Fellini himself was suffering from a creative block and decided that it would be a good narrative concept for his next project.
He’s suffering from acute director’s block and overwhelming existential dread at the countless people that he’s destined to disappoint thanks to his own creative inadequacies.Īs you might have guessed by now, this is a semi-autobiographical movie. The truth is that Guido has no clue what he wants his film to be. His entire cast and crew follows him there. Overwhelmed by the stress and anxiety of his responsibilities, Guido has retreated to a spa resort for a two-week break.
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Occasionally, a beautiful nameless woman (Claudia Cardinale) appears in his daydreams, offering loose sparks of inspiration that are quickly dismissed by his production team.įellini’s final black-and-white movie concerns a film director called Guido Anselmi He’s had a giant space rocket set constructed at a cost of millions and he’s begun screen testing actors to play characters very clearly based on people that he knows (his wife, his mistress, a woman from his past). Having achieved fame and success, the pressure is on for him to release his next movie. Just writing this, I’m tempted to dive back into Fellini’s film and let the extravagant circus of strange sensual confusion start up again.įor the uninitiated, Fellini’s final black-and-white movie concerns a film director called Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni). I’m like a child staring at an open bag of jam doughnuts. Very few films draw that much engagement from me, but there is something maddeningly indefinable about the strange atmosphere of 8 1/2 that hooks me in time and time again. Eight hours before that, I had watched it for the fourth time. After two chapters on Fellini’s precinematic career, the book covers all the films to date in analytical chapters arranged by topic: Fellini and his growth beyond his neorealist apprenticeship, dreams and metacinema, literature and cinema, Fellini and politics, Fellini and the image of women, and La voce della luna and the cinema of poetry.Yesterday, I watched Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 for the fifth time.
By probing Fellini’s recurring themes, Bondanella reinterprets the visual qualities of the director’s body of work - and also discloses in the films a critical and intellectual vitality often hidden by Fellini’s reputation as a storyteller and entertainer. These previously unexamined documents allow a comprehensive treatment of Fellini’s important part in the rise of Italian neorealism and the even more decisive role that he played in the evolution of Italian cinema beyond neorealism in the 1950s.
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Throughout the book Bondanella draws on a new archive of several dozen manuscripts, obtained from Fellini and his scriptwriters.
Peter Bondanella thoroughly explores key Fellinian themes to reveal the director’s growth not only as an artistic master of the visual image but also as an astute interpreter of culture and politics. Covering Fellini’s entire career, the book links his mature accomplishments to his first employment as a cartoonist, gagman, and sketch-artist during the Fascist era and his development as a leading neo-realist scriptwriter. Jung, especially Jungian dream interpretation. This major artistic biography of Federico Fellini shows how his exuberant imagination has been shaped by popular culture, literature, and his encounter with the ideas of C.