Fellini

A perceptive angle on Fellini from Jonathan Jones in the Guardian. In particular, I agree with his assessment that

Fellini made the greatest film about the 1960s before the 1960s began. La Dolce Vita makes supposed classics such as Blow Up (1966) and Darling (1965) look derivative, just as his 1950s films like I Vitelloni ("The Overgrown Calves", a raw portrait of shiftless youths) puts British imitations from Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) to This Sporting Life (1963) in the shade. More to the point, these British films are period pieces; La Dolce Vita is not. It tells you everything you need to know about the way we live today.

Jones is also right on the mark with his assertion that

The great American film-makers of the 1970s never made a secret of their debt to Fellini. Coppola paid homage by hiring Fellini's music collaborator Nino Rota to compose the score of The Godfather. And Woody Allen has practically made a career out of quoting him. But it's not just American directors who drank deep from Fellini's Trevi fountain; so did the Italians. All of them ended up assimilating something of Federico. In Blow Up, Antonioni made swinging London look like Fellini's Rome.

Fellini predicts our culture of universal voyeurism. Everyone is staring - at celebrity, at glamour, at themselves. At the end of La Dolce Vita a group of dissolute revellers see a giant fish on the beach. Its huge, empty eyes are wide open. "But you see, it's still looking," someone says.

Given how acutely Fellini described the voyeuristic, celebrity-obsessed, almost weightless culture we inhabit, it seems extraordinary now that he was ever accused of rejecting realism for vapid fantasy. But Fellini was a politically embattled film-maker. Or rather, he fought a battle not to make political films, of the kind that would satisfy Italian film critics.


The whole piece is worth reading.