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Editor’s Note

Federico Fellini, one of the most influential directors in film history, is widely regarded as an elusive storyteller and an imaginative dreamer - in his films, "everything can happen". In his artistic biography "Fellini's Films", Peter Bondanella attempts to lead us into Fellini's film world full of adventures and illusions in a rational and passionate way. The author's discussion covers Fellini's entire career, linking his directorial achievements with his work as a cartoonist and joke writer in the fascist era and his experience as a screenwriter for neo-realist films. At the same time, Bondanella explores many easily overlooked themes related to Fellini's films, such as literature, politics and feminism, with keen insight. Although the task is to interpret an artist who focuses on constructing mysterious dreams and chaotic realities, as Fellini himself said, Bondanella "successfully reproduces all aspects of the expressiveness of film art". This article is the preface of the book, and The Paper is authorized to publish it by Zhejiang University Press.

Federico Fellini

I am a liar, but an honest one. People accuse me of not telling the same story the same way. But that's because I made up the whole story from the beginning, and repeating myself seems boring to me and unkind to others.

Many people have been telling me that I am a liar, but other people lie too, and I always hear big lies about me from others. I could deny it, and I tried. Unfortunately, because I am a liar, no one believes me.

I am a person who does not agree with "labeling". As far as I know, labels only belong to suitcases and have no meaning in the field of art.

The most amazing thing about film critics is that they use critical methods from hundreds of years ago on works that could not have existed a hundred years ago.

Federico Fellini's reputation among critics was established as early as the great success of his films in the 1950s and 1960s. The release of many of his works became an important milestone in the rise of European auteur films. In the past decade, if it did not replace Hollywood, it at least challenged its hegemony. In the eyes of the public, Fellini's image as a director is that of a creative superstar and an imaginative magician, which is probably different from any other film director in the post-war period. His name has become synonymous with fantasy and exuberant creativity, even for people who have never seen his films. Many of Fellini's films, such as "La Strada", "Nights of Cabiria", "La Dolce Vita", "8 1/2", "Love Mythology" and "Amarcord", have unified the almost impossible coexistence of original artistic talent and record-breaking box office.

In preparing this book, which has been in the works for many years, I have tried to properly place these personal works of Fellini in the aesthetic and academic context of Italian culture. Although Fellini is often described by commentators and critics as a seductive public figure, a conceited Latin genius who lacks the critical thinking characteristic of European intellectuals, he can constantly foresee the shifting film tastes and intellectual trends in his works. As Milan Kundera has said, unlike many great artists who are fully understood after their death, today's public and critics may "no longer" fully understand Fellini. Kundera believes that the reason why Fellini's unique film style is ignored by contemporary critics is that in such an era dominated by kitsch and mass media, the director's personal fantasy world has nowhere to go. Fellini's films are precisely aimed at demystifying the mass culture that contemporary audiences are addicted to - this critical operation process only reveals that "the voice of culture is always becoming more and more difficult to hear, and people are gradually losing the ability to think, question, ask questions, examine the meaning of things, feel surprise and originality."

To fully appreciate the complexity of Fellini’s long career, we must briefly examine his artistic starting points and the imaginative wellsprings that Fascist Italian popular culture provided him. Moreover, a closer look at Fellini’s years as a screenwriter before his turn as a director sheds light on many of his important aesthetic tendencies as a director. Until La Dolce Vita, Fellini’s filmmaking had developed in a relatively traditional manner, as an original explorer of Italian neorealism, a genre he contributed greatly to as a screenwriter, fully exploring but ultimately exhausting this historical resource. I will take Fellini’s early career in chronological order, and after 8 1/2, he turned to a completely different type of filmmaking, organizing the director’s later career around key themes. This inductive approach to Fellini’s films is more illuminating than a traditional chronological approach, because it emphasizes the most original aspects of Fellini’s recent films, as highlighted in Chapter 4, which discusses Fellini’s meta-cinema. Chapter 5 will focus on Fellini’s unique use of literary sources in The Myth of Love and Toby the Damned, neither of which can be defined as “adaptations” in the traditional sense. The commonplace view that some critics have of Fellini’s lack of interest in social and political issues will be tested in Chapter 6, which discusses Amarcord and The Dress Rehearsal of the Orchestra. Chapter 7 will explore how Fellini represents the complex issue of sexuality and women in his analysis of Juliet and the Devil, Casanova, and City of Women. Finally, Chapter 8 will focus on Fellini’s latest film, The Song of the Moon, revealing its connections to the ideas and images of Fellini’s earlier “poetic cinema.” All of my observations and comments are based on the original Italian version of the film, although I will also refer to subtitled or dubbed versions released outside Italy.

As a bewildered but nonjudgmental observer of life, Fellini never preaches or patronizes, never posing as what Ezra Pound called “a poet on a perch.” More importantly, Fellini considers himself an entertainer and storyteller rather than an intellectual, and he evaluates his work by the extent to which the visual experience of the film can inspire an emotional response in the audience, rather than considering how the logical arguments or rational expositions of a particular ideological position can successfully enhance the audience's cognition. Fellini's films allow us to trace back to the authenticity of the director and appreciate the world he created with the perspective of a child who is astonished and fresh as the heart of every adult audience. This is extremely valuable. However, despite Fellini's desire to remain in the adolescence of imagination forever, the complexity of the film narrative constructed in his work must be regarded as one of the most outstanding "intellectual" achievements of contemporary Italian culture. This paradox will also be explored in detail in this book.

"Fellini's Films", written by Peter Bondanella [USA], translated by Yang Liu and Jia Jing, Qizhenguan｜Zhejiang University Press, August 2024.