Fellini would had been 92 on Friday -
(ANSA) - Rome, January 20 - Google paid homage to Italian movie great Federico Fellini Friday with a doodle on the anniversary of his birth in 1920.The black-and-white doodle shows the maestro in jacket and tie behind a film camera whose two reels form letters of the Google logo.
It was the second Fellini-linked doodle since December 3 when his longtime music collaborator Nino Rota was honoured.
Here is a strange bit of 80s advertising (it looks much older!)
Not a happy holiday story:
Her years as a Sixties film icon must seem a very long time ago now for Anita Ekberg. For the Swedish actress, who entered cinema history the moment she stepped into Rome's Trevi Fountain during the celebrated scene in Federico Fellini's 1960 masterpiece La Dolce Vita, has fallen on very hard times indeed.Things are so bad, that three months after her 80th birthday, the actress has asked her accountant, Massimo Morais, to request financial help from the Fellini Foundation, which was set up to honour the achievements of the renowned Italian director.
From better days:
Short video clip here from the BBC, from a longer interview that will air later today:
"Claudia Cardinale has starred in more than 100 films since the 1950s.She had major roles in two of Italy's most famous films, Fellini's 8 1/2 and Visconti's The Leopard.
She also did a stint in Hollywood in films like The Professionals and The Pink Panther.
Claudia Cardinale is still acting and has recently starred in small independent films such as Being Italian with Signora Enrica.
The film opened the Turkish Film Festival which is underway in London.
You can watch the full interview on BBC World News on Tuesday 29 November at 04:30, 09:30, 15:30 and 21:30 GMT and on BBC News Channel on Tuesday 29 November at 04:30 GMT and on Wednesday 30 November at 00:30 GMT."
Nice article about Fellini's Rome and where you can still find traces of it or the current equivalent:
But it also helps to be looking through the proper lens--to notice, for instance, that those would-be flaneurs outside trendy Bar del Fico (Piazza del Fico, 26; www.bardelfico.it), their heads turning in unison every time a pretty girl walks by, are straight out of "I Vitelloni," the director's pivotal portrait of frustrated, provincial 20-something men.Sometimes Fellini's Rome and Felliniesque Rome live in close proximity. The apartment that Federico and Giulietta shared (Via Margutta, 110) is on a small, charming street where Truman Capote once lived and Puccini composed. There's not much to see except a plaque on the building with caricatures of the pair and a commemorative poem in Roman dialect. But notice the number on the door of the palazzo: above the 110, it says "Già 113"--formerly 113--a very Felliniesque address.
Variety Lights
The film launched Fellini's directorial career, but was a collaboration (in production, direction, and screenwriting) with Alberto Lattuada. Up until that time, Fellini had been primarily a screenwriter (most notably working on Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City), while Lattuada was already an established and respected director of neorealist films and literary adaptations.
Variety Lights is a bittersweet drama about a group of second-rate theatrical performers on tour. The actors, dancers, and performers struggle to make money from town to town, playing to minimal crowds, while the ageing manager of the company falls in love with a newcomer, to the chagrin of his faithful mistress, played by Fellini's real-life wife, Giulietta Masina.
Below (incredibly and I am sure in violation of copyright) is the whole film on YouTube:
TORONTO -- It will be la dolce vita for Fellini-philes at the Toronto Film Festival, which will host the North American preem of Fellini: Spectacular Obsession, an exhibition exploring the creative process of the Italian director, from June 30 to Sept. 18 at its Bell Lightbox headquarters.
Rome, Fellini's surreal portrait of the eponymous city (screens this Sunday at the Museum of the Moving Image), is alive with his signature surreal sense of boredom but as a film, it feels more like an elaborate exhibition than a cinematic pageant. The most striking sequence is the scene in the subway tunnels with the vanishing frescoes. It speaks to an inability to gel together past and present seamlessly without losing something and that something has to be a definitive identity to the city. Audience becomes subject and the boundary between spectator and player becomes blurred to the point where qualifying the two becomes meaningless.
Read the rest here.
This is a bummer of a story. The "crisis" in Itlay is very real:
It won't be lost on many Italians that la dolce vita in Italy has turned rather sour when even The Grand Hotel in Rimini is, for the first time in its history, preparing to shut for the winter.
The palatial hotel, so beloved of film maker Federico Fellini, will close from January to Easter, its owners have announced, as Italy's economic crisis bites and the demand for five-star watering holes - even ones as mythical as this - goes into hibernation.
It was officially listed as an Italian national monument in 1994, and featured in many of Fellini's films, most notably as a sumptuous backdrop in his 1973 picture Amarcord, a coming-of-age comedy, in which he took liberal swipes at Mussolini and the Catholic Church.
From ANSA:
(ANSA) - Rome, November 9 - Fifty years after the release of "La Dolce Vita", widely considered one of the masterpieces of world cinema, and ninety years after Federico Fellini's birth, Rome is paying homage to the critically acclaimed film director in a new exhibition.
The anniversary show, on display at Macro Testaccio, features a vast body of photographs, videos, film reels, drawings, letters and notes illustrating Fellini's extraordinary career as an artist and filmmaker, from his debut as a cartoonist and screenwriter in the early 1940s to his death in 1993, shortly after winning his fifth Academy Award.
Aptly called "Fellini Labyrinth", the exhibition takes visitors on a journey to explore the influential director's work mainly through a blend of stills and movie footage.
(Reuters) - The Rome Film Festival will fete the 50th anniversary of Fellini's classic "La Dolce Vita" with the first screening of a restored copy and a retrospective of the glory days when Rome was called Hollywood on the Tiber.
The fifth edition of the festival, which has striven to carve a distinct identity for itself in the long shadow of its more famous cousin in Venice, will be held Oct 28-Nov 5.
More here from Reuters.
Interesting article on Fellini as a pervert:
"It was strangely fitting that the digitally remastered re-release of La Dolce Vita earlier this year was promoted, not by the usual critical garlands and reappraisals, but with a kiss and tell article in The Guardian by Germaine Greer in which she revealed hitherto untold liaison with the great maestro. Fellini always said that his films weren't autobiographical; it was simply that he had invented his own life purely for the screen. And if his preference for the soundstages of Cinecitta might sometimes make his films seem a little stagey, it is only because each of his films is set, ultimately, in the theatre of his imagination. And what a very peculiar place that turns out to be..."
I think "pervert" is a little too simplistic and obvious of a word to encompass Fellini's tastes and techniques, but the article is interesting nevertheless.
This sounds great:
Federico Fellini (1920-1993) began working as a screenwriter on such Italian neorealist landmark films as Rome, Open City and Paisà, but by the time he took the director's chair in 1950, he was starting to question the genre's principles and its focus on socioeconomics. In attempt to make a stylistic departure, Fellini communicates his characters' hopes, dreams, fears, passions, and inspirations. The series includes I vitelloni, La strada, and Nights of Cabiria, three of Fellini's earlier efforts, which demonstrate his interest in a character's emotions. With 8 ½, Fellini abandons any interest in reality, creating his own personal fantasy world.
Tickets and times are available on their website.
Criterion has a new podcast up:
"This is the podcast dedicated to The Criterion Collection. Rudie Obias, Ryan Gallagher & James McCormick discuss Criterion News & Rumors and Criterion New Releases, they also analyze, discuss & highlight CC #004, Federico Fellini's 1973 film, Amarcord, along with "Variations On a Theme"."
I still don't understand how this film isn't "owned" by someone:
According to IMF, the original producers of the film assigned the rights in 1962 to Cinemat, S.A., which transferred rights in 1980 to Hor A.G., which transferred rights the following year to Oriental Films, which transferred rights in 1998 to Cinestampa, which then transferred rights in 2001 to IMF. A year later, IMF filed a registration with the US Copyright Office on a restoration copy of the Fellini film.
More here.
File under I am not sure where, but here is part of retelling of an affair between Germaine Greer and Fellini from many years ago (as written by her):
Within hours I was writing to Fellini that he couldn't reduce the Marquise du Chatelet to a huge-breasted nurse for the senile Rousseau. His response was to come to see me in my tiny house in the Montanare di Cortona. A big blue Mercedes appeared at the top of my steep, rocky road. Fellini got out and calmly sent the driver away till next morning. We talked all afternoon about the concept of the film, to some purpose, I flatter myself, even though Federico continued to watch me as I spoke, even whistling between his teeth from time to time, as if he wasn't listening. I would have made supper, but Federico was even more fussy and valetudinarian than your average Italian man, and insisted on making himself risotto bianco with only a single leaf of basil to flavour it. He was already on beta-blockers and drank no wine at all. There was never any question of his sleeping anywhere but in the big bed with me, but he was horrified to find that I slept with all the windows open. He changed into the brown silk pyjamas with cream piping that he had brought in his little overnight bag, and hung his clothes up carefully for the next day. Every couple of hours he made a quick call to his wife Giulietta, back home in their apartment on the Via Margutta.
This is interesting stuff - hysterical that Fellini cooked for himself! There is more here from the Guardian.
Very interesting article about the origins of La Dolce Vita by Tom Kington of the Guardian:
Federico Fellini's classic depiction of decadent American starlets and photographers changed cinema forever. Now the journalist who chronicled 1950s life on Rome's glitzy Via Veneto and briefed Fellini for his film has decided to give his own definitive account of the era. As far as Ciuffa, now 77, is concerned, 50 years later he is setting the record straight, by writing La Dolce Vita, Minute by Minute. "The real Dolce Vita started in Rome years before the cafes opened on Via Veneto and had as much to do with mysterious deaths, drug abuse and debauched Roman aristocrats as with Hollywood," he said. While photographers such as Tazio Secchiaroli have long been seen as inspirations for Paparazzo, the character in La Dolce Vita who gave celebrity-chasing photographers their name, Ciuffa claims he provided source material for the cynical columnist-about-town, played to laconic perfection by Marcello Mastroianni.
Read it all.
The AP is reporting on the death of Felice Quinto "Celebrity photographer Felice Quinto dies at 80" who Fellini based his infamous character from La Dolce Vita, Paparazzo, on:
ROCKVILLE, Md. -- Felice Quinto, a renowned celebrity photographer and the likely model for the character Paparazzo in Federico Fellini's 1960 film "La Dolce Vita," has died. He was 80.Quinto died of pneumonia on Jan. 16 in Rockville, his wife, Geraldine Quinto, said Monday.
Quinto often was referred to as the "king of the paparazzi" -- a term derived from the character in "La Dolce Vita" -- and he pioneered some of the aggressive tactics that celebrity photographers use to this day.
He would hide in bushes, wear disguises and zip around Rome on a motorcycle, taking photos that appeared in gossip publications around the world.
Quinto was born in Milan in 1929 and befriended Fellini while living in Rome in the 1950s. According to his wife, Fellini asked Quinto to play a photographer in "La Dolce Vita," but he declined because he was making more money taking pictures. He briefly appeared in the film as a bystander.
"By the time Fellini came out with his movie, it was already about four years that I had been doing photography," Quinto told the Dallas Morning News in 1985.
In 1960, Quinto snapped a picture of actress Anita Ekberg -- who appeared in "La Dolce Vita" as a starlet hounded by Paparazzo -- kissing a married movie producer at a cafe in Rome.
Quinto told ABC News in 1997 that Ekberg shot arrows at him as he stood outside her house at 5 a.m. One nicked Quinto's hand, and another struck a photographer's car.
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