Federico Fellini (1920-2020)

There are restaurants called ‘La Dolce Vita’ all over the world. Words like paparazzi have made it into dictionaries. Airports, streets, piazzas and schools are named after Federico Fellini. And yet, as cinema scholars understand, Fellini’s films are not nearly as well-known as one might expect – even if university students will call him ‘Maestro’ without hesitation, when quizzed about the great directors in the history of cinema. There is almost no trace of Fellini on Amazon Prime or Netflix. In the best-case scenario, to most ‘millen- nials’ and ‘post-millennials’ La Dolce Vita (1960) is not a film, but an image seen on Instagram or YouTube: Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg taking a dip in the Trevi Fountain, two unrivalled ‘influencers’ promoting the Italian brand and economic boom. In other words, far from being part of a ‘shared culture’, Fellini’s films have been reduced, over the course of time, to the clichés and stereotypes that feed the constellation of meanings surrounding the term ‘Felliniesque’, and this often discourages new (and updated) readings of his work.

With hat and red scarf. The building of Federico Fellini’s public image. The centenary of the birth of director Federico Fellini in 2020 invites a unique opportunity to reassess his contribution to the history of Italian culture from new perspectives. With his monumental film production, which has been extensively studied—at least from La dolce vita forward—the Riminese director gradually seeped into Italy’s daily life. While his films have sparked lively debates since he first became popular in the 1950s, less attention has been devoted to the process that has led many scholars to consider him the emblematic figure of the film artist, both as a major character in the cultural history of Italy and as the symbol of what is quintessentially ‘Italian’. Unlike other Italian directors, Fellini became a newsworthy and publicized figure beginning in the 1960s. He contributed to the creation of an ‘elusive’ image of himself (Hodsdon 2017) both through the construction of several cinematic alter-egos and through unmistakable appearances with his hat and red scarf in documentaries, feature films, illustrated news magazines, press and TV reports, and other forms of media. Equally, he emerged as a staunch defender of certain political and cultural struggles, such as those against television commercials or against Berlusconi (who was still an editor at that time). Additionally, he became an object of scrutiny and discussion for journalists, critics, cinephiles, colleagues, and biographers searching for an openly hagiographical definition of the threshold of the Italian artistic tradition.