Film professor Mark Williams commemorates Fellini's birthday (Jan. 20, 1920) with commentary on his widespread influence

Posted 01/19/01

Not many artists come to occupy a place in everyday conversations.

The term "Fellini-esque" has been deployed since the 1950s, referencing imagery and media effects akin to the indelible films directed by the Italian genius Federico. The term has some range of interpretation: operatic scale configured via dream logic; ennui or wistful emotionality suddenly punctuated by eroticism, cruelty, or the marvelous; a circus of self-reflexivity that still harbors a romanticism about its medium. Especially due to masterworks such as 8 1/2 (1963) and Amarcord (1973), Fellini will always be remembered for his poetic roundelays, remarkable for their startling originality-part Rossellini, part Proust, and part Busby Berkeley.

But I want to emphasize the crucial role Fellini played in the rise of post-WWII film culture. As a young itinerant cartoonist and would-be journalist, Fellini found work at a satirical magazine in the late 1930s in Rome. He also began writing for and working as an assistant to music hall comedian Aldo Fabrizi. He and friends opened The Funny Face Shop, specializing in caricatures and other mementos for servicemen to send home. Rossellini met him there, inviting Fellini to collaborate on what would become the foundational NeoRealist film, Rome Open City (1946), which introduced audiences to Anna Magnani, and starred Fabrizi as a priest drawn into resistance politics. Fellini also worked with Rossellini on Paisa (1946), and then co-wrote and starred with Magnani in The Miracle, a film which led to censorship battles in the U.S. courts that ultimately decreed motion pictures to be an art form, protected by First Amendment rights.

His subsequent work as a director accelerated the emergent re-understanding of film as art. Fellini seemed to regularly push cinematic representation somewhere new, a quality that drew praise but also much disdain from all sides. He was accused of betraying NeoRealism, of parading anti-clerical sentiments, of diluting leftist political potentials. But literary critics and college professors, inspired by the possibilities of film, embraced Fellini, Bergman, and others as auteurs, lending the popular medium an academic foothold. It isn't an overstatement to suggest that Fellini is one of the reasons that Film Studies Departments have come to exist on college campuses all over the world today.

Fellini introduced the world to the great Marcello Mastroianni and to his beloved Giulietta Masina. His aesthetics left an imprint on everyone from Woody Allen to Bob Fosse to Christian Metz and REM. His influence has been so broad that our own memory of him might be called Fellini-esque. Discover him again: Asa Nisi Masa.