Remembering Federico Fellini: "I wanted to be a stationmaster"

Having always distinguished the intense connection between myths and realities in the universal unforgettable masterpieces of the 7th art, we chose to study this duality in the three most famous feature films of the Italian director Federico Fellini. In La Dolce Vita, Otto & Mezzo and Amarcord, Fellini always sailed between the palpable and the phantasmagorical. In this article, we will try to decorticate this complementarity, by attempting to clarify what Fellini tries to convey to the audience as a real fantasy.

2015

Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini (1920-1993) is one of the most renowned figures in world cinema. Director of a long list of critically acclaimed motion pictures, including La strada, La dolce vita, 8½, and Amarcord, Fellini's success helped strengthen the international prestige of Italian cinema from the 1950s onward. Often remembered as an eccentric auteur with a vivid imagination and a penchant for quasi-autobiographical works, the carnivalesque, and Rubenesque women, Fellini's inimitable films celebrate the creative potential of cinema as a medium and also provide thought-provoking evocations of various periods in Italian history, from the years of fascism to the age of Silvio Berlusconi's media empire. In Making a Film Fellini discusses his childhood and adolescence in the coastal town of Rimini, the time he spent as a cartoonist, journalist, and screenwriter in Rome, his decisive encounter with Roberto Rossellini, and his own movies, from Variety Lights to Casanova. The director explains the importance of drawing to his creative process, the mysterious ways in which ideas for films arise, his collaborations with his wife, Giulietta Masina, his thoughts on fascism, Jung, and the relationship between cinema and television. Often comic, sometimes tragic, and rife with insightful comments on his craft, Making a Film sheds light on Fellini's life and reveals the motivations behind many of his most fascinating movies. Available in its entirety for the first time in English, this volume contains the complete translation of Fare un film, the authoritative collection of writings edited and reworked by Fellini and initially published by Giulio Einaudi in 1980. The text includes a new translation of the Italo Calvino essay "A Spectator's Autobiography," an introduction by Italian film scholar Christopher B. White, and an afterword by Fellini's longtime friend and collaborator Liliana Betti.

Word-processed version of Film Quarterly article on Fellini and the death of the subject.

Word-processed version of essay in F. Burke and M.R. Waller FEDERICO FELLINI: CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES. U. of Toronto Press, 2002.

Special Issue of Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies, 2020

The centenary of the birth of director Federico Fellini in 2020 invites a unique opportunity to reassess his contribution to the history of Italian culture from new perspectives. With his monumental film production, which has been extensively studied—at least from La dolce vita forward—the Riminese director gradually seeped into Italy’s daily life. While his films have sparked lively debates since he first became popular in the 1950s, less attention has been devoted to the process that has led many scholars to consider him the emblematic figure of the film artist, both as a major character in the cultural history of Italy and as the symbol of what is quintessentially ‘Italian’. Unlike other Italian directors, Fellini became a newsworthy and publicized figure beginning in the 1960s. He contributed to the creation of an ‘elusive’ image of himself (Hodsdon 2017) both through the construction of several cinematic alter-egos and through unmistakable appearances with his hat and red scarf in documentaries, feature films, illustrated news magazines, press and TV reports, and other forms of media. Equally, he emerged as a staunch defender of certain political and cultural struggles, such as those against television commercials or against Berlusconi (who was still an editor at that time). Additionally, he became an object of scrutiny and discussion for journalists, critics, cinephiles, colleagues, and biographers searching for an openly hagiographical definition of the threshold of the Italian artistic tradition. Earlier theoretical contributions have thoroughly assessed the concept of ‘author’. Had Mikhail Bakhtin studied Fellini as an aesthetic and narrative object, he might have introduced him as a case study in Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity to highlight the reciprocal nature between his creative acts and his activism on the public scene (Bakhtin 1920-23). Michel Foucault, on the other hand, would have praised the discursive feature “characterized by […] plurality of egos” (Foucault 1969). Roland Barthes, for his linguistic sensibility, might have asked how Fellini influenced even common vocabulary such as the transformation of his name into an adjective as well as other words such as ‘dolcevita’, ‘amarcord’, and ‘vitelloni’ (Barthes 1967-68). However, from our point of view, it becomes essential to consider Fellini from a social and historical angle, calling upon cultural and social disciplines to furnish new analytical perspectives— measuring the impact of his personality on today’s and yesterday’s Italy, and on the Italian identity abroad. For example, Fellini was keen on creating a public image of himself both as a ‘magician’ and as a country bumpkin, playing with a combination of two Italian stereotypes: the creative artist (the ‘maestro’) and, by a sort of ‘reverse patriotism’, a heap of irredeemable flaws (Patriarca 2010). In short, the creation of his reputation is a crucial case study of how an ‘artist’ is socially constructed and of the cultural forces that influence his public image (Kapsis 1992). This angle unlocks promising and abundant research possibilities: the idea of masculinity offered by Fellini’s voice and body (his acousmatic force, as Chion [1999] would say, is flagrant); the fashion in which his cumbersome presence has transformed urban spaces, such as Rimini, a film library dedicated to him, the Cinecittà theme park, Rome, and the EUR district. Moreover, contributions to this special issue can discuss the exoteric vein in Fellini’s life experiences as often illustrated in magazines and news outlets; the numerous parodies of which he is the unconscious victim; the proliferation of commercial activity using the names of his films (here, too, a re-semanticized lexicon); and the way in which his wife, and his collaborators, friends, and colleagues evoke him in biographies, interviews, public statements (Giulietta Masina, Marcello Mastroianni, Vincenzo Mollica, Tullio Kezich, Milo Manara). Overall, the broad and innovative perspective described in this call for papers pursues the goal of rediscovering the aspects that contributed to Fellini’s mythification and integration into the sphere of Italian public speech. If we can believe Morin when he says Fellini “is more than an actor incarnating characters, [since] he incarnates himself in them, and they become incarnate in him,” (Morin 1961) is it then possible to study Fellini as a character/divo in the film of social history and Italian culture in the last half century? If the articles composing this single-issue journal confirm that proposition, may one consider Fellinian heritage as the ability to inhabit social spaces, the ability to be inscribed in the (Italian) public sphere but in flesh, bones, and other phantasmal forms?

Scholarly Monograph, 2014

“. . . as well as being a good idea in itself, Pacchioni’s ‘perspective’ works rhetorically to make possible an extraordinary density. A short book covers a huge amount of Fellini’s work in a penetrating way. Strangely, it isolates themes, motifs, and meanings from the films themselves, in the sense of endowing figures with meaning, but without their aesthetic insertion into the artistic artefact. In other words, the book throws enormous light on the components of Fellini’s films. And there is nothing wrong with this, when you reflect on the extent to which each film is an assembly of fragments—that is the way Fellini works. But the assembly is really successful—and this is where the ‘collaborators’ stop, and ‘Fellini’ himself takes over completely. He welds their disparate contributions into a work that is unified and ‘beautiful’, as well as meaningful. By not dwelling on this (though he does talk about it), Pacchioni lets the ‘contributions’ stand out, each with their identity. It is the films themselves that incorporate, absorb, digest the components, and Pacchioni’s critical activity is to undigest and tease out the threads, so that each character on the stage (each writer) receives his own spotlight. The reader, in his memory, reassembles the now enriched components.” –– Excerpt from Christopher Wagstaff’s review (University of Reading) in The Modern Language Review 11.3 (July 2016)

Choice Reviews Online, 2014

2018

As Dr. Pacchioni points out, challenging the critics’ portrayal of Frederico Fellini (1920 – 1993) as an autonomous creative force is a di cult task. Not only does the “critical institution” of auteurism iercely defend the established image of the solitary and genial auteur, but the screenplay continues to be an underrated element both as a tool and a piece of art. Inspiring Fellini: Literary Collaborations Behind the Scenes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 256p. ISBN: 1442612924) confers a higher status to the ilm script by seeing it as part of a web of connections involving a rich literary and artistic context. he study also places the Italian director in a complex meshwork of collaborations that does not entirely downplay the traditional critical notions of his lone wolf geniality. On the contrary, as noted by one of his collaborators (160), his efective “absorption” of some of the best writers of the twentieth century testiies his own brand of auteurism. Was this practice ...

Word-processed version of an essay published in ROMANCE LANGUAGES ANNUAL 1994 in which I attempt to theorize my personal engagement with Fellini relation to Catholicism, American postwar culture, and the art film.