The director, the guiding hand behind every film’s narrative, symbolic weight, and direction. The director decides on how to translate to the audience the story. Now, The director may decide to do that by changing the lens or angle of the camera, changing the composition and where the characters stand, and how they move and react within the director’s chosen confines. The beauty in both directing and filmmaking is that a personal voice can be expressed through a medium where both art and entertainment combine. Such names as Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorcese, Akira Kurasawa, Ingmar Bergman, and Andrei Tarkovsky have all fully embraced the fruit of directing, all of the names listed have yelled their messages of personal expression to an audience, and the audience has answered. There is one name that I did not list, a director that has walked the line of total expression through his medium, thereby creating films with his dreams, worries, and experiences as the main source of inspiration. That director is Federico Fellini. 

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Federico Fellini is an Italian Director born in the seaside town of Rimini, Italy in 1920. Towards the late 1930s, Fellini and his family moved from Rimini to Rome. While living in Rome, and while World War II was raging, Fellini would sell scripts to the local radio station Cico e Pallina, which is where Fellini would meet his wife Giulietta Masina - who would go onto star in more than one of Fellini’s films. During this period of time, Fellini met the director Robert Rosselini who invited him to work as a screenwriter for his film Roma, Citta Aperta or Rome, Open City in 1945. Rosselini’s Rome, Open City (1945), was nominated for best screenplay at the Oscars, which gave Fellini his first Oscar nomination. Rome, Open City, is considered an important film in neorealism filmmaking (“Federico Fellini”). Neo-Realism filmmaking is a type of cinema where the real problems of the middle class and those in poverty are represented and the cast is mostly made up of non-actors. Going forward, Fellini would work on more Neo-realism films and would direct his own, such as La Strata in 1953, and Nights in Cabiria in 1957. But Fellini would stray from this path, wanting to make cinema of a more fantastical and personal quality. Moving away from neo-realism would isolate Fellini from the rest of the Italian directors who were working solely in neo-realism (“Realism”).

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Now, who is Federico Fellini? Well, Fellini was a precise, yet chaotic director, telling stories in heavily surrealistic and fantastical ways, while also telling of the real nature of human beings. At the core of Fellini’s work is a personal statement if not exact memory or experience in his life. Here is a quote that sums up this point, “Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me” (“Federico Fellini Quotes”).  Examples of Fellini’s use of personal life as inspiration begins with I Vitelloni in 1953 where he explores the adventurous and energetic minds of young men living on the Seacoast - and the eventual escape of the town. To the swinging streets of Rome in La Dolce Vita in 1960, where the main character Marcello is torn between a life of partying or a life of serious professional writing. Or Fellini’s autobiographical film 8 ½ in 1963, where he explores the obstacles and agony of directing a film (Lane). A device Fellini used to add dimension to his characters, is including images of their dreams, fantasies, and hidden thoughts. Though the dreams are chaotic, they are calculated, by showing a dream sequence, for example, the audience is presented with the thoughts and memories of the character, so as to form a better idea about the character and how their thoughts relate to the plot. This technique would inspire an entire breed of filmmaking, thus creating a wrinkle in the fabric of modern cinema (“Federico Fellini”). Here is a quote from Fellini, “Our dreams are our real life. My fantasies and obsessions are not only my reality, but the stuff of which my films are made” (“Federico Fellini Quotes”).

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You may ask, Where does Fellini stand in the history of cinema? I will tell you this, there is no other storyteller like Federico Fellini, no other creative mind like Federico Fellini, and no other director that has touched filmmaking in such a unique way like Federico Fellini. In Fellini’s life and Fellini’s films, from the humble seaside town of Rimini to the swinging streets of Rome, to the dreams and fantasies of his characters, the line blurs between what is pure fiction and what is storytelling of a personal kind in Fellini’s film. I would like to finish with a quote that in my mind summarizes a large sum of what Fellini represents, “All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster's autobiography” (“Federico Fellini Quotes”).