Fellini @ 100: "Amarcord"

A few volunteers from Team Experience are revisiting Federico Fellini classics for his centennial. Here's Eric Blume...

 

Federico Fellini’s 1975 film Amarcord is considered the culmination of his style and artistry, the “most Fellini” of Fellini films, the one that won him his last (of four) Best Foreign Film Oscar, as well as prizes from the New York Film Critics and National Board of Review as director of the year.  And he never made a film afterwards that rivaled its success or connection with audiences... 

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Fellini @ 100: "Roma" (1972)

A few volunteers from Team Experience are revisiting Federico Fellini classics for his centennial. Here's Cláudio Alves...

If Rome is the Eternal City, then Federico Fellini might be the Eternal Filmmaker. His cinema exists outside of time, both ancient and strangely new. A filmography that's a circus of pleasures where the grotesque and the beautiful are hand-in-hand, always dancing to a song of transgression and perversity. The faith of the church and the clown's laughter coexist too, precariously, but assuredly, and the images their communion produce are profane marvels. Like ancient frescos, there's a patina of age to these pictures, but they're bright as if they were freshly painted by master artists.

Perhaps no single film better exemplifies these wonderful contradictions than Fellini's Roma…

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Fellini @ 100: His Self-Referential Masterwork "8½"

A few volunteers from Team Experience are revisiting Federico Fellini classics for his centennial. Here's Eurocheese...

A filmmaker stands out as a master because of the distinctiveness of their voice, and how they speak specifically to the human condition. Well, that, and a filmography where we can point to classics, even stone-cold masterpieces. If I was to ask you which director seemed to examine life through a fun house mirror, you might be able to guess we were talking about Fellini. I hadn’t rewatched 8½ (1963) in several years and one of the things I had forgotten, maybe because of the joyous memories of so many individual scenes, is the way the razor sharp editing creates such a sense of panic right from the start; we're watching our protagonist suffocating with hundreds of eyes on him. The iconic image of the director flying high in the sky like a kite, only to be pulled down to the ocean, adds terror to the upcoming, more realistic scenes. This movie itself must provide answers for him to escape his terrible fate.

The way the film consistently rushes one character after another at the camera gives us a taste of the control Mastroianni’s Guido is experiencing. He's both suffering from a god complex where he can toy with the depictions he is sending us, and building towards a fate he's desperate to avoid...

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Fellini @ 100: "La Strada"

A few volunteers from Team Experience are revisiting Federico Fellini classics for his centennial. Here's Mark Brinkerhoff...

My first recollection of watching La Strada is in a class at school as a youth. Oddly though, I neither can recall which class nor at what age exactly I saw it. But Federico Fellini’s 1954 breakthrough is nothing if not a film that sticks with you, like a bracing force which leaves an imprint that lasts.

A masterwork in Italian neorealism, La Strada (“The Road”) is set largely against the backdrop of a traveling circus, centering on a triangle of sorts between a trio of street performers...

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Intermission/Posterized: Dino De Laurentiis 100th

Today in showbiz history the famous and sometimes infamous producer Dino de Laurentiis was born in a province of Naples, Italy. We'll take an intermission on our five or six part celebration today but we hope you've enjoyed the write-ups on Bitter Rice (1949) and the Fellini years, the creation of Dinocitta and its famous high-grossing but also-flopping The Bible: In the Beginning (1966), and his early years in America with gritty dramas like Serpico (1973) and Death Wish (1974). We resume tomorrow evening with the much-derided but very successful King Kong (1976) which just so happened to be the film debut of Jessica Lange.

Until then which of these 18 early De Laurentiis' productions have you seen? Do you have a favourite?He produced hundreds of his films in his career, starting at the age of 20, so this is just a small sample of his work in the first 30+ decades of his career...

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