Choose only one? Impossible! That was the unanimous response of those summoned in this survey that seeks to investigate the most endearing film by Federico Fellini. An overflowed task (certainly fellinesca), because nothing that came out of his imagination was trivial. His films propose different trips through memory, sleep and oblivion, taking us through labyrinths of infinite exits.
Born in Rimini in 1920, this Monday, January 20, Fellini would be 100 years old. It is difficult to define it with a single image, because we could consider it a director of the circus of illusions, a man of childish soul and diabolical subconscious, a lustful obsessed with voluptuous and giant women, a fetishist fascinated with Anita Ekberg, Claudia Cardinale or Sophia Loren. A jovial artist on the street and a tyrant when the lights of the Cinecittà studio 5 come on. The fellinian identity is indefinable, as much as a dream can be.
—A difficult choice—
The task of choosing a work by Fellini over others has not depended on an academic analysis, but on an intimate and subjective reflection. This is what the poet and university professor Giovanna Pollarolo tells us, although she recognizes that films such as “8 1/2” and “La dolce vita” are her most emblematic films, in which the Fellini-Mastroianni duo is consolidated, the more successful and innovative according to critics, she joins the majority of creators she has chosen “Amarcord”, seduced by her endearing love of cinema. “Fellini invented a new language, a way of telling stories, an unmistakable style that transcends his cinema and gave us a word as useful as‘ felliniano ’to designate the excess, the monstrous, the real implausible,” says the writer.
A difficult choice, yes, but that is also a wonderful opportunity to remember the films of the great Italian director who, as the playwright César de María explains, the elders know with too much familiarity, “as a crazy neighbor and poet who knows us is known Surprise at night with the shadows cast in the window of his old house, ”he says.
“It is difficult for me to separate him from his music and his actors, because the genius of the directors at that time was to make the performances, music, emotions and words that made up his films inseparable,” adds the playwright. Thus, done the addition and subtraction, in our survey are “Amarcord” and “La dolce vita” as the most celebrated by respondents, also highlighting essential films such as “La Strada”, “8 1/2”, “And the ship goes ”,“ The nights of Cabiria ”and“ The city of women ”. A tight selection of the enormous treasure that this dreamer of cinema gave us, who knew how to anticipate the future; an artist capable of representing in his visions the illusions, falls and victories of an Italy that could well represent the world.
“Amarcord” (1973)
Rafo León, writer
Italian fascism was less political and efficient than operatic. No one ever portrayed that eerie character of fascism as Fellini did, indirectly and laterally in “Amarcord” (script in conjunction with Tonino Guerra). A year in the life of an imaginary town called Borgo, metaphor of the director’s native Rimini. The look of the adolescents records events and characters that move in the unnatural unreality to the circus. It is the ironic tenderness of the popular that saves a buffoon Italy from the debacle that would come with the second great war. “Amarcord” is a memory and, as such, crossed by sexual passion, humor, melancholy and absurdity.
Carmen Ollé, writer
I don’t know if it’s a favorite, because I liked “Roma” and “Satiricón”, but “Amarcord” is the one I remember the most. It also has sentimental value for me, because Enrique (Verástegui) and I went to see it together, and since then we did not stop celebrating the female character known as Volpina, the insatiable woman played by actress Josiane Tanzilli, with a beautiful face and ugly because of its rough expressions. This film accompanied our erotic relationship for a good time.
Fernando Ampuero, writer
Since I have to choose between the beautiful films of Fellini, which for me is a difficult task since I like all his cinema, today I give in to the first impulse: “Amarcord”. Fellini was there a dream cousin of Luis Buñuel, but more nostalgic, more tender, more melancholic; He was an Italian Proust, as the Cuban Cabrera Infante would say about this movie; and he was the most Italian of the Italians, perhaps because he never ceased to be the Rimini provincial, who loved Rome as the Romans themselves did not know how to love her.
Giovanna Pollarolo, writer
Fellini taught us to see differently; To listen and dream differently. To love. To wish. There are “Cabiria”, “La Strada”, “Juliet of the Spirits” where the beloved and beloved, always badly loved, Giulietta Masina builds female characters of an originality that deserve to be reviewed from gender studies and in light of the violence, harassment, abuse. But I keep “Amarcord”, the provincial life before the war; with the love of cinema, with the adolescent initiation, with the torn cry of Lallo climbed on the tree: “Io voglio una donna”.
“La dolce vita” (1960)
Gustavo Rodriguez, Writer
Seeing a soccer field next to a Roman aqueduct and a helicopter moving a Christ through the air, one intuits that he will attend an exceptional work. The next three hours confirm it: “La dolce vita” is the greatest period fresco that the cinema has given. The elegant decline that Marcello Rubini must report, the sensual Sylvia with a kitten on her head before bathing in the Trevi Fountain or begetting the term “paparazzi” would suffice as proof. But there is more: the border between the real and the fantastic has its most beautiful customs here.
Lorenzo Osores, Plastic artist
“La dolce vita” is unsurpassed. It is about the trajinar frivolous of a chronicler (Mastroianni) who writes for fascistoid publications. Such a simple plot is solved in a dizzying succession of unforgettable scenes: Rome and Via Veneto full of paparazzi; Anita Ekberg climbing the steps of San Pedro or dancing in the hot springs of Caracalla or bathing in the Trevi Fountain; Anouk Aimée among the pathetic court of a dilapidated castle or a young drugged and feathered in a stupid party are masterful images that scandalized the Vatican.
Emilio Bustamante, Film critic
“La dolce vita” is more than a film about the frivolous, mundane and brilliant Rome of the Italian postwar miracle, more than a film about a provincial journalist fascinated by the city lights, more than Anita Ekberg and Mastroianni in the Fontana say Trevi. It is a film that through a new style (hereinafter indelible by its author) represents modernity as none. Where the objective facts are confused with dreams, memories, imagination and hallucinations, and they all fade away, leaving only emptiness and melancholy.
“8 1/2” (1963)
Alberto Isola, actor and theater director
I saw her in a movie club. At the end of the sixties, it was the only possibility for a high school student to watch movies “for people over 18 or 21”, and this was. I had heard my paternal family speak, on Sunday lunches, about that rare and understandable Fellini. And somewhat scandalous. It was literally a fulguration. Although my understanding at all was that of a teenager, I was dazzled by the enormous freedom of the film, the ease with which Fellini moved from reality to dream, from drama to parody, from current to memory, creating a world unique, that moved to the beat of the beautiful music of Nino Rota. The Saraghina, the wife and the mistress, the diva out of date, the old woman who was sentenced to the second floor of memories … A splendid black and white, the hallucinated costumes of Piero Gherardi … I wanted to be Fellini. Over time, the film was transformed into something else, something much more complex, deeper. The story of an artistic crisis that is also, as always, the story of a human crisis. As I became entrenched in the world of theater, as an actor and as a director, the doubts of Guido Anselmi, the alter ego of Fellini perfectly embodied by Marcello Mastroianni, became close, distressing. And the final solution, always hopeful. I see her again from time to time and she continues to dazzle me. It is also my favorite movie of all.
“And the ship goes” (1983)
Micaela Chirif, writer
The captivating first minutes of “And the ship goes”, mute and in black and white, seduced me in such a way that I surrendered to the film without resisting. It is impossible to recount the strange and fascinating characters of the film, as well as the succession of bizarre situations that occur with the naturalness of everyday life. Each character is irreplaceable and essential to paint the portrait, very beautiful, of a decadent society that goes, without knowing it, to its own shipwreck. If you have not seen it, do it. In addition to enjoying the genius of Fellini, you can see one of the rare performances of the extraordinary Pina Bausch.
“The nights of Cabiria” (1957)
Melina León, filmmaker
It is the Fellini movie that I remember with more affection and admiration, perhaps because Giulietta Masina is Cabiria and Fellini is more than ever a genius in love. “The nights of Cabiria” is humanity, in its constant dance between tragedy, hope, love and poverty. And the music of Nino Rotta is pure poetry. And photography is a dream.
And you dance mambo.
And in those 110 minutes we are all an Italian prostitute who dreams of finding love and we want her to be happy, so that the world is not so terrible even if only once.
“The city of women” (1980)
Luis Freire, writer
In these times of “Me Too”, inclusive language and political corrections sometimes quite incorrect, “The city of women” comes to mind. The great Marcello Mastroianni, with his face of gentle seducer, gets into a city or place populated solely by women, all of them on a war footing against the traditional roles imposed by that secular patriarchate, so Italian, so Latin, so sadly Peruvian . The film is a feminist allegory in tune with the seventies counterculture, full of fellinian surrealism, acid irony and, of course, topicality.
“The Strada” (1954)
César de María, playwright
“The Clowns” hurt me the first time and I tried to steal something for a play with dying clowns. “Ginger and Fred” referred me to my grandparents, whom I saw a waltz dance at midnight in a light so dim that I thought I dreamed. That is Fellini: a very long dream divided into films like “Amarcord”, “8 1/2”, or “La dolce vita”. But I remember those of “La Strada”, that wonderful couple that makes us laugh in the midst of their pain and violence, that contrast between the agonizing fragility of Masina and the sensitive brutality of Quinn. Watching that movie I understood how much damage we can do to each other lovers, creators and all humans when we hide what we feel and let the need stiffen us. And how many sad endings would we save if we detect love in time and save ourselves from the misery and hatred imposed by this refugee ship that is the world.
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