It was 12 o’clock on a sunny Sunday at the end of October 1993. Federico Fellini, a native of Rimini, was leaving the Umberto Primo Polyclinic in Rome, just 24 hours after his 50th wedding anniversary with Giulietta Masina. Since then, the shadow of his genius has spread across cinema and international culture, thousands of pages have been written about his work, his life, his inner world.
Memorable and somehow exhaustive is the monumental “Fellini 23 1/2” by Aldo Tassone, which was published by the Cineteca di Bologna on the occasion of his 100th birthday (January 20, 1920) and can be read together with the famous “Book of Dreams”. . edited by Gian Luca Farinelli, Sergio Toffetti and Felice Laudadio for Electa in 2019. These days it is almost impossible to engage with 20th century fantasy without repeatedly hearing echoes of “La strada” or “La dolce vita”. find. , from “Fellini 8 ½” or “Amarcord”, to the desperate and dreamy “La voci della luna”, which really appears in memory as his expressive testament from 1990.
How much he has influenced our view, the relationship between the conscious and the figurative unconscious, the photography of the changing times, can easily be seen in the direct and indirect tributes that other masters have paid him over the years.
Federico Fellini belongs to the generation that is making its way into the world in the wake of a new Italian cinema, literally created by Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica after the Second World War. In an extraordinary flourishing of his talents he is accompanied by those of Luchino Visconti and Michelangelo Antonioni.
However, today we can say that Fellini’s greatness lies in the fact that he was a genius, while the others were above all artists. These are the values, not just artistic ones, that today, thirty years later, mark an unbridgeable gap. Because his lesson can be understood, absorbed and remembered a thousand times, but it can only be reproduced with the birth of a new Fellini, certainly different from the original but equally powerful and unique. We can look at the work of the great Rimini and applaud him, but know that his immortality is only guaranteed through the filter of collective memory.
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