A good example of this is found in Rome Open City (1945), where the priest enters an antique store. There are some irreverent moments, imbued with a kind of anarchic humour. It is possible to detect a discreet Fellini touch in those films. The Italian neorealism was shaped under that complex debate, finding common points in a civilisation with a millenary heritage that faced many moments of destruction and reconstruction in its history.Įither as a screenwriter or assistant director, Federico Fellini participated in many important Italian neorealist films, working mainly with Roberto Rossellini, Pietro Germi and Alberto Lattuada. Mediating those opposite visions, the Catholic Church embraced the human condition as a priority. The hard dialogue between conflicted ideologies had to be established and the Catholic Church played a fundamental role in that process. At same time, the Italian infrastructure was basically destroyed by the war and many people were literally starving. Separatist armed movements revealed that the possibilities of a civil war were on the table. Many forces were involved in that complex time of tensions and struggles.
The international impact of Rome Open City (1945) and Paisà (1946) by Roberto Rossellini was essential for the starting of a new era in the Italian post World War II cinema.Īlthough the Italian neorealist movement produced a list of films with different styles, approaches and visions, they shared one point in common: understanding the process underlining the destruction of Italy and the urgent need to approach the reconstruction of the country. Perhaps Fellini’s most succinct explanation for his decisive turn toward studio-based filming comes from the Gili interview, in which he was asked if it had amused him to construct a sea entirely of plastic for 1983’s And the Ship Sails On: “If you want to give the sea a feeling – the feeling of being a particular kind of sea – you can only do so with materials that can be lit a certain way, so they become dense with emotion.Federico Fellini started work as screenwriter in Italian film productions in 1942, one year before the fall of Benito Mussolini leadership in Rome.Īt that time the roots of the upcoming neorealist film movement were already cultivated by several Italian film directors as Luchino Visconti, Mario Soldati and Vittorio De Sica among others. As the French composer and film theorist Michel Chion notes: “We reach a point where voices… begin to acquire a sort of autonomy in a baroque and decentered profusion.” Dubbing was the norm in most Italian pictures during the director’s long career, but with Fellini it assumed a poetic quality. If he felt an actor’s voice didn’t match their physiognomy, or if he wanted a voice to contrast sharply with the actor’s appearance (say, for comic effect), he would change it.Īll of the performers who worked with him knew that the lines they delivered on set would more often than not be modified in post-production. With sound as with image, Fellini was keen to oversee every last detail. The whirling visuals are matched by equally free-floating and entirely post-synchronised soundscapes, which layer dialogue, sound effects and music. Fellini’s films are often bustling with movement, his characters moving in and out of teeming frames, some freely breaking the fourth wall – as in the famous final shot of Nights of Cabiria (1957), in Amarcord (1972) and elsewhere in his filmography.įellini’s characters often break the fourth wall, as in Amarcord (1972) Like many of the major moments in his life, he reimagined it for the big screen, in 1987’s Intervista, a picture originally conceived to mark the studio’s 50th anniversary.įellini always envisioned his films as journeys, and it’s clear that inside or outside the studio, with or without protagonists at their centre, most of his works have a restless, wandering quality – something the director claimed was influenced by his collaborations with Rossellini. Like a painter with his canvas, Fellini told Gili, the filmmaker “is able to put together colours and tones, controlling distances, transparencies and perspectives”.įellini first stepped into Cinecittà as a young journalist in the late 1930s, shortly after the studios had opened. In a 1986 interview with Positif’s Jean Gili, he affirmed his belief that the studio is the only place where the filmmaker can recreate exactly what he or she has cooked up in their imagination. Although his early films blended some location shooting with studio work, the director became increasingly attracted to the idea of building his filmic worlds from scratch and exerting complete control.
When in Rome: Satyricon (1969) was one of many Fellini films to shoot at Cinecittà studiosįew filmmakers knew how to keep Cinecittà busy like Fellini.