Most authorities agree that he was born on Jan. His past is somewhat shrouded in mystery, most of it his own invention, as he discarded details he found boring and invented those that he preferred. Starring Mastroianni, it chronicled the dissolute life of a character much like Fellini himself as he tried to find in his scattered personality and wandering erotic impulses the discipline to make the very movie we were watching.įellini got into the movie business almost incidentally: He wasn't one of those earnest students of the cinema yearning to direct.
The most "Fellini-esque" of the director's films came in 1963, his famous and influential "8 1/2 ," an amalgam of frank autobiography and surrealism. What more crushing image of the secularization of our age than its great opening shot of a portable statue of Christ dangling from a helicopter as it's transferred to new quarters? What more vivid image of the debauchery that was concomitant to the death of religion in that same movie than Marcello Mastroianni, a drunken journalist, riding atop Anita Ekberg at the end of a night's revels? What more pungent evocation of the paganism that runs through the civilized world than that vision of Ekberg herself, soaking in the Trevi Fountain like a great Roman goddess, her breasts bulging from a cocktail dress, her hair back, her face lost in bliss? "La Dolce Vita" alone, that corrosive damnation of the modern world, provided at least three. Indeed, his films are full of imagery so vivid it has taken root in the popular imagination. The word was drawn from Fellini's visual style, his ability to look upon the banal and infuse it with lyrical intensity.
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