Suddenly the wonderful alchemy happened. Dreams became images, words and music, the spectacle of the world expanded. It was necessary to invent a word to define the prodigy: we said “Fellinian.” For forty years and twenty-four films, Federico Fellini, visionary, conductor and ballet master, brought tenderness and mockery, fantasies and the things in life to dance with his megaphone. He knew how to trigger immense waves of emotions with the tiny smile of Giulietta Masina, he made large illuminated boats appear from memory, he entrusted giant women with learning gestures of love, at the beginning of his crazy nights monsters washed up on beaches. He had made cinema the most comprehensive, dazzling, grotesque and sensitive of all fabulous operas. On Sunday October 31, 1993, the day of his fiftieth wedding to Giulietta, the maestro stopped directing his divine comedy…
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In 1939, Giulietta was 18 years old and starred in a radio soap opera in Rome written by Federico. One day he calls her because he wants to make a film of this successful soap opera. It’s love at first sight on the first date. This resulted in his first film: “The Fires of the Music Hall”. With “La strada” he turns her into the moving Gelsomina, companion of the acrobat Zampano. But for this genius, woman had a thousand facets and “Juliette of the Spirits” is a fabulous love poem in pictures that he wrote for the woman. “There are unions that cannot be destroyed,” says Giulietta. I am his wife, his daughter, his mother, his lover. For me he is a multiplication of men. I am happy. »
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This woman magician was the man of only one love…
One day he confessed that he had loved all the women he had turned. Giulietta, whom she called “the courtesans of King Federico’s court”, confessed to having suffered from her madness, which fortunately was short-lived… However, this poet of women could never have imagined herself without the muse and confidante Living all their dreams For Rome’s most legendary couple, living in their famous apartment on Via Margutta was like an adventure. Many years had passed since their love at first sight, but until the end, Federico and Giulietta watched over each other, bound by “this very intimate, deeply spiritual and very secret community,” as the maestro put it. Giulietta died five months after Federico.
Fellini was born on January 20, 1920 in Rimini into a lower middle class family. “I was, he remembers, a quiet little boy; my father was a businessman. » At the age of 9, the “quiet” child would have run away with a traveling circus, been found and brought back. He studied with priests. He was always good at drawing. At the age of 17, his first sketches were published in a political-satirical weekly newspaper in Florence. The following year he was in Rome, making a living doing comics and caricatures in restaurants. Soon he was writing sketches for radio and theater. He quickly worked on his first scripts. In 1941 he met Roberto Rossellini, whose two films “Rome, the Open City” and “Paisà” paved the royal road to neorealism in cinema. Fellini was involved in the script for “Rome Open City” alongside Rossellini and Amidei.
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In 1959, Fellini brought together for the first time those who would become both his favorite actors and the emblematic characters of his new universe: Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni, heroes of “La dolce vita”. The film, a key work in his career, caused a major scandal in Italy: it depicted the pomp and adventures of revelers on the Via Venetto. It did justice to the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival the following year. “La dolce vita” will become a classic of the seventh art and will make its director known worldwide. Fellini definitely became Fellini. “Marcello is a friend, a companion,” he said. The help he gives me is not only based on his acting skills, but also on the way he puts himself in my hands with full confidence. On screen, the actor will be his double, another will be himself.
Every one of his shoots is a party
Each of his shoots is a celebration, as this big-screen metaphysician, admired and respected by the century’s greatest intellectuals, refuses to take himself seriously. Stage No. 5 at Cinecitta, where he built the huge sets for “Huit et demi”, is for him the most perfect theater of illusions. In total he will shoot six of his films there. “On an empty set,” he says, “I immediately experience absolute emotion, thrill and ecstasy.” A bare studio is a space to fill, a world to create.”
When he died, Giulietta Masina wanted him to return one last time to that magical place that inspired him so much. There, in the reconstructed setting of Intervista, his penultimate film, the burning chapel was built under a blue sky with pink clouds, where his friends came to greet his remains. Like a crazy sequence that Fellini could have directed, with silence as the only soundtrack.
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