Federico Fellini

Federico Fellini began as a neorealist screenwriter and ended by inventing a word for the opposite of neorealism. He came from Rimini, drew caricatures for a living, wrote for radio and for Rossellini - the script of Rome, Open City is partly his - and directed his own films from 1950. La Strada, with his wife Giulietta Masina as a simple-minded girl sold to a strongman, won the first Academy Award for a foreign film. La Dolce Vita in 1960 followed a gossip journalist through Roman nights, gave the language paparazzo from the name of a photographer character, and was denounced from the pulpit and by the Vatican newspaper. From 8½ onward the films abandoned plot for memory, dream and procession: circuses, faces cast for their strangeness, enormous sets built at Cinecittà rather than locations found in the street, which is exactly what neorealism had refused to do. Fellinian entered several languages. He won four Academy Awards for best foreign film and an honorary fifth, and married Masina for fifty years. Amarcord, a year in a Rimini boyhood under Fascism, won his fourth foreign-language Academy Award in 1975. He kept a notebook of dreams for thirty years, illustrated in colour, which was published after his death and explains a good deal of the imagery. Nino Rota wrote the music for every film until his death in 1979. Fellini directed Anita Ekberg into the Trevi Fountain in a February night shoot that lasted hours and left Marcello Mastroianni needing a wetsuit under his clothes. He and Giulietta Masina died five months apart.

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