Italian Cinema Legend: Who is Federico Fellini?

He was born on January 20, 1920, in Rimini on the Adriatic coast of Italy. He studied primary school in Rimini. He ran away from home when he was 10 years old. The place he went was a circus and he started working there. He started university in 1938, or more accurately, he registered but did not attend classes. He started working in Humor magazine.

It was 1939 when he went to Rome. He still couldn't break away from humor and worked as a cartoonist. He wrote humorous lines for films as well as radio plays. In 1943, he married actress Giulietta Masina. He worked with his wife in many films. He started working in cinema when he met Roberto Rossellini. Fellini and Rossellini worked together on the film Rome, Città Apperta in 1944. He wrote scripts and served as assistant director between 1946 and 1952. Rossellini, Alberto Lattuada, and Pietro Germi were the names he worked with. It was 1950 when he shot his first movie (Variety Lights) with Alberto Lattuada.

He did not want to leave his homeland and never worked abroad to make films. After Rimini, Rome became Fellini's second home. He created his own film world both in Rome and in the rural towns of Italy. He did not take his characters out of his country either. He became famous worldwide with his Italian films.

During his directorial career of more than 40 years, he received the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film 4 times. He was awarded and honored with a special Oscar in 1993. He passed away in Rome on October 31, 1993, at the age of 73.

Details of his story

Federico Fellini, who won major awards such as the Best Foreign Film Oscar 4 times, the Cannes Film Festival "Lifetime Achievement" and the World's Best Director throughout his cinema career, was born in Rimini, which will have a big place in his films in the following years. He spent his childhood in Rome, ran away from home at the age of 10, and lived the most important part of his life in circuses. The reason why it is important is that it reflects these periods in its cinema. Even though he started studying at the Faculty of Law, there was the light of art on his path. Thus, the journey started by coming to Rome with the dream of becoming a journalist; While he was drawing caricatures, writing stories, and working on the radio, he met Roberto Rossellini, who came there very often, thanks to the "Funny Face Shop" he opened in those years. Thus, he found himself writing in script groups. Roma took his first step into cinema by working with Rossellini on the script of Open City. He wrote Variety Lights with his memories from the years he traveled around Italy with a variety of groups.

“Once I started liking movies, I couldn't be satisfied with just writing papers and decided to direct.”

Federico Fellini, who used people searching for themselves as the subject of his films, took the audience to another dimension. In this dimension, it shows us the truth. Although he was one of the directors of the Italian Neorealism movement, he was not one of its representatives. Because his perception of reality is intertwined with imagination. It is blended with memories and fantasies. There is no such logic that we should see the facts by directly conveying them through social events and politics. The closest reality to us are the images created by our minds. The person who encouraged him to think more about this existential reality questioning was Jung. He begins to take note of his dream-like hallucinations, and this appears in Fellini's films.

Imagination, which is a reflection of dreams, memories, the past, dreams, and possibilities, is the deep language of Fellini's self in the cinema. He wants the audience to find the truth and uses imagery that will enable us to use our imagination. Many critics say he makes incomprehensible films, but this is obvious.

Existential Questioning

He wants us to question existence in the films he presents to us with a surreal atmosphere. While we live without understanding our own world, this questioning will shed light on us through a movie. It is important to change our focus and position from time to time and look at things from other perspectives. Even if it keeps us trapped in a cage, creates confusion, and collapses, we must try. At this stage, cinema is the only means of artistic expression. For people in modern times, hallucination is the only art form that can penetrate. It is a tool of original cultural transmission. Cinema liberates our emotions and fantasies.

Many of the memories of Fellini that we see on the streets of Rimini also appear in his other films. Circuses, post-war Rome, Mussolini's fascist regime, myths that need to be destroyed, idealized concepts threatening our mental health, and dreams, dreams, dreams... All of them go deep into our depths with a surreal transfer and metaphors. Especially the silence in dream scenes or the howling sound of the wind that sometimes becomes constant makes us experience grief, beauty, nostalgia, and mystery.

Fellini, whose many films are in black and white, expresses his reason for choosing this with the following words:

“If you photograph a sea in black and white, the viewer will attribute the blue of his own sea to that sea photographed in black and white, so it will really be the sea in his eyes. "If you photograph in color, you may have given that sea a blue that will not be accepted by the audience; the audience will not recognize it as their own blue."

For him, filming was the struggle, the comedy, the charm of life, life itself. He made his mark with his indispensable actors such as Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg, with his views that make you question life such as La Dolce Vita (La Dolce Vita), leaving his mark with Otto e mezzo (Eight and a Half) about a director who could not finish his movie, and his first film with La Strada (Endless Streets). We will continue to be with him through his latest achievement, which is Oscar success and immortality in cinema history.