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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)