster – courtesy of © Webphoto & Services

Crew

Director: Federico Fellini
Story: libera riduzione dal racconto “Non scommettere la testa con il diavolo” di Edgard Allan Poe
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Bernardino Zapponi
Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno (Technicolor-Eastmancolor)
Music: Nino Rota
Production design: Pietro Tosi
Costume design: Pietro Tosi
Film editing: Ruggero Mastroianni
Camera operator: Giuseppe Maccari
Special effects: Joseph Natanzon
Songs: “Ruby” di Mitchell Parish (parole) e Heinz Roemheld (musica)
Singers: Ray Charles
Set decorator: Carlo Leva
Second assistant director: Eschilo Tarquini, Francesco Aluigi, Liliana Betti
Assistant editor: Adriana Olasio, Wanda Olasio
Production manager: Tommaso Sagone
General manager: Enzo Provenzale
Producer: Alberto Grimaldi, Raymond Eger

Cast

Terence Stamp : Toby Dammit
Salvo Randone : Padre Spagna
Antonia Pietrosi : l’attrice
Polidor : un vecchio attore
Anne Tonietti : commentatrice televisiva
Fabrizio Angeli : primo regista
Ernesto Colli : il secondo regista
Aleardo Ward : primo intervistatore
Paul Cooper : il secondo intervistatore
Marisa Traversi : partecipanti alla festa
Rick Boyd : partecipanti alla festa
Mimmo Poli : partecipanti alla festa
Marina Yaru : la bambina
Brigitte : la ragazza alta due metri

Reviews

“Toby Dammit’s story is quite weak. It is characterized by memories, nostalgia, Fellini’s beloved mirages, unreal actresses, and a weak Polidor. This film is focused on technique and how to go beyond them. Otto e mezzo’s fogs and Giulietta’s colours are replaced by lights problems. Rotunno solves them all: projectors, light bulbs, car headlights. Techniques, set decoration and lighting prevail. There is a formal showing-off and a technical virtuosity that are sometimes an end in themselves”.
(Mario Verdone, “Bianco e Nero”, a. XXIX, n. 11-12, November-December 1968)

“Fellini views reality through his characters’ eyes: he is alternatively a priest, a Catholic writer, a cruel reporter (when he mocks Totò), a blind comedian with a huge blond and eccentric actress. Fellini-Poe’s Rome welcomes all these elements as if they were surrounded by smoke or taken from a nightmare (…)”.
(Edoardo Bruno, “Filmcritica”, a. XIX, n. 193, December 1968)

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8½

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8½

Year: 1963
Format: Black and white
Runtime: 114 min
Production: Cineriz (Roma) e Francinex (Paris)
Word sales: Francinex (Paris)
Viewed censorship: 3946106/02/1963

Guido Anselmi, a famous Italian film director, is suffering from the “director’s block”. Despite Anselmi declaring that this movie should be an easy one to make, he is having problems with his artistic vision, and in particular he does not want to tell lies on the screen. He’s blocked when shooting his new science fiction film, including some veiled autobiographical references, and he has lost interest amid artistic and marital difficulties. As Guido struggles half-heartedly to work on the film, a series of flashbacks and dreams delve into his memories and fantasies; they are frequently interwoven with reality. He is trying to relax in a spa after scoring success for his last film. He can’t really have peace, however, as the people who have worked with him in the past are constantly asking for more work to do. He wrestles with his conscience, but is unable to come up with a new idea. While thinking, he starts to recall the major events of his life, and all the women he has loved and then abandoned. He’s a lot of stress, both at professional and personal level. As he works through these problems in the spa, and he thinks over his childhood. Both at the spa and/or on a film set he’s surrounded by many real people he’ll portray on screen, including his wife Luisa – he loves her but he does not fully understand their marriage – his mistress Carla, the antithesis of Luisa, and an actress named Claudia who, in his opinion, will be his ultimate salvation.

Crew

Director: Federico Fellini
Story: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano (ideato da Federico Fellini)
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, Brunello Rondi
Cinematography: Gianni Di Venanzo
Camera operator: Pasquale De Santis
Music: Nino Rota
Production design: Piero Gherardi
Costume design: Piero Gherardi
Assistant production designer: Luciano Riccieri, Vito Anzalone, Orietta Nasalli Rocca
Film editing: Leo Catozzo
First assistant director: Guidarino Guidi, Giulio Paradisi, Francesco Aluigi
Artistic advisor: Brunello Rondi
Makeup artist: Otello Fava
Hair Stylist: Renata Magnanti
Still photographer: Tazio Secchiaroli
Script supervisor: Mirella Comacchio
Producer: Federico Fellini, Angelo Rizzoli
Production manager: Nello Meniconi
General manager: Clemente Fracassi, Sandy von Norman
Production supervisor: Mario Basili
Production secretary: Albino Morandin

Cast

Marcello Mastroianni : Guido Ansemi
Anouk Aimée : Luisa la moglie di Guido
Sandra Milo : Carla
Claudia Cardinale : Claudia
Rossella Falk : Rossella
Barbara Steele : Gloria
Guido Alberti : Pace il produttore
Madeleine Lebeau : l’attrice francese
Jean Rougeul : l’intellettuale
Caterina Boratto : la signora delle terme
Annibale Ninchi : il padre di Guido
Giuditta Rissone : la madre di Guido
Edra Gale : la Saraghina
Mario Conocchia : direttore di produzione
Cesare Miceli Picardi : ispettore di produzione
Tito Masini : il cardinale
Mario Pisu : Mezzabotta
Jacqueline Bonbon : Yvonne la soubrette
Jan Dallas : Maurice il telepata
Georgia Simmons : la nonna di Guido
Edy Vessel : Edy indossatrice
Annie Gorassini : l’amica di Pace
Rossella Como : amica di Luisa
Gilda Dahlberg : la moglie del giornalista americano
Olimpia Cavalli : Olimpia
Hazel Rogers : la negretta
Bruno Agostini : segretario di produzione
Elisabetta Catalano : sorella di Luisa
Sebastiano De Leandro : un prete
Frazie Rippy : il segretario laico del cardinale
Roberta Valli : bambina
Eva Gioia : la ragazza dell’ispettore di produzione
Dina De Santis : la ragazza dell’ispettore di produzione
Roby Nicolosi : un medico delle terme
Polidor : un clown

Awards

1963
Academy Awards, Oscar for Best Costume Design, Black-and-White
1963
Silver Ribbon for Best Director
1963
Silver Ribbon for Best Producer
1963
Silver Ribbon for Best Supporting Actress: Sandra Milo
1964
Silver Ribbon for Best Original Story
1964
Silver Ribbon for Best Screenplay
Silver Ribbon for Best Cinematography, B/W
Silver Ribbon for Best Music
Moscow International Film Festival Grand Prix, Nomination Oscar for Best Director
Moscow International Film Festival Grand Prix, Nomination Oscar for Best Original Stoory and Screenplay
Bodil Award (Copenaghen), Best European Film
Nomination Guild of America (Los Angeles), Career Oscar

Peculiarites

“I was shooting Marcello’s profile but he has a double chin. Hence I put a plaster on this face and his double chin was all moved to one side of his face. He was very good to bear acting this long scene, namely the one with his father at the cemetery. […] He was very patient with me and my crew. Make-up artists had prepared bags full of sand to alter his eyelids. I had told him he had to lose ten kilos. Then the hair stylist put white streaks in his air. Then, we had to change his hands: we made little hoods he had to wear to lengthen his fingers, but after a couple of shots the little hoods were blown away as if they were pencils. ”
(Rita Cirio, Il mestiere di regista, Garzanti, Milan, 1994, p. 36)

Reviews

“Fellini’s character Fellini is erotomaniac, sadist, a masochist, mythomaniac, afraid of leading his life, nostalgic of his mother’s breasts, as well as a trickster and a cheater. A few of his traits remind us of Leopold Bloom, James Joyce’s Ulysses hero, and Fellini has read and analyzed Joyce’s works. The film is a monologue alternating some real events. Fellini describes a neurotic approach to impotence very clearly. […] Fellini’s dreams are always surprising and original. It is for this very reason the two childhood episodes set in the countryside of Romagna and the one showing his first meeting with a woman on the beach of Rimini, as an adolescent, are the best of the film and fall within the best episodes in Fellini’s works”.
(Alberto Moravia, “L’Espresso”, 17 February 1963)

“This film is a milestone in the history of the fictional film. La dolce vita – with its block-based structure – indicated a significant path both in film-making and literature. Otto e mezzo, however, moves forward towards experimentalism. In this film Fellini looks ahead, imagines the future, and analyzes the problems experienced in living, writing, and relating to the outside world”.
(Alberto Arbasino, “Il Giorno”, 6 March 1963)

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Le notti di Cabiria

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Le Notti di Cabiria

Year: 1957
Format: Black and white
Runtime: 110 min
Production: Dino De Laurentiis (Roma), Les Films Marceau (Paris)
Word sales: Paramount
Viewed censorship: 2374215/03/1957

Cabiria, an innocent and unhappy prostitute, risks being killed by a friend who wants to rob her. She is picked up by a popular movie star, Alberto Lazzati, and brought to his estate. However, his mistress shows up and Cabiria gets locked in the bathroom all night with the dog. She then joins her fellow prostitutes to attend a service; she prays and hopes a miracle will take place. She meets Oscar, an accountant, who promises her a happy future. At first she is cautious and suspicious, but after several meetings she falls passionately in love with him and they get married only a few weeks later. During their honeymoon, Oscar becomes very nervous and violent and wants to kill her and steal her money. She throws her purse at his feet, sobbing, while he abandons her. Hours later, she picks herself up and stumbles out of the wood in tears. In the film’s famous last shot Cabiria walks along the long road leading to town where she meets a group of young people riding scooters, playing music, and dancing. They happily form a parade around her until she begins to smile through her tears.

poster – courtesy of © Webphoto & Services

Crew

Director: Federico Fellini
Story: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli (da un’idea di Federico Fellini)
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli
Collaborazione ai dialoghi: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Artistic adviser: Brunello Rondi
Cinematography: Aldo Tonti
Music: Nino Rota
Musical director: Franco Ferrara
Production design: Piero Gherardi
Costume design: Piero Gherardi
Film editing: Leo Catozzo
Assistant editor: Adriana Olasio
Sound: Roy Mangano
First assistant director: Moraldo Rossi, Dominique Delouche
Production secretary: Narciso Vicario
Makeup artist: Eligio Trani
Production manager: Luigi De Laurentiis

Cast

Giulietta Masina : Cabiria
Amedeo Nazzari : Alberto Lazzari
François Périer : Oscar D’Onofrio
Franca Marzi : Wanda
Ennio Girolami : un “magnaccia”
Dorian Gray : Jessy
Aldo Silvani : l’illusionista
Mario Passante : lo zoppo
Pina Gualandi : Matilda
Polidor : il frate
Christian Tassou : Luccicotto
Maria Luisa Rolando : amica di Cabiria
Amedeo Girard : Davide, il maggiordomo di Lazzari
Loretta Capitoli : una prostituta
Franco Balducci : ipnotizzato dall’illusionista
Ciccio Barbi : ipnotizzato dall’illusionista
Nino Milano : ipnotizzato dall’illusionista
Leo Catozzo : l’uomo col sacco

Awards

1957
Oscar Best Foreign Film
1957
Silver Ribbon for Best Director
1956-1957
Silver Ribbon for Best Production
1957
Silver Ribbon for Best Supporting Actress
1957
Donatello David Award for Best Director
Donatello David Award for Best Production
Festival de Cannes: Best Supporting Actress
Special OCIC Award

Peculiarites

“Censorship authorities had banned the movie but I didn’t want negatives to be burnt. Thus, based on the advice of a clever friend of mine, an open-minded Jesuit, father Arpa, I went to Genoa to meet a famous Cardinal, who was likely to be elected Pope, to ask him to watch the film. A throne-like chair, with a large red pillow and golden fringes had been put in the middle of the room. The cardinal arrived at 12.30 a.m. on his black Mercedes. I was allowed to remain in the hall and I didn’t know whether the cardinal had really watched the whole movie or had slept throughout it. Probably father Arpa woke the Cardinal up exactly when processions or sacred images were shown. At the end he said: ‘ Poor Cabiria, we must do something for you!’ I think he just had to make a phone call. Someone publicly accused me of being a sort of Richelieu, who didn’t fight openly, but rather conspired behind the scenes. Luckily enough at that time it was possible to waste time in this type of debates. Anyway, the film was saved, upon a condition: the shot of the man with the bag had to be removed, as the Cardinal had required. […] The episode was inspired by an extraordinary character with whom I spent two or three nights in Rome: a kind philanthropist, a magician, who later had a vision dedicated to a particular mission: giving poor people all the food and clothing he had on his bag. This happened every day. I saw fairy things when I was with him. For example, when we opened a manhole and expected to find only mice and mud, we found a little old lady who was asleep. In the corridors of a sumptuous palace in Via del Corso – where the Socialist Party’s headquarters are now located – there were tramps who slept until five o’clock in the morning, as the night warden had let them in. The man’s knew all these people, he gave one of them an injection, and another one some food. In the movie I imagined Cabiria when she met him on the Appia Antica road, while she was going home at dawn, and was angry as a customer had not paid her. She saw the man holding the bag leaving a car and heading for tufa quarries. He then stopped on the edge of a chasm and called a woman. A nasty old whore called ‘the Atomic Bomb’ came out of nowhere; she was living miserably then. Then Cabiria agreed to go back home with the man by car and was very impressed by his stories. It was a very touching little shot, but I was forced to take it out, maybe because it upset some Catholic circles. Isn’t it ridiculous that when Cabiria was screened, the Mayor of Rome protested because I had put the whores on a site – Passeggiata Archeologica (archeological promenade) – that he had tried to upgrade?”
(Federico Fellini, Intervista sul cinema, a cura di Giovanni Grazzini, Laterza, Roma-Bari, 1983, pp. 102-103)

Reviews

“In Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria) Fellini shows his balance, his powerful vision of characters and how he masters all film-making technical aspects. This is Fellini’s most mature film. You can rarely find some disputable moments in the film”.
(Lino Del Fra, “Bianco e Nero”, a. XVIII, n. 6, June 1957)

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La strada

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La strada

Year: 1954
Format: Black and white
Runtime: 94 min
Production: Dino De Laurentiis, Carlo Ponti
Word sales: Paramount
Viewed censorship: 1731118/09/1954

Zampanò, a violent-tempered man, makes his living as an itinerant fire-swallower. He buys Gelsomina, a naïve young woman for 10,000 lire, and she becomes his assistant. She’s forced to become his lover, but she tries to run away, as she is constantly abused by him. She meets il Matto (‘The Fool’) in a circus; he is a talented artist and a clown, and he teases and humiliates Zampanò whenever he can. During a quarrel, Zampanò accidentally kills Il Matto. Following the murder, Gelsomina is driven crazy. Zampanò abandons her while she is taking a nap. Some years later, he overhears a woman singing a tune Gelsomina often played and he learns that Gelsomina died. Zampanò gets drunk and wanders to the beach, where he becomes fully aware of being lonely. He breaks down and cries on the deserted beach.

poster – courtesy of © Webphoto & Services

Crew

Director: Federico Fellini
Story: Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli
Screenplay collaboration: Ennio Flaiano
Dialogue writer: Ennio Flaiano
Cinematography: Otello Martelli
Camera operator: Roberto Girardi
Music: Nino Rota
Musical director: Franco Ferrara
Production design: Mario Ravasco
Costume design: Margherita Marinari Bomarzi
Film editing: Leo Catozzo
Assistant editor: Lina Caterini
Sound: Aldo Calpini
First assistant director: Moraldo Rossi
Artistic advisor: Brunello Rondi
Second assistant director: Paolo Nuzzi
Makeup artist: Eligio Trani
Script supervisor: Narciso Vicari
Still photographer: A. Piatti
Production manager: Luigi Giacosi
General manager: Danilo Fallani, Giorgio Morra, Angelo Cittadini

Cast

Giulietta Masina : Gelsomina Di Costanzo
Anthony Quinn : Zampanò
Richard Baserhart : il matto
Aldo Silvani : Il Sig. Giraffa
Marcella Rovere : la vedova
Livia Venturini : la suora
Mario Passante : l’oste
Yami Kamedeva : la prostituta
Anna Primula : la mamma di Gelsomina

Awards

1954
Oscar Best Foreign Film
1954-1955
Silver Ribbon for Best Director
1956
Silver Ribbon for Best Producer
1956
Silver Lion at Venice Film Festival
1956
Nomination Oscar Best Writing, Best Screenplay-Original
Bodil Best European Film (Bedste Europæiske film Copenaghen)

Peculiarites

“I think I made the film because I fell in love with that ‘old child’, Gelsomina, a clown who’s a fool and a saint at the same time. When I hear the sound of her trumpet I still feel very sad”
(Federico Fellini, Fare un film, Einaudi, Torino, 1980, p. 60)

Reviews

“La strada begins as a sort of nostalgic farce (with the soundtrack by Nino Rota, who was inspired by the first movement of Il Titano’s symphony by Mahler), and turns into a Shakespearian tragedy. Gelsomina, interpreted by Fellini’s wife, reminds us of Harpo Marx. She is part of the ‘white clown’ family Fellini loved, while Zampanò is a cruel Augusto, and il Matto a philosopher. The latter explains his own view of morality to the fairy tale viewers: ‘Everything has a meaning in the universe, even a pebble has one’. Fellini directed more important films, but he never found the purity of this childish dream again”.
(Claude Beylie,“ I capolavori del cinema”, Garzanti, Milan, 1990)

“Zampanò is one of the most powerful, solid and dramatic characters of contemporary cinema. The style of the film is one of the purest and clearest ones in Neorealism (it suffices to think of Gelsomina’s trip to the big country house , where she finds the sick child. Said scenes are very intense). I don’t think it is fair to state that Fellini’s film is an escape from reality. We could instead discuss Fellini’s nature. I think he is inclined to be an exceptional ‘innocent’ creature, in a Dostojewskian sense”.
(Vittorio Bonicelli, “Il Tempo”, 7 October 1954)

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La dolce vita

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La dolce vita

Year: 1960
Format: Black and white
Runtime: 178 min
Production: Riama Film (Roma), Pathé Consortium Cinéma (Paris)
Word sales: Cineriz
Viewed censorship: 3107021/01/1960

Marcello is a gossip columnist, and is searching for a way to become a serious writer. He’s fully involved in Rome’s ‘dolce vita’. He’s flirting with an aristocrat who’s always looking for new emotions. He has a partner, Emma, and feels oppressed by her jealousy; she attempts to commit suicide. He woes Sylvia – a very popular and explosive movie star – to no avail. Sylvia bathes in the Trevi Fountain and is very sexy. Two children invent a fake vision of the Virgin Mary and he meets a sophisticated intellectual, Mr. Steiner. Marcello admires his family and his apparently ideal life style. Mr. Steiner, however, kills his own children and then commits suicide. Marcello’s old father comes to see him and gets ill, Emma abandons him, and other events follow one another. After another orgy occurring during the night, at dawn the tired and dazed participants find the carcass of a sea monster stranded on the beach.

poster – courtesy of © Webphoto & Services

Crew

Director: Federico Fellini
Story: Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano (da un’idea di Federico Fellini)
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli
Screenplay collaboration: Brunello Rondi
Cinematography: Otello Martelli (Totalscope)
Camera operator: Arturo Zavattini
Assistant camera: Ennio Guarnieri
Music: Nino Rota
Musical director: Franco Ferrara
Singers: I “Campanino” e Adriano Celentano
Production design: Piero Gherardi
Costume design: Piero Gherardi
Assistant production designer: Giorgio Giovannini, Lucia Mirisola, Vito Anzalone
Makeup artist: Otello Fava
Film editing: Leo Catozzo
Assistant editor: Adriana Olasio, Wanda Olasio
First assistant director: Guidarino Guidi, Paolo Nuzzi, Dominique Delouche
Second assistant director: Giancarlo Romani, Gianfranco Mingozzi, Lilli Veenman
Artistic advisor: Brunello Rondi
Sound: Agostino Moretti
Hair Stylist: Renata Magnanti
Producer: Giuseppe Amato, Angelo Rizzoli
General manager: Clemente Fracassi
Executive producer: Franco Magli
Script supervisor: Isa Mari
Production manager: Manlio M. Moretti, Nello Meniconi
Production supervisor: Alessandro von Normann
Production secretary: Mario Basile, Mario De Biase, Osvaldo De Micheli

Cast

Marcello Mastroianni : Marcello Rubini
Walter Santesso : paparazzo
Giulio Paradisi : 2° fotografo
Enzo Cerusico : 3° fotografo
Enzo Doria : 4° fotografo
Anouk Aimée : Maddalena
Cesare Miceli Picardi : signore irritato nel dancing
Donatella Esparmer : signora con signore irritato
Maria Pia Serafini : 2° signora con signore irritato
Adriana Moneta : prostituta
Anna Maria Salerno : 2° prostituta
Oscar Ghiglia : 1° sfruttatore
Gino Marturano : 2° sfruttatore
Yvonne Fourneaux : Emma
Thomas Torres : giornalista ospedale
Carlo Mariotti : infermiere
Leonardo Botta : medico
Anita Ekberg : Sylvia
Carlo Di Maggio : Totò Scalise produttore
Francesco Luzi : il radiocronista
Francesco Consalvo : assistente di Scalise
Guglielmo Leoncini : il segretario di Scalise
Sandy von Norman : interprete conferenza stampa
Lex Barker : Robert
Tiziano Cortini : operatore cinegiornale
Maurizio Guelfi : giornalista conferenza stampa
Adriano Celentano : cantante rock’n’roll
Gondrano Trucchi : cameriere Caracallas
Giò Staiano : giovane effeminato
Archie Savage : ballerino negro
Alan Dijon : Frankie Stout
Paolo Labia : cameriere casa Maddalena
Giacomo Gabrielli : il padre di Maddalena
Alain Cuny : Steiner
Valeria Ciangottini : Paola
Alfredo Rizzo : regista TV
Alex Messoyedoff : il prete del miracolo
Rina Franchetti : la madre dei miracolati bugiardi
Aurelio Nardi : lo zio dei miracolati bugiardi
Marianna Leibl : madre che chiede il miracolo
Giovanna : bambino miracolato
Massimo : bambino miracolato
Reneé Longarini : la signora Steiner
Iris Tree : invitata casa Steiner
Leonida Rapaci : invitato casa Steiner
Anna Salvatore : invitata casa Steiner
Letizia Spadini : invitata casa Steiner
Margherita Russo : invitata casa Steiner
Winie Vagliani : invitata casa Steiner
Desmond O’Grady : invitato casa Steiner
Nello Meniconi : litigante via Veneto
Massimo Busetti : pettegolo via Veneto
Annibale Ninchi : il padre di Marcello
Vittorio Manfrino : direttore tabarin
Polidor : clown tabarin
Magali Noël : Fanny
Lilly Granado : Lucy
Gloria Jones : Gloria
Nico Otzak : ragazza sofisticata via Veneto
Principe Vadim Wolkonsky : Principe Mascalchi
Giulio Questi : Don Giulio Mascalchi
Ida Galli : la debuttante dell’anno
Mario De Grenet : il ragazzo stanco con i cani
Franco Rossellini : il bel cavallerizzo
Maria Marigliano : Massimilla
Loretta Ramaciotti : l’invasata alla seduta
Giuseppe Addobbati : dottore
Paolo Fadda : vice commissario
Vando Tres : commissario di zona
Franco Giacobini : giornalista che telefona
Giuliana Lojodice : cameriera casa Steiner
Federika André : inquilina casa Steiner
Giancarlo Romani : carabiniere
Nadia Gray : Nadia
Mino Doro : amante di Nadia
Antonio Jaconi : “travesti”
Carlo Musto : “2° travesti”
Tito Buzzo : il bruto muscoloso
Sandra Lee : la ballerina di Spoleto
Jacques Sernas : il divo
Leontine von Strein : l’amante divo
Leo Coleman : il ballerino negro
Laura Betti : l’attrice-cantante bionda, Laura
Daniela Calvino : Daniela
Christine Denise : la signora che mangia il pollo
Riccardo Garrone : Riccardo il padrone di casa
Decimo Cristiani : spettatore dello spogliarello
Umberto Orsini : spettatore dello spogliarello di Nadia
Sandra Tesi : spettatrice dello spogliarello di Nadia
Renato Mambor : ballerino
Mario Conocchia : spettatore dello spogliarello di Nadia
Enrico Glori : ammiratore di Nadia
Lucia Vasilicò : ragazza che si confessa
Franca Pasutt : ragazza coperta di piume

Awards

1960
Nastro d’argento per miglior attore
1960
Nastro d’argento per miglior soggetto originale
1960
Nastro d’argento per miglior scenografia
1960
David di Donatello per miglior regia
1961
Festival de Cannes: Palma d’oro per miglior film
Nomination Oscar per miglior regia
Nomination Oscar per miglior soggetto e sceneggiatura originali
Nomination BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards) per il miglior film

Peculiarites

“I had decided that Nadia’s character would wear white bra and panties under her dark dress. I thought that contrast would be sensational and very sexy, but Nancy Gray, the actress, refused. She said no fashion-oriented woman would have ever worn white bra and panties under a dark dress, as you would catch a glimpse of them beneath the dress. Plus, she wouldn’t feel at ease taking a dark dress off and showing white underwear. She told me she couldn’t do it, as this absolutely didn’t suit her character. She was so convincing I believed her, and we accepted black bra and panties”.
(Charlotte Chandler, Io, Federico Fellini, Mondadori, Milano, 1995, pp. 160-161)

Reviews

“Cruel analyses, shared feelings and vision are encompassed and mixed up in this terrible and fascinating polyptych on a modern Babylon. […] The fact that he voices his opinions and condemnations while being deeply sympathetic with his characters – including the shabbiest – and puts himself in their shoes thus discovering their underlying reasons, is an evidence of this film’s high level of vitality, force and mercy”.
(Morando Morandini, “Schermi”, a. III, n. 20, gennaio-febbraio 1960)

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Il bidone

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Il bidone

Year: 1955
Format: Black and white
Runtime: 104 min
Production: Titanus (Roma), S.G.C. (Paris)
Word sales: Titanus
Viewed censorship: 1985804/10/1955

Roberto, Picasso and August are ‘professional swindlers’. They dress up as priests and cheat peasantsì, then they pretend to be government officers and swindle people living in emergency housing while promising them they’ll be assigned a house, and sell old coats to un-experienced filling station attendants telling them they are new . The three friends attend a New Year’s Eve party together, when Iris, Picasso’s wife, finds out what kind of business her husband is actually in. Augusto’s daughter is not aware of her father’s job either. One day, when she is at the cinema with her father, she finds out the truth, because one of Augusto’s victims recognizes and attacks him. Augusto is arrested in front of his daughter. As soon as he gets out of prison he joins the gang and dresses up as a cardinal to cheat people again, but this time the victim‘s daughter is paralytic and the money they received would have been used to support her. Augusto feels remorse and intends to give the money back. Later he changes his mind and tries to cheat the other swindlers, there is a fight and Augusto tries to escape; he falls into a gully and breaks his spine. The other members of the gang don’t help him, they take the money and run away. Augusto dies after much suffering.

Crew

Director: Federico Fellini
Story: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli (da un’idea di Federico Fellini)
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli
Cinematography: Otello Martelli
Camera operator: Roberto Gerardi
Assistant camera: Arturo Zavattini
Music: Nino Rota
Musical director: Franco Ferrara
Production design: Dario Cecchi
Costume design: Dario Cecchi
Film editing: Mario Serandrei, Giuseppe Vari
Sound: Giovanni Rossi
First assistant director: Moraldo Rossi, Narciso Vicario
Second assistant director: Dominique Delouche, Paolo Nuzzi
Artistic advisor: Brunello Rondi
Makeup artist: Eligio Trani
Hair stylist: Fiamma Rocchetti
Set decorator: Massimiliano Capriccioli
Still photographer: G. B. Poletto
Script supervisor: Nada Delle Piane
Production manager: Giuseppe Colizzi
Production supervisor: Antonio Negri
Production secretary: Manolo Bolognini
Segretario amministrativo: Ezio Rodi

Cast

Broderick Crawford : Augusto
Richard Baserhart : Picasso
Franco Fabrizi : Roberto
Giulietta Masina : Iris, la moglie di Picasso
Giacomo Gabrielli : Baron “Vargas”
Alberto De Amicis : Rinaldo
Sue Ellen Blake : Susanna
Lorella De Luca : Patrizia, la figlia di Augusto
Mara Werlen : Maggie, la danseuse
Mario Passante : un truffatore
Irene Cefaro : Marisa
Xenia Walderi : Luciana, la compagna di Rinaldo
Maria Zanoli : Stella Fiorina, contadina truffata
Sara Simoni : seconda contadina truffata
Cristina Pall : la proprietaria del portasigarette d’oro
Tiziano Cortini : il biondo del cinema
Riccardo Garrone : Riccardo, un bidonista
Paul Grenter : bidonista
Ada Colangeli : signora Bove, bidonata case popolari
Amedeo Trilli : Luigi Fiorelli, bidonato case popolari
Ettore Bevilacqua : bidonato case popolari
Alberto Plebani : l’uomo del bidone dell’orologio

Reviews

“Basically, let’s be clear, what amazes us in Fellini’s work is his ability to encompass the Heaven and the Earth in a single glance. I think of his Platonism, that is un-capable of forgetting his loved ones, his memories, the battles fought together, the unjustified suffering of simple good-willed individuals. Even in Il Bidone, Fellini’s main characters are strong and powerful: the three swindlers and the other characters’s lives are intense. It is equally true that the apparently humble people who have been cheated do suffer (“Picasso”’s wife, Augustus’ daughter, the young paralytic) are clearly relevant, even though they are appear on stage for a limited period of time”.
(Pietro Bianchi, “Maestri del cinema”, Garzanti, Milan, 1972)

“Once again, in case we intend to find Fellini’s stylistic and spiritual bond with a previous artist, we should name Kafka. The old swindler’s path follows Kafka’s route of trial and conviction in a cruel and objective world, among tired and indifferent men. We shouldn’t be surprised if Il bidone bothers dogmatists and cannot be defined by them”.
(Tullio Kezich, “Sipario”, a. X, n. 115, November 1955)

“Il Bidone starts badly and ends solemnly. If screened at a film festival, this explosive mixture can upset viewers who enter a cinema and willing to leave the it as soon as possible. I was not in a hurry instead, and I would have watched Broderick Crawford die for hours”.
(François Truffaut, “Cahiers du Cinéma”, n. 51, October 1955)

Boccaccio ’70

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Boccaccio ’70

Year: 1962
Format: Colour
Runtime: 60 min
Production: Concordia Compagnia Cinematografica e Cineriz (Roma), Francinex e Gray Films (Paris)
Word sales: Cineriz
Viewed censorship: 4645206/02/1962

The other film episodes are: Renzo e Luciana by Mario Monicelli, Il lavoro by Luchino Visconti and La riffa by Vittorio De Sica.
Doctor Antonio, an unbending moralist, waged a personal war against spreading immorality. He improvised sermons in front of a boy-scout audience, he bothered couples looking for intimacy, he even tore off covers from magazines displayed at newspaper kiosks. He got really angry when a provocative billboard showing a smiling buxom woman, advertising ‘Drink more milk’, was hung just below his windows. He made an unsuccessful effort at having the billboard removed. He then decided to throw ink bottles onto the billboard to stain it. The billboard was then censored by local authorities but heavy rains uncovered the tempting woman’s body once again. This image started haunting him in his dreams until he was found having hallucinations on the billboard he had climbed. While Doctor Antonio was being driven to hospital by ambulance Cupid was smiling at him scornfully.

Crew

Director: Federico Fellini
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, con la collaborazione di Ennio Flaiano
Cinematography: Otello Martelli (Technicolor)
Camera operator: Arturo Zavattini
Music: Nino Rota
Production design: Piero Zuffi
Film editing: Leo Catozzo
Producer: Carlo Ponti

Cast

Peppino De Filippo : dott. Antonio Mazzuolo
Anita Ekberg : la donna del cartellone
Antonio Acqua : il commissario
Eleonora Nagy : Cupido
Dante Maggio : capo operaio
Donatella Della Nora : sorella del dott. Antonio
Giacomo Furia : operaio
Alfredo Rizzo : capo cantiere
Alberto Sorrentino : l’operaio attacchino
Monique Berger : la signora del bar
Polidor : operaio
Gesa Meiken : la signora questuante in chiesa
Mario Passante : il sacrestano
Achille Maieroni : l’autista di mosignore
Silvio Bagolini : un segretario di monsignore
Enrico Ribulsi : il moralista con gli occhiali scuri
Ciccio Barbi : l’ingegnere nell’auto
Giulio Paradisi : il ragazzo nell’auto
Giuliano Gemma : Ercole

Peculiarites

“For several weeks during the summer of 1961, Federico went on playing with Anita in the perfect reproduction of the EUR building prepared by production designer Piero Zuffi. The Corriere dei Piccoli–like story became a Swiftian satire, an allegoric moral tale challenging the Philistines. Peppino’s character is obsessed with Anita’s explosive image. However, Anitona (Anita’s nickname) is tense. She’s no longer the happy-go-lucky Viking of La Dolce Vita. She’s an international movie star now, and she is well aware of this. Her new concerns have changed her personality: she is more difficult to deal with. Fellini would no longer have been able to ask her either to dance barefoot in Caracalla throughout the night or to get fully dressed into the Trevi Fountain. Actually, of all the people inhabiting the miniature EUR building, Anita is apparently the one having the least fun. Some people said she was upset because she didn’t know that her part was supposed to be only a picture on a living billboard, and she wanted a real role to play. Anitona spends most of her time in her trailer watching TV, but when she’s on the set and Fellini shows her how to walk along the miniature houses and streetlights, she embodies the eternal feminine again, as she did in La Dolce Vita”.
(Tullio Kezich, Fellini, Milan, Camunia, 1987, pp. 309-310)

Reviews

“With “Le tentazioni del Dottor Antonio”, Fellini took a break. Being a good Catholic, he wanted to entertain his audience, and he succeeded. He touched upon one of the most grotesque aspects of some moralizing campaigns. In the film, he was able of directing Peppino De Filippo extremely well, as he made a great performance. He then gave Anita Ekberg the chance of showing how good she was, and then choose a great group of character actors who acted with said two great actors”.
(Giovanni Grazzini, “Corriere della Sera”, 24 February 1962)

Amore in città (episodio “Agenzia matrimoniale”)

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Amore in città (episodio “Agenzia matrimoniale”)

Year: 1953
Format: Black and white
Runtime: 16 min
Production: Faro Film
Word sales: D.C.N.
Viewed censorship: 15341 13/11/1953

The other film episodes are: L’amore che si paga by Carlo Lizzani, Paradiso per quattro ore by Dino Risi, Tentato Suicidio by Michelangelo Antonioni, Storia di Caterina by Francesco Maselli and Cesare Zavattini, Gli italiani si voltano by Alberto Lattuada.
A young journalist is carrying out a survey on marriage agencies. Being sceptical, he pretends to be a customer who is searching for a wife for a rich friend of him. Although he says that his friend suffers from epilepsy, lives in the countryside and he turns into a werewolf during full moon nights, he manages to find a girl willing to marry his friend. She is a sweet and naive girl, who undermines the protagonist’s cynic approach.

Crew

Director: Federico Fellini
Story: Federico Fellini
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli
Cinematography: Gianni Di Venanzo
Music: Mario Nascimbene

Cast

Antonio Cifariello : Giornalista
Livia Venturini : Rossana
Ilario Maraschini : proprietario dell’agenzia
Angela Pierro : direttrice dell’agenzia

Peculiarites

“While Maselli and Zavattini made an attempt at describing a real fact, and other film-makers shot a documentary film, Fellini chose the ‘true-fake’ story. Fellini has never shared Zavattini’s theories on true cinema, as he is convinced everything must be invented. Some people said that Fellini had made a survey at Omega Marriage Agency, and had been assigned the acronym “C. L. 35”. According to others, he had told Zavattini a lie just to make him happy, or to mock the strong advocate of Neorealism. It is most likely that nothing in the Agenzia matrimoniale episode – written with Pinelli – was ‘taken from life’, as Zavattini said. The protagonists are in fact two young professional actors. Antonio Ciffariello (who lends his name and surname to the character of the journalist in an imaginary game of truth) has already performed in some movies and he has started a promising career as an actor. He’d become a popular faces of ‘pink Neorealism’ (…). The role of the girl, Rossana, is played by Livia Venturini, actress and dubber, who’d also perform in La strada (as a nun) and other movies”.

(Tullio Kezich, Fellini, Milan, Camunia, 1987, pp. 210-211)

Reviews

Of the two ‘tales’ directed by Federico Fellini, Agenzia matrimoniale is the happiest one. It is brisk and witty in the beginning, and then gradually becomes more pathetic, as in description of the clumsy country girl who’s willing to marry a werewolf as she really wants to ‘get married’. This tales summarizes the bitterness and miseries underlying a ‘marriage agency’’ sign. The director actually reaches the goals he had set himself thanks his tact and his attentive observations of the story background and the relevant psychological traits. The outcome is better here than George Cukor‘s Mariti su misura.
(Giulio Cesare Castello “Cinema” [nuova serie], a. VI, n. 123, 15 December 1953)

I Vitelloni

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I Vitelloni

Year: 1953
Format: Black and white
Runtime: 103 min
Production: Peg Film (Roma) / Cité Film (Paris)
Word sales: ENIC
Viewed censorship: 1500517/09/1953

Set in the director’s hometown of Rimini, I Vitelloni follows the lives of five young vitelloni, or layabouts, who while away their listless days in their small seaside village. Fausto, the leader of the pack, marries his sweetheart, but finds himself constantly distracted by other women. Meanwhile, would-be playwright Leopoldo goes on working on his dreary plays, dreaming of staging them one day. Clownish Alberto still lives at home with his mother and sister, Olga, while boasting of preserving the family honor by watching over her. Stuck in adolescence, the five friends stumble into various misadventures, as they seek to spice up their uneventful provincial lives. Ultimately, one of them breaks free from their self-imposed paralysis and moves on.

poster – courtesy of © Webphoto & Services

Crew

Director: Federico Fellini
Story: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, da un’idea di Tullio Pinelli
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano
Cinematography: Otello Martelli, Luciano Trasatti, Carlo Carlini
Camera operator: Roberto Girardi, Franco Villa
Music: Nino Rota
Musical director: Franco Ferrara
Production design: Mario Chiari
Costume design: Margherita Marinari Bomarzi
Film editing: Rolando Benedetti
Production manager: Luigi Giacosi
Production supervisor: Danilo Fallani
Production secretary: Ugo Benvenuti

Cast

Franco Interlenghi : Moraldo
Alberto Sordi : Alberto
Franco Fabrizi : Fausto
Leopoldo Trieste : Leopoldo
Riccardo Fellini : Riccardo
Eleonora Ruffo : Sandra
Jean Brochard : il padre di Fausto
Claude Farell : la sorella di Alberto
Carlo Romano : Michele l’antiquario
Lida Baarova : Giulia la moglie di Michele
Enrico Viarisio : il padre di Morando e Sandra
Paola Borboni : la madre di Morando e Sandra
Arlette Sauvage : la sconosciuta nel cinema
Vira Silenti : la “cinesina”
Maja Nipora : la soubrette
Achille Majeroni : il capocomico
Silvio Bagolini : l’idiota
Giovanna Galli : ballerina
Franca Gandolfi : ballerina

Awards

1953-1954
Silver Ribbon Best Director
1953
Best Supporter Actor
1957
Silver Lion Mostra di Venezia
Nomination Oscar Best Original Story and Screenplay

Peculiarites

“Nobody wanted to distribute I Vitelloni, so we went around proposing rentals, and I remember some awful screenings where viewers gave me a nasty looks; I do not remember their names, and even if I do I’d better not mention them. I remember there was a 2 p.m. screening, during the summer, for the president of a large company. He came in tanned, wearing a golden bracelet, the car-salesman type that women do like (…). The film was not accepted there, but another film distribution company took it. They didn’t like the title I Vitelloni, and they proposed another title: Vagabondi!, with an exclamation mark. I said ‘okay’, but I suggested they should have the title uttered by a very strong voice on the soundtrack. They accepted the title only when Pegoraro gave them two more films that would definitely be very popular. They did not want Alberto Sordi’s name on the first posters and on the first copies of the film, and they told me: ‘he doesn’t attract people, he’s unpleasant, viewers don’t stand him’”.
(Federico Fellini, Fare un film, Einaudi, Torino, 1980, p. 53-54)

“The most elusive protagonist is Alberto Sordi, and Fellini wanted him badly. The comedian was performing with Wanda Osiris in Garinei and Giovannini’ variety show. Consequently, to be able to hire him the crew had to attend his shows in several cities, including Viterbo and Florence. The Carnival Ball was shot in Teatro Goldoni – unfit for use and full of mice – while a flat in Florence was used to shoot a shop selling vestments and altar furnishings”.
(Tullio Kezich, Fellini, Milano, Camunia, 1987, p. 193)

Reviews

“I Vitelloni confirms the most vivid satirical vein of our cinema. It depicts the grey atmosphere of the province (those streets at night, echoing the layabouts’ silly jokes and songs, the poor but respectable houses these hoodlums finds refuge in every night after their idle wanderings, the periods of artificial euphoria and the beauty contest party. Some psychological attitudes (dandy Fausto, Albert the jester – role played by Sordi – and ‘signorino’ Monaldo) appear to be interpreted by a very acute observer and psychologist who, as a good moralist, knows how to extract a meaning from his story, which is not meant to be exclusively a ‘divertissement’”.
(Giulio Cesare Castello, Troppi “leoni” al lido, “Cinema” (nuova serie), a. VI, n. 116, 31 August 1953)

“Fellini is fresh, his main credit is that he does not like pre-established and complicated things, but voices his own feelings and sufferings, moods and moments that are seemingly unimportant. However, he’s really an artist in those very moments, and everything is meaningful”.
(Mario Gromo, “La Stampa”, 9 October 1953)

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Lo Sceicco Bianco

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Lo Sceicco Bianco

Year: 1952
Format: Black and white
Runtime: 85 min
Production: P.D.C. – O.F.I.
Word sales: P.D.C.
Viewed censorship:  11720 07/04/1952

Two newly-weds, Wanda and Ivan, are spending their honeymoon in Rome during the Holy Year. He comes from a bourgeois family and has planned everything, including visiting the Pope. As soon as they arrive in Rome, Wanda leaves the hotel and looks for the White Sheik, the hero of a photo love story published on a magazine she’s a fond reader of. She goes to Fregene, where a new episode of the White Shiek is being made and she finds out that her ‘hero’ is not up to her expectations. She tries to commit suicide by diving into the Tevere river, but she’s rescued. She finally goes back to the hotel, where she meets her husband. They hurriedly go to Saint Peter’s Basilica, together with her relatives, to meet the Pope.

poster – courtesy of © Webphoto & Services

Crew

Director: Federico Fellini
Story: Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli (da un’idea di Michelangelo Antonioni)
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli con la collaborazione di Ennio Flaiano
Cinematography: Arturo Gallea
Camera operator: Antonio Belviso
Music: Nino Rota
Musical director: Fernando Previtali
Production design: Raffaello Tolfo
Film editing: Rolando Benedetti
First assistant director: Stefano Ubezio
Sound: Armando Grilli, Walfredo Traversari
Makeup artist: Franco Titi
Still photographer: Osvaldo Civirani
Script supervisor: Moraldo Rossi
Producer: Luigi Rovere
Production manager: Enzo Provenzale
Production secretary: Renato Panetuzzi

Cast

Alberto Sordi : Fernando Rivoli “Lo sceicco bianco”
Brunella Bovo : Wanda Giardino in Cavalli
Leopoldo Trieste : Ivan Cavalli
Giulietta Masina : Cabiria
Lilia Landi : Felga
Ernesto Almirante : il regista di fumetti
Fanny Marchiò : Marilena Vellardi
Gina Mascetti : la moglie dello “Sceicco bianco”
Enzo Maggio : il portiere d’albergo
Ugo Attanasio : lo zio di Ivan
Jole Silvani : prostituta amica di Cabiria

Peculiarites

“The first day we worked on Lo sceicco bianco started very badly indeed. We had to shoot outdoors. I left Rome at dawn and when I said good-bye to Giulietta I was very tense. I was driving a Fiat car (“Cinquecento”) car and I stopped in front of a church, and I went in to pray. I saw a catafalque in the shadow, and I thought it was a bad omen. But there wasn’t a catafalque in the church, there wasn’t anyone. There was just me, I couldn’t remember even a prayer. I made some vague promises of repentance and I went out a little restless. On the road to Ostia, a tire of my car burst and I had to change it myself. I did not feel able to do it, so I was there, quite desperate, thinking that I’d be late for my first film-making experience. Luckily, a Sicilian good-humored truck driver saw me, and helped me. I arrived to Fregene at 9.45 a.m. while I had an appointment at 8.30 a.m. All the members of the crew were on board a large boat, one kilometer away on the immense sea. They seemed so far, unreachable. While a motor boat was driving me towards them, my eyes were dazzled by the sun. They not were unreachable, and I couldn’t see them any longer. I was wondering ‘What shall I do now? … ‘ I didn’t remember the film plot, I didn’t remember anything, I simply had to run away and forget it. Then, all of a sudden all my doubts vanished when I was on board. I joined the crew. I was curious to see where it was all going to end. ”.
(Federico Fellini, Fare un film, Einaudi, Torino, 1980, p. 51-52)

Reviews

“In the Sceicco bianco the original expressions are coupled with anxiety. The camera is pitiless when shooting the gestures and actions made by the small-bourgeois protagonists who are trying to make their provincial dreams come true. Middle class people here give up their authenticity and try to stick to their myths”. (Lino Del Fra, “Bianco e Nero”, a. XVIII, n. 6, giugno 1957)

“This film confirms Federico Fellini’s talent as a director, after Luci del Varietà – that he directed together with Lattuada – and also gives an example of a work of art that has to be very carefully watched and understood. At a first glance in fact we do not immediately perceive how unique this film is. Common people undertake trivial actions in common places, but those people, those places and those actions take on precise meanings. However, while in Luci del Varietà Liliana eventually lives in the world of comics, in Lo sceicco bianco provincial Wanda manages to escape from some “love lies” and her adventure becomes a positive experience because she abandons the world of photo love stories and magazines and goes back to the real world”. (Guido Aristarco, “Cinema Nuovo”, a. I, n. 1, 15 dicembre 1952)

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Luci del varietà

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Luci del varietà

Year: 1950
Format: Black and white
Runtime: 100 min
Production: Capitolium Film
Word sales: Fincine
Viewed censorship: 8888 18/11/1950

Luci del Varietà is about a bunch of misfits of a traveling vaudeville troupe. The group of actors, dancers, and performers struggle to make money and perform in front of just a few people. Their director, Checco Dal Monte, wants to be successful. His longtime sweetheart, Melina Amour, saves up money and plans to start a business. They arrive in a small town to stage another show, and Checco meets beauty queen Lily; he hires her as a dancer. Her sex appeal attracts large crowds of enthusiastic spectators, and she quickly becomes the star of the show. Checco falls in love with Lily and neglects Melina. The loyal group of performers are left without a leader, while Lily proves to be stubborn in her quest for fame. Lily signs a contract with another impresario and leaves him. After Melina’s has forgiven him, Checco and the whole company start travelling again. On the train he meets a nice-looking woman … and the whole story starts again.

poster – courtesy of © Webphoto & Services

Crew

Director: Alberto Lattuada, Federico Fellini
Story: Federico Fellini
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Alberto Lattuada, Tullio Pinelli con la collaborazione di Ennio Flaiano
Cinematography: Otello Martelli
Camera operator: Luciano Trasatti
Still photographer: Osvaldo Civirani
Music: Felice Lattuada
Musical director: Franco Ferrara
Production design: Aldo Buzzi
Costume design: Aldo Buzzi
Set decorator: Luigi Gervasi
Film editing: Mario Bonotti
First assistant director: Angelo D’Alessandro
Production manager: Bianca Lattuada, Federico Fellini

Cast

Carla del Poggio : Liliana “Lilly” Antonelli
Peppino De Filippo : Checco Dalmonte
Giulietta Masina : Melina Amour
Folco Lulli : Adelmo Conti
Franca Valeri : la coreografa ungherese
Carlo Romano : Avv. Enzo La Rosa
John Kitzmiller : John
Silvio Bagolini : Bruno Antonini il giornalista
Dante Maggio : Remo il capocomico
Alberto Bonucci : personaggio del duo teatrale
Vittorio Caprioli : personaggio del duo teatrale
Giulio Calì : il fachiro
Mario De Angelis : maestro
Checco Durante : il proprietario del teatro
Joe Fallotta : Bill
Giacomo Furia : Duke
Renato Malavasi : albergatore
Fanny Marchiò : una soubrette
Gina Mascetti : Valeria Del Sole
Vania Orico : Gypsy Singer
Enrico Piergentili : il padre di Melina
Marco Tulli : spettatore
Alberto Lattuada : inserviente teatrale
Sofia Lazzaro [Sophia Loren] : ballerina
Giovanna Ralli : ballerina

Awards
1950-1951
Silver Ribbon Best Supporting Actress (Giulietta Masina)

Peculiarites
In early 1950s newspapers discuss this “wives and husbands’ cooperative,” that is to say the collaboration between the two directors and their respective wifes, namely actresses Carla Del Poggio and Giulietta Masina. Bianca, Lattuada’s sister, a great organizer, helps them and Lattuada’s father is the author of the score.
(Tullio Kezich, Fellini, Milano, Camunia, 1987, p. 166)

Reviews
One of the qualities of Luci del varietà (directed by Lattuada and Fellini) seems to be the indifference, on the part of the authors, towards tragedies. At the end, when the girl, the main character, is almost naked on stage, sends kisses to the audience and says: “thank you”, she has tears in her eyes, as she understand they are clapping her body and not her performance. Said praises are cruel in a way and lead to a set of comments on the concepts of art and success. It is a sort of antinovel, rather than a satirical film. There is no hope for a happy ending, and characters are never moved, because their prevailing feeling is vanity.(Ennio Flaiano, “Il mondo”, a III, n. 18, 5 maggio 1951, ora in Lettere d’amore al cinema, Rizzoli, Milano, 1981)

Luci del varietà is inspired by the world of vaudeville and reports on the lives of comedians, soubrettes, and the whole crew of people performing on stage with intelligence and humor. (Tullio Cicciarelli, “Il Lavoro Nuovo”, 7 dicembre 1950)

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Giulietta degli spiriti

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Giulietta degli spiriti

Year: 1965
Format: Colour
Runtime: 120 min
Production: Federiz (Roma), Francoriz (Paris)
Word sales: Cineriz
Viewed censorship: 4573323/09/1965

Giulietta is a wealthy middle-class housewife living in Fregene (near Rome), who constantly fears her husband Giorgio is cheating on her. While she yearns for a peaceful intimate evening with him on the night of their 15th wedding anniversary, the egotistical Giorgio has forgotten about it and instead arrives home with his eccentric friends. They organize a séance, and Giulietta is haunted and offended by erotic and vulgar ghosts. She is obsessed with their statements and fears Giorgio’s infidelity. She meets her neighbor Suzy, who invites her to her villa, and she talks freely to her, as she now has the evidence of her husband’s infidelity. She feels guilty and leaves, bewildered. Thanks to a psychoanalyst, Juliet manage to fight against her ghosts and temptations. At the end – triumphant and wearing a white dress – she goes towards the strong wind blowing from the sea.

Crew

Director: Federico Fellini
Story: Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, da un’idea di Federico Fellini
Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, Brunello Rondi
Cinematography: Gianni Di Venanzo (Technicolor)
Camera operator: Pasquale De Santis
Music: Nino Rota
Musical director: Carlo Savina
Production design: Piero Gherardi
Costume design: Piero Gherardi
Assistant production designer: Luciano Riccieri, E. Benazzi Taglietti, Giantito Burchiellaro
Wardrobe assistant: Bruna Parmesan, Alda Marussig
Film editing: Ruggero Mastroianni
Set decorator: Vito Anzalone
First assistant director: Francesco Aluigi, Liliana Berti, Rosalba Zavoli
Sound: Mario Faraoni, Mario Morici
Script supervisor: Eschilo Tarquini
Makeup artist: Otello Fava, Eligio Trani
Hair Stylist: Renata Magnanti, Marisa Fraticelli
Assistant editor: Adriana Olasio
Producer: Angelo Rizzoli
Production manager: Mario Basili, Alessandro von Norman
General manager: Clemente Fracassi
Production supervisor: Walter Benelli
Production secretary: Renato Fié, Ennio Onorati

Cast

Giulietta Masina : Giulietta Boldrini
Mario Pisu : Giorgio suo marito
Sandra Milo : Susy, Iris, Fanny
Valentina Cortese : Valentina
Caterina Boratto : la madre di Giulietta
Lou Gilbert : il nonno di Giulietta
Sylva Koscina : Sylva sorella di Giulietta
Luisa della Noce : Adele altra sorella di Giulietta
Josè De Vilallonga : Josè il cavaliere romantico
Valeska Gert : Nhishma la veggente
Silvana Jachino : Dolores
Fred Williams : principe arabo
Milena Vukotic : domestica di Giulietta
Genius : Genius il medium pederasta
Dany Paris : l’amica disperata di Susy
Alberto Plebani : il detective privato
Yvonne Casadei : cameriera della corte di Susy
Mario Canocchia : l’avvocato di famiglia
Cesarino Miceli Picardi : amico di Giorgio
Felice Fulchignoni : Dott. Raffaele
Lia Pistis : amica della spiaggia
Alba Cancellieri : Giulietta bambina

Awards

1965
Silver Ribbon for Best Supporting Actress
1965-1966
Silver Ribbon for Best Cinematography, Color
Silver Ribbon for Best Production Design
Silver Ribbon for Best Costumes Design
Donatello David Award, Best Actor

Reviews

“Paradoxically, it could be argued that Giulietta degli spiriti is a film to be ‘skimmed through’ rather than watched; the best way to enjoy it would be to cut it in to a thousand shots, and then examine them, one by one, as you do with an album […] You may suspect that Fellini was affected and constrained by colours as well as by Juliet”.
(Morando Morandini, “L’Osservatore Politico Letterario”, Milano, 12 December 1965)

“An almost plain story is turned into a phantasmagoric set of shapes, colours, characters’ thoughts, memories, dreams and Fellini’s dreams. It is a further display of his baroque imagination, his own use of colours and the ensuing amazing effects”.
(Leo Pestelli, “La Stampa”, 29 October 1965)

“The main elements of this film are: a hectic camera, relentless images combined with a unique domain of light, and colours. A cinema master directed this film. I don’t only have Otto e mezzo in my mind, but also Citizen Kane by Welles and Marienbad by Resnais, that this film is very close to. Fellini moves freely in time and space, imagination and memory”.
(Gordon Gow, “Films and Filming”, april 1966)