His mother, Ida Barbiani (1896–1984), came from a bourgeois Catholic family of Roman merchants. His father, Urbano Fellini (1894–1956), born to a family of Romagnol peasants and small landholders from Gambettola, moved to Rome in 1915 as a baker apprenticed to the Pantanella pasta factory. On 25 January, at the San Nicolò church he was baptized Federico Domenico Marcello Fellini. 2.7 Late films and projects (1981–1990)Įarly life and education Rimini (1920–1938) įellini was born on 20 January 1920, to middle-class parents in Rimini, then a small town on the Adriatic Sea.Fellini was ranked 2nd in the directors' poll and 7th in the critics' poll in Sight & Sound's 2002 list of the greatest directors of all time. His other well-known films include La Strada (1954), Nights of Cabiria (1957), 8½ (1963),' Juliet of the Spirits (1965), the "Toby Dammit" segment of Spirits of the Dead (1968), Fellini Satyricon (1969), Roma (1972), Amarcord (1973), and Fellini's Casanova (1976). He received an honorary award for Lifetime Achievement at the 65th Academy Awards in Los Angeles. His films have ranked highly in critical polls such as that of Cahiers du Cinéma and Sight & Sound, which lists his 1963 film 8 + 1⁄ 2 as the 10th-greatest film.įor La Dolce Vita Fellini won the Palme d'Or additionally, he was nominated for twelve Academy Awards, and won four in the category of Best Foreign Language Film, the most for any director in the history of the Academy. He is recognized as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time. It is a film I am sure to revisit the film as I continue to study the director.Federico Fellini, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI ( Italian: 20 January 1920 – 31 October 1993) was an Italian film director and screenwriter known for his distinctive style, which blends fantasy and baroque images with earthiness. Special features include a 1953 Fellini short, Agenzia Matriomoniale (Marriage Agency), a featurette entitled “Fellini’s Circus” that references The Clowns in context to the director’s entire body of work, and a book about the making of the movie.Īll in all, The Clowns is extremely interesting viewing that provides great insight into the inner workings of Federico Fellini and his filmic inspiration by the circus.
FEDERICO FELLINI CRITERION TV
The video is soft, with muted colors, which I suspect has to do with The Clowns initially being a 1970 TV movie. Video and audio of this DVD release are clean but unspectacular. One is definitely left with a distinct feeling of sadness at The Clown’s completion-Fellini definitely believes society has lost something important with the demise of the clown.
The big top sequences at the beginning and end are a far cry from the slick, awe-inspiring set pieces of mainstream Hollywood fare these are course, rough, more “real” despite being “staged” in the sense of a film inside a film. I was absolutely convinced that I was watching a narrative feature until the sudden switch to documentary (actually, the initial switch is to the faux documentary, thus continuing the illusion that the film is narrative a slight bit longer).
Structurally The Clowns is unlike anything I have ever seen. It is simultaneously Fellini’s tribute to the clown’s craft, an elegy to the dying breed of traditional clowns, and his sick revenge for the terror that clown’s inflicted upon him as a child. Indeed, the clowns in that sequence are creepy, dirty, rough men, and Fellini’s tight packing of manic activity into the 4:3 screen provides for an extremely claustrophobic effect that augments the disturbing nature of this particular circus.įinally, Section 3 consists of the interviewed clowns from Section 2 performing a giant funeral routine for one of their own, a recreation of their art for Fellini as documentarian that we also see being shot from the pseudo-documentary perspective of the director making his film. Oh, and Section 1? It is actually Fellini’s recreation of his memories of the circus as he saw it as a child, when the clowns in fact terrified him. To be totally accurate, Section 2 is simultaneously a documentary on the clowns and a faux documentary of the making of said documentary, with Fellini and his crew “playing themselves." And when I say playing, I mean playing-the footage feels very much staged, not your video camera spying in on the set that we have now seen in so many DVD bonus features. Segue into Section 2, which is a documentary about the many great European clowns of the early- and mid-twentieth century.
If this were all one watched of the film, one would think The Clowns was a narrative. One would be wrong. Section 1 tells the typical story of a circus coming to a small Italian town, concluding with an extensive, almost gratuitously long performance sequence inside the big top.
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