On the morning of March 12, 1993, Federico Fellini arrived at the Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles to receive an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement. He was seventy-three years old, visibly frail, and characteristically theatrical in his acceptance. Standing at the podium, he silenced his wife, Giulietta Masina, who was weeping in the audience, with a gentle gesture and a single word: basta. Enough. The audience laughed. What followed was a speech as elliptical and associative as one of his films, circling gratitude, memory, and the strangeness of a life spent making images out of dreams. Six months later, he was dead, felled by a stroke in the same city of Rimini where he had grown up watching American films through the window of a cinema he could not afford to enter. The boy who had pressed his face against that glass had spent fifty years creating some of the most original images in the history of the medium. The distance between those two moments is the measure of a remarkable life.
One of the most creative and idiosyncratic filmmakers of the twentieth century, Italian director Federico Fellini (1920–1993) has been widely acclaimed for his imagery and artistry. His distinctive and deeply personal style propelled him to international fame with classics such as La Dolce Vita (1960), while four of his films won Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film: La Strada, The Nights of Cabiria, 8½, and Amarcord. Working at the intersection of memory, fantasy, and autobiography, Fellini created a cinematic language so recognizable that his name became an adjective, a measure of how thoroughly a single sensibility can transform a medium.
To understand that sensibility in its full depth requires a guide who has spent a career inside the films and their context. Peter Bondanella, Distinguished Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Indiana University in Bloomington, is among the foremost Fellini scholars in the world. The author of The Cinema of Federico Fellini (1992) and the Pulitzer Prize-nominated The Eternal City: Roman Images in the Modern World (1987), Bondanella has devoted much of his scholarly life to mapping the cultural and artistic forces that shaped Fellini's imagination, bringing to the task both rigorous film scholarship and a deep knowledge of Italian literary and visual culture.
In the conversation that follows, Bondanella guides us into Fellini's world, illuminating the sources of his imagery, the nature of his artistry, and why the films of a man who grew up pressing his face against a cinema window in provincial Italy continue to speak, with such force and such strangeness, to audiences around the world.
Charles Carlini: How did you become interested in Italian cinema in general, and in Federico Fellini, in particular?
Peter Bondanella: I received a master's degree in Political Science from Stanford and a doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon with a Renaissance and Italian concentration. My academic journey was not straightforward; I couldn't take any film courses, which were not offered at the time. To stay current with contemporary Italy, I pursued a research grant in 1974 that allowed me to watch 50 Italian films in Paris over six weeks. My connection with Fellini began during a course I taught on his films at Indiana University. An acquaintance of Fellini's publicity agent was in attendance, leading to a memorable meeting arranged by Mario Longardi.
After my first book on Fellini was published, I had the opportunity to dine with him in the hills outside Rome, an experience that deepened my appreciation for his cinema and led to significant collaborations.
CC: What aspect of Fellini's work, personality, and vision did you (and still do) find the most intriguing and fascinating?
PB: Another adjective employed to describe Fellini's style is "baroque." Baroque or Felliniesque both point to a richness of Fellini's imagery, a willingness to give us ten great visual ideas when one would be sufficient just to narrate a story. Fellini tells stories with images, not with words. And these images, when successful, connect to our subconscious in a way that transcends barriers of culture or language.
CC: It is said that Fellini's childhood exposure to carnivalesque characters such as clowns and vaudevillians has shaped his imagination and films, and that he was among the most intensely autobiographical film directors. However, he was once quoted saying: "I have invented myself entirely. A childhood, a personality, longings, dreams, and memories, all in order to enable me to tell them." So the question is, are Fellini's films purely autobiographical or tinted with fiction?
PB: Every artist's work is inevitably influenced by their autobiography. While Fellini often resisted reductive interpretations of his films, it is crucial to recognize that his narratives blend personal experiences with imaginative elements. For instance, the character Guido from 8½ does not directly mirror Fellini's own schooling, and the boy in Amarcord reflects the life of a childhood friend. Ultimately, Fellini's storytelling is a tapestry woven from his life, dreams, and the stories of others, serving as a rich canvas for his unique artistic vision.
CC: Was there anyone Fellini drew inspiration from, or did he blaze his own trails entirely?
PB: Fellini certainly learned a great deal from Roberto Rossellini, but not film style. What he learned from Rossellini was that the crucial thing in filmmaking was a vision, to see one's story in images rather than words. Moreover, he learned from Rossellini that an artist should not be intimidated by technology.
Actually, Fellini was probably more influenced by early American cartoon artists Winsor McCay's Little Nemo cartoon series and Frederick Burr Opper's Happy Hooligan cartoon series than by any single film director, except for Rossellini. The character Happy Hooligan was a precursor of Chaplin's Little Tramp character, and both Opper and Chaplin formed Fellini's idea of what would eventually become Gelsomina in La Strada and Cabiria in The Nights of Cabiria, both played by his wife, Giulietta Masina.
McCay was important because his cartoon figure Little Nemo began each new and fantastic adventure by dreaming, and dreams were always the source of Fellini's inspiration. From the time he was a small child, he drew cartoons and caricatures. He was a precocious cartoonist and used his sketches to construct every film he shot.
CC: Fellini was friendly with Roberto Rossellini, another great Italian director. What was his relationship with and view of other idiosyncratic filmmakers of his era, for example, Ingmar Bergman?
PB: Fellini generally never said a bad word about other directors, although the same cannot be said about his colleagues in his regard. About the closest he came to a negative remark was in response to Rossellini's critique of La Dolce Vita. Obviously jealous over the attention lavished on his former pupil, Rossellini allegedly said that it was the work of a provincial, a dismissive remark that Luchino Visconti must have agreed with since he apparently said the film was something that might have been made by an aristocrat's servants peering through a keyhole. Fellini's response, I think, was most revealing: before a metaphysical reality, he noted, we are all provincials. Generally, he admired anyone-Bergman, Buñuel, Antonioni, and, of course, Rossellini-who had a personal vision and knew how to express it in film.
CC: Fellini was quite influenced by the teachings of Carl Jung. In what way did Jung's philosophy impact Fellini's work?
PB: Fellini's encounter with Jung's work and Jungian analysis in the late 1950s encouraged him to have confidence in his own dreams. Unlike Freudian psychology, which according to Fellini tended to see dreams as a form of neurosis, Jung's view of dreams was more conducive to the work of an artist, since it tended to underscore the creative potential of dreams.
Under the advice of a Jungian analyst, Ernst Bernhard (1896-1965), Fellini began to sketch his dream life and eventually compiled at least two huge notebooks, copiously illustrated with commentary that has just been published in a facsimile edition. Many of Fellini's films from this period to the end of his life were directly linked to his attempt to use his dream life as an inspirational source for his films. Perhaps 8½, Juliet of the Spirits, and The City of Women are the three films that most completely represent Fellini's debt to Jungian psychoanalytic ideas.
CC: Is anyone today making movies in a style similar to Fellini's?
PB: Fellini's impact upon filmmakers has been enormous (he has always been more popular among directors than film critics). Martin Scorsese based the protagonist on the brutish Zampanò of La Strada; his breakthrough film Mean Streets owes a huge debt to I Vitelloni, and he even did a version of the conclusion of 8½ in one of his early student films. Without Fellini, we would not have Bob Fosse's Sweet Charity (an adaptation of The Nights of Cabiria) and All That Jazz (a version of 8½), Woody Allen's Stardust Memories, Peter Greenaway's 8½ Women, or Spike Jonze's Adaptation—all indebted to 8½. Nor would we have the musical Nine. Any time a film director decides to speak of the art of cinematic creation, he or she will inevitably have to come to terms with Fellini.
CC: Can American audiences truly appreciate Fellini's artistry?
PB: While American audiences often embrace Fellini's films, there remains a challenge in fully appreciating the nuances of his artistry, particularly due to cultural and linguistic barriers. However, my experience teaching Italian cinema has shown that students, even those initially reluctant, are drawn to his work. Fellini's ability to resonate with the subconscious of viewers allows for a profound connection that transcends language.
CC: What is your own favorite Fellini film?
PB: I love three of them equally: 8½; La Strada; and Amarcord. Each film employs a different style and represents a different stage of Fellini's career, but they are all unforgettable and deeply moving in ways that are difficult to analyze in solely logical terms.
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