Alberto Lattuada, the Italian filmmaker who generously supplied Federico Fellini’s first director’s credit for 1950’s “Variety Lights,” once claimed that he “invented Fellini.” His peer, Massimo Mida, disputed this, noting that if anyone invented il Maestro, it was legendary Italian auteur Roberto Rossellini. Respectfully, they’re both wrong. For his part, Fellini, who now towers over Mida, Lattuada, and arguably Rossellini in Italy’s cinematic canon, credits Rome for shaping him. Still, his mythos suggests a man born fully formed as a rascal, philosopher, casual liar, and genius. He was destined to make movies and had no inventor but experience, which was frankly as much a mother to him as his actual mother. Even when his movies aren’t directly about him, they’re still about him.
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The Criterion Collection’s “Essential Fellini” box set comprises 15 discs and over a day and a half’s worth of content—Fellini’s movies, obviously, as well as a pile of supplementary materials, wrapped in a package as loud and ostentatious as Fellini himself—but more than that functions as a timeline of Fellini over the years of his life. Watching the Fellini of “Variety Lights” grow into the Fellini of black and white neorealist pictures like “La Strada,” the Fellini of self-reflective surrealist fantasies like “8 1/2,” eventually, the Fellini of unhinged color grotesqueries like “Fellini’s Satyricon,” is the purest of joys married with a quick, dirty, delirious rundown of Italian history. Fellini filtered his cinema chiefly through Italy itself and Rome, particularly with Rimini, the town where he grew up, coming in a close third. Provincial life was his initial focal point, until his road led him to the Eternal City and irrevocably changed him.
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Kogonada, filmmaker and video essayist, lays this out in his sharp, poetic capstone to the set’s big booklet of Fellini analysis: “You are provincial, and you know it. You feel naive. You judge those around you to be even more so because they are unaware. Or worse, content. They have accepted their lot in life.” But life in Rimini wasn’t a life at all for Fellini, who left for Rome in 1939 and began the next phase of his evolution. As all Criterion booklets are, the booklet is stuffed with lovely and astute writing from Bilge Ebiri, Stephanie Zacharek, Michael Almereyda, Carol Morley, and Colm Tóibín. Still, Kogonada’s thoughts are the most instructive of Fellini’s character: He changed people’s ideas of what movies could be. He could never sit still, and if he had to do it all again, he’d still trade peaceful languor for Rome, for love, and for heartache, horror, and wonder.
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“Variety Lights” (1951)
For Fellini, as for so many characters, life was a performance, and 100 years after his birth, his showmanship has been made no less remarkable by time’s passage. So, screw Lattuada. “Variety Lights,” a film about ambition and emotional betrayal in vaudeville, is Fellini’s show. The film’s protagonists contain the DNA for those whose stories he was yet to tell at the time. Fellini strikes a contrast between masks worn by Checco (Peppino De Filippo), manager of a traveling vaudevillian troupe, a scoundrel but also a sad puppy; by Liliana (Carla Del Poggio), the star waiting to be born whom Checco discovers, then romances, and is later betrayed by; by Melina (Masina), Checco’s faithful girlfriend, who keeps up a strong front even as Checco’s own betrayal of their love crushes her soul. Before there was such a thing as a “Fellini” movie, “Variety Lights” established what that would look like as he moved up the ladder in Italy’s movie industry, through humor and melancholy.
“The White Sheik” (1952)
Has any movie featured a one-two combination of male leads as pitiable and pathetic as Leopoldo Trieste and Alberto Sordi? Trieste’s wide, panicked eyes tell of a man whose heart might at any moment give out on him from too much excitement, and not the fun kind of excitement; Sordi’s sparkling smile, cutting through his soft and rounded facial features the way butter spreads under a knife, makes a swooning illusion of macho virtue. “The White Sheik,” maybe not coincidentally, is Fellini’s funniest and his shortest film; in just over 80 minutes, newlyweds Ivan (Trieste) and Wanda (Brunella Bovo) face their first marital crisis as Ivan frantically searching all over Rome for his bride, who sneaks off to spend the day with Fernando (Sordi), the beaming star of her favorite fotoromanzo. Ivan bends over backward, lying to his relatives over her whereabouts, and Wanda, in turn, learns that Fernando isn’t the dashing gallant type he plays on TV. Italian critics of the movie’s day poured their disdain on it for not being political enough, but this out of towner comedy of errors shoulders a sense of purpose complimenting its whizbang comic sensibility while also laying down roots for Fellini’s future “inside baseball” fixations.
“I Vitelloni” (1953)
Boys will be boys. Caught in the orbit of their podunk Rimini surrogate town, pals Alberto (Sordi), Leopoldo (Trieste), Fausto (Franco Fabrizi), Riccardo (Riccardo Fellini, Federico’s younger brother), and young Moraldo (Franco Interlenghi), bum about looking for ways to make money without enduring the ignominy of work. True story: The film’s distributor suggested changing the ending by having the fellas discover an oil well, get rich, and live happy lives working the pumpjacks. Fellini and one of his two co-writers, Tulio Pinelli, laughed the idea out of the room, which frankly is more insane than making a sequel. But what would a sequel to “I Vitelloni,” a character-driven comedy of rural disaffection, have looked like? Fellini knew the connection between the two would be exploited for commercial gain, so he never bothered. And he didn’t have to. The film’s tenderly self-critical story of Italian Peter Pans was a hit. Who needs happy endings when ennui will do just fine?
“La Strada” (1954)
Fellini’s neorealist dramas would arrive a few years behind the 1940s classics of Vittorio De Sica and Rossellini who began the movement, but 1954’s “La Strada” is still a masterpiece that moves on from gritty markers of neorealism into something more poetic; a meditation on cruelty and love and how often they’re the sides of the same coin. A tragedy of human suffering, centered on Fellini’s trademark love of circus folk and vagabonds, “La Strada” centers on a brutish strongman Zampanò (Anthony Quinn, Fellini’s first big star) and the simple-minded girl (Giulietta Masina), he buys from her mother to accompany him out on the road as a street performer—a replacement for the older sister that Zampanò previously bought and has died (!). Their exploits have moving elements of comedy, pathos, and identity—trying to hold on to dignity while scraping for change on streets—but naturally, it ends in heartbreak, after the anger in Zampanò’s heart manifest in violence. Quinn is terrific; Masina’s broken performance is wrenching, and “La Strada” is towering tragic frailty of the human condition work that put Fellini on the international stage and won the inaugural Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1957. – Rodrigo Perez
“Il Bidone” (1955)
After eschewing the grittier elements of neorealism in “La Strada,” in favor of the poetic elements that would only consume his career later, Fellini returned to something rawer raw with “Il Bidone,” a dark crime film about con men. Overshadowed by the international success of “La Strada,” and “Nights Of Cabiria,” and thus also overlooked in general, “Il Bidone,” is nonetheless still as heartwrenching and painful in its depictions of human suffering. American actor Broderick Crawford, along with two Fellini regulars, American Richard Basehart from “La Strada”), and Franco Fabrizi, play a trio of con men, swindling poor families from their hard-earned money and destroying them in the process. It’s all fun and games at first, but Fellini examines the cost of the grift and the damage it causes to the soul, which feels even more timely in 2020. As the men become more personally exposed, their dignities dragged, their families brought closer to the painful truths they’ve suspected, the weight of their scams starts to take their toll. “Il Bidone,” then shifts towards Crawford’s lonesome lead swindler and the story of his daughter, and it’s one of the most heartbreaking stories of comeuppance, and personal tragedy ever told in neorealism (fun fact: Humphrey Bogart almost played this role). – RP
“Nights of Cabiria” (1957)
Masina’s a treasure when winsome and wide-eyed, but seeing her ignite into a spitfire in “Nights of Cabiria,” reprising her role from “The White Sheik,” is a pleasure, too. After her beau robs her and nearly drowns her in a river, Cabiria shakes herself off and tries to rebuild her life (and bank account) while exploring the nooks, crannies, and caves of Rome along the way; there’s plenty of time for the lovesick, lonesome, irascible lady of the evening to open the window to her soul and make liquid stares at the men who bruise her feelings and take advantage of her weary heart. Fellini didn’t direct the film in full comedy mode, though it is one of his most raucous, and watching Masina kick her feet and tap her toes on Roman sidewalks under a shining moon is joy distilled into cinema even if the joy is short-lived. Cabiria, like Gelsomina, is doomed to meet unhappy circumstances mirroring those the viewer meets her in at the start of the movie. In fact, the cycle trapping Cabiria may be crueler than Gelsomina’s love triangle, even if her ending, in which Masina stares through the camera and into our collective soul, gives her hope that Gelsomina is denied. The reversal reads as atonement for “La Strada”s bleak climax: Even the most forsaken among us can find happiness.
“La Dolce Vita” (1960)
The modern grasp on what’s “controversial” is broad, so any movie that comes out, from “The Hunt” to “Joker,” has the potential to kick up manufactured pearl-clutching rumpuses. The shock never lasts. Movies like these are cobbled together by smirking edgelords for whom shock equates with artistic value. On the other hand, Fellini made “La Dolce Vita,” a towering tragicomedy following disillusioned journalist Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) as he spends a week carousing as he meanders through the orbit of Italy’s upper crust looking for love or at bare minimum meaning to life. The film sparked an Italian civil war of words that remains a subject of scholarly study today, much as the film itself remains a classic of world cinema. Italians being constitutionally excitable, because some stereotypes are indeed true, “La Dolce Vita”s release was perceived by many as an attack on morality; the film was decried by the Catholic Church and censored by Umberto Tupini, the Tambroni government’s Minister of Culture, even as critics from Roger Ebert and Fellini’s peers, ala Pier Paolo Pasolini, sang its praises. In the end, we all know who won that fight, and “La Dolce Vita,” an epic of its time, is the gold standard for measuring social decay on screen.
“8 1/2″ (1963)
If only we all could float away from our troubles through concatenations of overhead wires to freedom, as director Guido (Mastroianni) fruitlessly labors to make his sci-fi epic while colliding with creative blocks, nonconstructive criticism, mental health, and his chaotic relationships along the way. Granted, freedom in “8 1/2,” the film for which generations may best know Fellini of film students who had their minds blown by this masterpiece in their Communications courses, is fleeting. No sooner do we achieve liberty than we plummet back down to the terra firma of our existential king bummers. “8 1/2” isn’t a bummer at all, of course: It’s a grand spectacle underpinned by Jungian psychology, informed by Fellini’s personal demons, and the Rubicon that, once crossed, saw Fellini graduate from “great” to “legend.” Perhaps he learned self-acceptance in the process, too. Like his hero-cum-screen surrogate, Fellini arrives at the climax, having recovered his true self and reconciled his neorealist roots with his later day surrealist interests. If that makes the movie sound stuffy, recall that Fellini is incapable of making stuffy movies, and that as dense, elliptical, and yes, “Felliniesque” as “8 1/2” is, his artifice is so richly personal that there are new lessons to learn for every repeat viewing—and boy, repeat viewings are recommended.
“Juliet of the Spirits” (1965)
Most discontent suburbanites take up weed when they want to add pizzazz to their lives. Giulietta (Masina) takes up with apparitions, mystics, wanton sex goddesses, and hallucinations while stoking resentment for her two-timing husband Giorgio (Mario Pisu). When “Juliet of the Spirits” was released, it was said by those in the know and promptly denied by Fellini that he’d made it as an apology to Masina for a litany of sins: Neglect, mostly, but his affairs, too. Masina was a key component to his early success; she deserved amends, and as amends go, “Juliet of the Spirits” remains unmatched in the annals of gestures men have made to repair their relationships with their wives. It’s vibrant, and as Fellini’s first foray into color film it would be; it’s elusive the same way that “8 1/2” and “La Dolce Vita” are elusive, but complicated by ghostly visitations; it’s a centerpiece for Masina nearly a decade after Fellini wrapped “Nights of Cabiria” around her, and at a moment in time when her own career was in the middle of a drought. (It also might’ve been influenced by Fellini’s first run-in with LSD, and while it’s hard to imagine him not taking psychoactive drugs before making “8 1/2,” facts are facts.)
“Toby Dammit” (1968)
Popular wisdom advises keeping the “essence” of an original work intact when adapting it to a new medium. Fellini was alive before that wisdom became popular, and apart from that, he didn’t make movies any other way than his own. “Toby Dammit” remakes Edgar Allan Poe’s “Never Bet the Devil Your Head” into Fellini condensed, a macabre portrait of movie stardom plowed under by ego, alcoholism, and run-ins with the Devil himself, or herself: Fellini imagines evil as a leering girl in a white dress, whose visage slowly drives famous actor and arrogant prick Toby Dammit (Terrence Stamp) to madness on his press tour through Italy. The drinking helps. So does world-wariness. Watching Stamp laze and loll and cut down simpering entertainment journalists with sharp, slurred wit is a hoot, and Fellini’s genre economy packs an excess of atmosphere into 40 or so minutes of running time. It’s enough to make one wish he’d made more horror movies.
“Fellini Satyricon” (1969)
Fellini’s adaptation of Petronius‘ prosimetrum satire is at once the most and the least Fellini film he ever shot, the episodic tale of two men, Encolpius (Martin Potter) and Ascyltus (Hiram Keller), battling for the heart of Encolpius’ slave boy Gitón (Max Born) as they navigate Greece’s shifting landscapes. It’s frequently repulsive, a true rebuke to art that insists on depicting ancient cultures, particularly Greek culture, as shiny, bright, and beautiful; it’s a feature and not a bug. Fellini acknowledges that with no way of truly knowing what life looked like in the “Satyricon’s” period, he had to invent and imagine, and he imagines ugliness. Given that intention, the ultimate effect is admirable, even handsome. Fellini wanted viewers to squirm in their seats, watching his vision of Petronius unfold as his heroes attend nauseatingly excessive feasts, fall prisoner to pirates, accidentally off a demi-god, fight men in Minotaur’s clothes, and find cures for impotence. In Fellini’s hands, “Satyricon’s” twisted hero’s journeys become an unexpected space where the hideous becomes striking.
“Roma” (1972)
Fellini’s thesis in narrative pseudo-documentary “Roma” is, like so much else in his life, self-contradicting. Sometimes, the past is best left in the past, buried, hidden beneath dirt and stone where it can be preserved outside the present’s prying eyes; sometimes, the only way to truly love a place is to leave it in your motorcycle’s dust. And yet here he is, making a movie in Rome and about Rome while excavating his own recollections of the city and his early years in its embrace. The collision between these two diametrically opposed pursuits works in “Roma”s favor, of course. Drawing the conclusions, the film arrives at without a little bit of hypocrisy is nearly impossible. Besides, the cruel magic trick Fellini plays beneath Rome’s streets, revealing a plethora of hidden frescos that immediately fade once met with fresh air, is breathtaking. Beauty fades. That’s why it’s beautiful. As a paean and as a dirge, “Roma” captures that painful dichotomy with nostalgic urgency.
“Amarcord” (1973)
“Amarcord” is the phonetic translation of the Italian words “Mi Ricordo” (“I remember”) and fittingly, it is a warm nostalgic throwback to a provincial life and people of Fellini’s childhood, mixed in with his increasing tendencies towards the carnivalesque and surreal at that time (though notably less outrageous than “Roma” and “Satyricon”). Picaresque, bawdy, and autobiographical in nature, “Amarcord” doesn’t have much in the way of plot—it’s more a series of comedic vignettes set in a 1930s Italian coastal town—which in some ways makes its 1974 Academy Award as Best Foreign Film win something of a surprise given it lacks the heart and soul of earlier work and is rather rambling. Nonetheless, Fellini dives back into provincial life, examining the thorny difficulties of families, the sinister tolerance of fascism and Mussolini, and horny coming-of-age boys who want some action from either the town whore or the busty mama ok with a little motorboating and grab-ass. Eccentric and absurd, “Amarcord” is a swirling memory piece with a real menagerie of characters; doting mothers, Fascist loyalists, sensual women, overassertive fathers. It’s vulgar, it has pathos, and the way it shifts from fantasy to something more domestically grounded and back is perhaps a testament to the triumph of Fellini’s unique skills as a director. – RP
The Rest:
“Intervista” isn’t Fellini’s final film—that would be 1990’s “The Voice of the Moon”—and yet it feels like the more fitting send-off. No one but Fellini should have the final word on Fellini, after all, and no movie can capture Fellini’s idiosyncrasies as man and movie director than one as metatextual as “Intervista.” It’s a documentary. It’s a narrative feature. It’s a movie within a movie and a movie about movies. “Intervista” is peak Fellini, ironic given that it’s also omega Fellini, a film obsessed with the past that’s also keenly aware of both the future ahead and sad reality that Federico, in his late 60s at the time of production, won’t be around for long enough to see it. (He died in 1993.)
In small ways, even as it waxes nostalgic about yesteryear, particularly as Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg reunite to dance once more and watch their “La Dolce Vita” scenes through the tears in their eyes, “Intervista” reads like a passing of the torch: Speaking to a Japanese documentary crew on set, Fellini insists, time and again, that his collaborators—his assistants, crew members, and archivists—know more about damn near everything, including the iconic Cinecittà Studios. In his pomp and grandeur, he’s humble; in his humility, he’s larger than life.
