The name Frederico Fellini and his films can be… intimidating. Either you know, love, and worship the film reel he walks on, or you’ve heard him mentioned by influencers making fun of the film bro they’ll never date again. Fellini is on that untouchable top tier of the filmmaker pyramid that can’t be argued against. He graciously shares the small triangular point with Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Scorsese, and other directors. Fellini dropped a rope too, allowing those names to join him on that crisp peak.
Interestingly, Fellini, an auteur filmmaker, is referenced by so many auteur filmmakers. The idea behind the term ‘auteur’ is that the visionary’s art is so remarkably their own that it’s noticeable at first sight. That would almost seem to mean that the auteur filmmakers of today wouldn’t make the art the way they do without their forefather Fellini.
The pinnacle of auteurism was nominated for 12 academy awards during his 50-year career. His first nomination was at the humble ages of 25 and 26 for his work as a writer on Roberto Rossellini’s films Rome, Open City (1945), and Paisan (1946). After that, he would go on to win four Oscars (among the slew of other awards the world over) for Best Foreign Picture for; La Strada (1954), Le Notti di Cabiria (1957), 8 1/2 (1963), and Amarcord (1974) – not including his honorary Academy lifetime achievement award. This count is unsurprisingly higher than any other foreign film director. Throughout his career, he developed a style that became true to his own.
“In the movie theater, you always know a Fellini film. He had individual style. There are things you cannot take a course in. You are born with it. He was a first-class clown, with a unique, great concept. In life, when you were with Fellini, you always knew you weren’t with anyone else. He was in his own orbit. When someone like Fellini dies, there is no way to pass on a formula, because there is no formula. What he did came out of the person, out of him. People will study and analyze and copy, and maybe someone will achieve to the point it is said of him, “His film is like a Fellini.” – Billy Wilder
To be ‘like a Fellini,’ there is a list of essential elements you’ll need to include in your film. They’re the elements that Fellini used joyfully and without mercy throughout most of his pictures- Things like authentically over-the-top characters that somehow manage to be right in-between boringly ordinary and frightfully absurd. They’re a bit like how Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton (who’ve both confessed to being admirers of Fellini’s) display their dramatis personae, though typically in a much more fantastical nature.
Fellini’s characters are dolled out on equal sides of the spectrum of religious and demimonde, filthy rich and dirt poor. Starting his career as a caricature artist, it makes sense that the people in his films would be just as heightened as in his drawings. No one is immune from this portrayal of a fully-fleshed oddity, from the upper crust to the lower of society.
These characters can enjoy live music at various social events like weddings, parties, parades, processions, and general soirées in open fields, coastlines, and town centers. Their lives are riotous, dingy, variegated, zesty, and dirty glamour. They are complex- neither explicitly good nor bad, but swinging back and forth on a moral pendulum of vices. We watch as they dream under the beautifully raw and harsh world of everyday life that shines through the mockery and proclaims that “If you see with innocent eyes, everything is divine.” (Fellini)
As a 1993 New York Times headline put it, “Fellini’s World Was So Real It Was Bizarre”. Its tantalizing layers of falsities and harsh truths are pressed on top of one another so compactly that they blur together the life we ignore, the one we see, and the one we desperately want. His movies captured the world from his unique and very particular point of view, which was also somehow entirely universal.
It’s a true testament to his vision because it’s so specific (the case of the auteur), that it would be this influential to so many over many generations. Fellini is not like, say, a Ron Howard, who’s had fantastic success with wildly diverse films from the magical baby ‘chosen one’ picture Willow to the hilarious Christmas classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas to the harrowing rescue mission of Thirteen Lives. Howard seemingly disappears, dad hat and all, within each of his projects. Instead, Fellini is like those equally specific directors: Kubrick, Lynch, Scorsese, and Anderson– who’ve all spoken at length about his influence.
The list doesn’t stop with those four. It’s potentially neverending and grows every year. You could say that Baz Luhrmann’s films draw inspiration from Fellini with their lavish costuming, depiction of class disparity, and love of carnival. Similar themes occurred in even more places at this year’s Oscars with contender Triangle of Sadness, and we can hope that Fellini would have been smitten with Everything Everywhere All at Once. Conversely, consider the indie donkey drama EO with its rugged countryside, morally corrupt ensemble characters, and vignette-style storyline. Also, a little Fellini in there?
“Perfect and beautiful” are the words David Lynch used to describe Fellini’s work. And, of course, Lynch would say that- he who reigns as the American king of the borderline grotesque and surreal mishmash of dream vs. reality. Lynch met Fellini twice, once while attending his then-partner’s shoot in Rome and a second time while he was shooting a Barilla pasta commercial. Fortunately, timing, the day before, Fellini entered a coma. He would make ‘Dream – A Tribute to Felllini’, a lithograph series based on the last scenes of 8 1/2 that toured the world in honor of the idol.
Pedro Almódevar movies like; Pain and Glory, Bad Education, and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! have, between the three of them, elements of vibrant color, dutiful camerawork that lets the scene be the star, plots littered with elements of film and live performance, sexual obsession, recollection of childhood, and characters that aren’t intended to be flattered by the story. At the heart and soul, Pain and Glory, Felliniesque could be part of the same balloon bundle as 8 1/2, just plucked and placed into a modern time.
The way that Fellini, in his later The Voice of the Moon, “ felt it was necessary to build an entire country,” which included “a piazza, church, a discothèque, a town hall, a shopping mall.” (Fellini) Almódevar created the feeling of building a country on a stage for Tilda Swinton’s world in his beautifully intricate The Human Voice. Other similarities could include his love of working with repeat performers (Penelope Cruz and Antonio Banderas). With his latest short film coming out soon, we could also get Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal into the repertory circuit.
Wes Anderson famously works in the same manner. His vast, billowing ensembles routinely contain recognizable faces plucked from the top bills of Hollywood and his previous pictures. Outside of his features, he specifically paid homage to Fellini in the 2013 Prada commercial (more so an art film than an ad), in which the car racing stunts harken to Fellini’s car race through the streets of the town of Amarcord. While Fellini film makes you forget about the camera placement, in an Anderson project, you are constantly reminded of the camera, as it is just as much a character as anyone else on the screen. After his Prada commercial, Anderson further proved his love for the director in a 45-minute Italian interview Fantastic Mr. Fellini, exploring the filmmaker’s themes for the 100th anniversary of his birth.
The one who may owe the most to the famed auteur may be Paolo Sorrentino. His most recent Hand of God, and indeed The Great Beauty, can hold heavy inspiration from Fellini’s work. Going back to one of his first short films, the 1998 Love Has No Bounds (or boundaries, depending on the translation) feels incredibly Fellini-esque- if Fellini was making the Transporter series on an early Tarantino budget. This is a little bit conjecture because the only way to watch this film is via youtube video with translations as clear as; “-the appointment was here and here like it lissome tripods well more light his altar boy” and “remember to be trivial, but he hasn’t obvious with past.” In an impressive feat for a beginning filmmaker’s short project, it does sport the theatrics and theatrical costuming, gathering of cooky characters, dream-like visuals, and gloomily gray seascapes and old Europe streets by night that Fellini would have admired.
It makes me want to go to that overcast seaside town now, and if I did, it wouldn’t feel like the first time. It would feel like going to a familiar, adopted hometown. Watching these movies encompassing life in a time and place makes the viewer feel a part of them from beginning to end. There is no middle; you exist in the time that slides by in moving images between the first and the last credits. But maybe we can allow ourselves to be even more romantic than that. Maybe we can believe that the show only continues to go on.
As Fellini himself says, “There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the passion of life.”
Leave a Comment