Frederico Fellini

How 48 hours at large in LA turned Fellini into a maestro

A new film will suggest what happened when director Federico Fellini vanished for two days in 1957

Paul Harris

guardian.co.uk, Saturday 12 May 2012 13.36 BST


Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina at the airport in Rome on their return from the 1957 Oscars. Photograph: Mario Torrisi/AP

It is a cinematic mystery surrounding the disappearing act of one of the greatest names in the history of film.

A new movie is set to explore what may have happened when the celebrated Italian film director Federico Fellini disappeared for 48 hours on his first visit to America, where he was due to attend the Oscar awards.

Instead of a smooth trip to the 1957 ceremony, the man who was to make such classics as La Dolce Vita and 8½ almost missed the awards gala after going missing for two days somewhere in Los Angeles. Fellini Black and White, to be written and directed by Homeland producer Henry Bromell, and starring Brazilian actor Wagner Moura as Fellini, will suggest the film-maker fell under the spell of Hollywood and America in the 1950s and spent the two days discovering jazz, surfing and romancing a local lover who was a vet. He then emerged as a changed man who broke with his previous neo-realist style and went on to create his greatest movie hits.

Of course, there is no real evidence for any of that, but Fellini experts are welcoming the project. "It is a great idea. He was the sort of guy that used to just get in a cab and go off on a tangent and he had a talent for being in the right place at the right time," said Professor Peter Bondanella, a film expert at Indiana University and the author of a book on the Italian maestro.

Fellini Black and White is a step in a different direction for Bromell, whose previous films include major mainstream Hollywood fare such as the action comedy Get Smart. But it boasts a strong cast that should go some way to satisfying Fellini fans. Aside from Moura, it is also set to star William H Macy, Peter Dinklage and Terrence Howard.

Bondanella said Fellini had a clear love of many aspects of America. "He would have found some place like LA fascinating. It was a dream factory at that time. That was what it was all about in those days," he said. But Bondanella added that there was a risk that the new movie could overstate the impact of his experiences across the Atlantic when it came to Fellini's artistic development. "He had interesting things to say about America. But the things that I love most about Fellini are really things that make him most Italian," he said.

Fellini Black and White is not the only Fellini-linked project currently in the works. Another eagerly anticipated movie that has just been announced is The Days of Mary, a loose remake of Fellini's Nights of Cabiria. The movie removes Fellini's central character, a prostitute searching futilely for love in Rome, and replaces her with a young working woman in Reno, Nevada, engaged in the same romantic pursuit. The main character will be played by Juliette Lewis, famous for numerous high-profile roles, including one half of a serial-killing couple in Oliver Stone's controversial Natural Born Killers.

The two projects reveal a continuing fascination with Fellini, whose film career spanned almost five decades from the early 1940s to his last film, The Voice of the Moon, which came out just three years before his death in 1990. Fellini's body of work won five Oscars and was nominated for a dozen more and he became known for a flamboyant cinematic style focused on beautiful and arresting imagery. The moment from La Dolce Vita where Swedish actress Anita Ekberg bathes fully dressed in the Trevi fountain in Rome has become one of the most famous scenes in film history.

However, Fellini is also famed for being more popular with film directors than he is with movie critics and especially with academic film theorists, though a notable exception is Bondanella. "Fellini has a reputation for not being intellectual. There is a side to Fellini that is childlike and adolescent. But directors see, they don't think. They love him because he was all about vision and they are not especially interested in what the latest theory might be," he said.

Fellini certainly has a legion of ordinary film fans across the globe. But that also means that directors seeking to tackle his life or, as in the case of The Days of Mary, remake his works could face a difficult time. The news that Nights of Cabiria was being given a modern update and put before potential financial backers in this year's Cannes film festival met with a hostile reception in certain quarters. "We presume they'll … basically lose everything that made Fellini's original one of his best, and an Oscar winner to boot," wrote film critic Kevin Jagernauth on the film blog The Playlist. He then added furiously: "Hopefully buyers in Cannes will know better than to get involved with this."

La Dolce Vita: No 23 best arthouse film of all time

Federico Fellini, 1960

Steve Rose

The Guardian, Wednesday 20 October 2010


Marcello Mastroianna and Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita (1960). Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

Previously associated with neo realist tales of poverty and hardship, Federico Fellini's career, and Italy's public image, took a sudden shift here. It was time to replace those associations of bombed-out, postwar landscapes with hip, thriving modern culture in all its glory and squalor.

La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life)
Production year: 1960
Country: Rest of the world
Cert (UK): 18
Runtime: 176 mins
Directors: Federico Fellini
Cast: Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimee, Marcello Mastroianni

Always a master of the grand tableau, Fellini captures Rome in staggering breadth, from the opening aerial shots of the city, the narrow streets, prostitutes' bedrooms through to aristocratic homes and around the historic landmarks on the back of a Vespa. He's like a tireless, voluble tour guide; you're never quite sure where he's going but you're compelled to follow.

His protagonist, Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni), is also led along for much of the picture, a journalist on the trail of the next story or in thrall to the new idols of the age, such as the Hollywood starlet Sylvia (Anita Ekberg), after whom he wades into the Trevi fountain in the film's most famous scene.

Rubini is the epitome of continental suaveness, but he's a conflicted soul, prey to the city's tensions – between tradition and modernity, morality and hedonism, fantasy and reality. It's easy to forget how fresh and bold this all was at the time, and how the film was condemned by the Catholic church and Italian patriots, among many others.