Made in 1960, this multi-episode narrative marked his first collaboration with Marcello Mastroianni, the actor who became his virtual alter-ego. La Dolce Vita was the first film to display this new style. Through use of a complex system of symbolism he would evoke a “collective unconscious” that enveloped his thoughts and feelings with that of his characters and the society they lived in. Ernest Bernhardi, Fellini discovered the works of Carl Jung whose works inspired him to move away from the objective neorealist style to a subjective approach. The visual style is closer to his neorealist beginnings with its content focusing on exploitation of people at the lowest level of society. They also best illustrate the relatively restrained and sober style of Fellini’s early films. Both films won Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film. Her comic performances channeled the spirit of silent cinema and directly inspired two of their most notable collaborations - La Strada and Nights of Cabiria.
The White Sheik also marked the start of Fellini’s lasting collaboration with composer Nino Rota and most notably featured his wife, actress Giulietta Masina, in a brief cameo as a prostitute named Cabiria. Already visible is Fellini’s focus on the media’s influence on people’s private fantasies, a theme that informed La Dolce Vita and 8 ½. After collaborating with Alberto Lattuada on Variety Lights, Fellini directed his first solo feature, The White Sheik. He contributed to the dialogue of neorealist classics such as Rome, Open City, Paisan and also worked as an actor alongside Anna Magnani in the controversial short Il Miracolo. It was only after he came into contact with the circle of Ettore Scola, Cesare Zavattini, Aldo Fabrizi and Roberto Rossellini, that he would seriously consider the cinema as a medium of expression.įellini’s collaboration with Rossellini would prove important to both men. His favourite films were American comedies by Chaplin, Keaton, Harry Langdon and the Marx Brothers.
His childhood fascination with the circus and the Grand Guignol also governed his cinephilia in these early years.
And we should all be grateful for those dreams.” He initially arrived in Rome as a law student but his career as a satirical cartoonist and gag writer was already well established by then. In fact, Orson Welles once described Fellini as “a small-town boy who’s never really come to Rome. The lack of available options to young men in provincial towns is an important theme in some of his films, most notably I Vitelloni and Amarcord. Federico Fellini was born in 1920 to a provincial middle-class family in Rimini, a small town on the coast of the Adriatic Sea.
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