Federico Fellini :: News

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!)

Via 3quarksdaily.com.com

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.

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.

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.

Quite a messy story being reported in several outlets about Fellini's niece and his foundation:

Federico Fellini, revered in Italy as a cine matic great and cited abroad as a key influence on Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen, is at the centre of a row in his home town of Rimini.

Celebrations of the 90th anniversary of the director's birth have been marred by a battle over his legacy between his niece and the foundation set up in his name to promote such classics as La Dolce Vita.

Francesca Fabbri Fellini, the daughter of Fellini's sister, has stormed off the board of the foundation, claiming that she was frozen out and has taken with her Fellini's personal library and his collection of Oscars.

A tale of money, blood ties and show business, the battle of Rimini has upstaged the opening in Italy of Nine, the musical film starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Nicole Kidman inspired by Fellini's 1963 masterpiece 8½.

Despite rumours in Rimini that she craved the limelight at the foundation, Fabbri Fellini said the truth was she has been snubbed. "When the Fellini Prize was awarded to Sidney Lumet in November, no one bothered to introduce me to the American director," she told the Italian newspaper Il Resto Del Carlino. "I had to chase him down the corridor of the Grand Hotel in Rimini at the end of the evening to meet him."

Here are a couple of interesting blog posts from around the web about Fellini films - "Fellini's Faces" and "Wine in Fellini's La Dolce Vita" - both worth a read.

It is great to see people both viewing and thinking about and discussing these films in 2010.

Here is a photo feature from Style.com on "Fellini's Women".

You learn something new every day. I just came across Italian artist/illustrator Milo Manara from a blog post, specifically one highlighting some of his renditions of Fellini's films:

In 1966, after a terrifying nightmare, the Italian maestro decided to abandon the making of a film called The Journey of G. Mastorna. Years later, the script was published in Italian newspapers with some illustrations by none other than Milo Manara, whose "Untitled" was a tribute to Fellini and which uncle Federico had liked. The subsequent collaboration on "Trip To Tulum" is a gorgeous blending of Fellini's dream vision and some of the finest illustrations ever put to paper by Manara (which means finest illustrations by anyone ever).

Manara's official site.

Variety has a report of the newly announced theme park to be developed in Rome by Cinecitta Entertainment. I get this thinking to a point:

Alemanno said... "Theme parks are a global phenomenon that prompts hundreds of thousands of people to travel; but Italy, and Rome in particular, has been terribly behind in this sector,"

But Rome is... Rome. Does it really need a theme park?

Anyway, there is more in the article, including the specific mention of a Fellini ride.

Here are more details about the exhibition at the Jeu de Paume from Bloomberg via the Washington Post:

PARIS -- Federico Fellini, once viewed by some as a mere farceur, has become a classic. The Jeu de Paume is honoring the Italian film director with a vast exhibition, aptly named "La Grande Parade."

Processions, masquerades and clowns are leitmotifs in his movies. At age 7, Fellini ran away from boarding school to follow a traveling circus. Although the adventure soon came to an end, the circus remained a lifelong obsession.

The show at the exhibition space in the Tuileries Gardens doesn't attempt to trace Fellini's life chronologically. That's a wise decision, given his tendency to constantly re-imagine his past. Instead, the exhibits -- photographs, posters, magazines, movie clips and Fellini's own drawings -- are grouped around themes.

An exhibit (I am assuming of photos and film stills) of Fellini's work at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris is running now until January 17, 2010:

To attempt to put on a Fellini exhibition means to go back to the sources of Fellini's art and studying and revealing its processes of transformation, alteration, borrowing and accumulation. The result is a set of strata combining filmic elements, photographic documents, magazine presentations of the event, TV images and works by artists. This exhibition is resolutely multidisciplinary. It sets out to offer a new grid for reading Fellini's films.

The event and the historical fact, History and anecdote, biography and fiction are the materials that, by means of confrontations, echoes and dialogues, Fellini used to built his distinctive narratives and original visual environments.

Showing the creative context of Fellini's work in an exhibition means showing the nature of his creative mechanisms.

While many now legendary scenes have come to be seen as perfect incarnations of Fellini's prolific imagination, it now looks as if a more thorough analysis of the context will offer a fresh point of view on his work. Such a hypothesis sits well with Fellini's own inclinations. Trained as a caricature artist in his youth, for a while he earned a living by doing portraits of GIs on leave, and all through his life he would show the same visual acuity, the same ability to gather so much more than images in his freeze-frames of reality.

The exhibition at the Jeu de Paume affords a glimpse of Fellini's creative mechanisms by showing his unique ability for absorbing the real.
It comprises mainly photographs and drawings by Fellini, original film posters, period magazines and excerpts from his film.

An article about the anniversary of La Dolce Vita from the BBC:

Fifty years ago this month, cinema history was being made - inside a fountain.

Not any old fountain, but Salvi's masterpiece, the Trevi fountain, in the centre of Rome.

The scene has the actors Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni wading through its chilled waters in sensual abandon.

An erotically charged, but fully clothed, expression of lust and loss, it was shockingly original and audacious for audiences half a century ago.

The film was La Dolce Vita, or The Sweet Life.

The Trevi fountain scene has become an iconic moment, pitting an electrifying Ekberg, with those waters caressing her impossibly voluptuous body, alongside a hopelessly infatuated, tuxedo-clad Mastroianni.

It is a fusion of eroticism, temptation and ultimately frustration and all encapsulated into one minute and 38 seconds of celluloid brilliance.

This news is a couple of weeks old but since the site is new it seems pertinent to post it here:

Tullio Pinelli, whose prolific screenwriting career included a long partnership with the director Federico Fellini, with whom he wrote many of Fellini's best-known works, including "I Vitelloni," "La Strada," "La Dolce Vita" and "8 ½," died on Saturday in Rome. He was 100.

The death was confirmed by his son Carlo Alberto Pinelli.

Mr. Pinelli, who helped write more than 70 films, had been a lawyer in Turin, his hometown, where he also wrote plays. Not until his late 30s did he devote himself to movies. One day in late 1946 his life changed. He was standing in the Piazza Barberini in Rome, reading a newspaper at a kiosk, when he began a conversation with a young man reading the same paper. It was Fellini, then a young screenwriter, and they immediately fell into a discussion of films, each expressing a desire to infuse poetry and lyricism into the political neo-realism then in vogue in Italian cinema.

More here from the NY Times.