/View.info/ Federico Fellini / 1920 – 1993/ was perhaps the “most Italian” and at the same time the “most universal” director of Italy. “Eight and a half”, “The road”, “Nights of Cabiria”, “Roma”, “Amarcord”, “Clowns”, “The city of women”, “And the ship travels…” – the work of a magician, without whose presence it is difficult to imagine the past twentieth century.
His world has long been more than a cinematic one – it is also part of the spirit of the age in which we have the fortune or misfortune to live.
Fellini connected in a unique, ingenious way the grotesque and the sublime, the nostalgic and the satirical, the buffoonish and the lyrical, to create a new, unique genre in the seventh art, which after him can hardly be reached. We simply don’t have a director of his caliber today.
Ognyan STAMBOLIEV
WORDS OF THE GREAT DIRECTOR
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My cousin, who is very fond of compiling family trees, discovered that my mother’s name, Barbiani, was known as early as the 15th century in the papal court of Martin IV. This great-grandfather of mine, a pharmacist and alchemist, was involved in some noisy process with poisons. He was sentenced and spent 34 years /!/ taming the rats and spiders in the Vatican prison. Maybe it was from him that I inherited the taste for directing.
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What could a country boy in Mussolini’s Italy have been thinking? for high school, for church, for American movies on Saturdays, and in the summer for the beach and the girls in bathing suits.
I don’t have many memories, but I put them into my films. By giving them to the public, I erased some of them and can no longer tell the real from the fictional.
Real memories are covered by the painted prospectuses on which the sea is depicted, and the geors of my youth in Rimini are pushed out by the rough elbows of the actors and extras of my films…
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I feel like I’ve been shooting the same film all my life: the same images, the same material, seen from different angles.
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Cinema is a divine way of presenting life that rivals God the Father!
No art can create such a world, so close to the real one…
For me, the perfect place for a movie is the Fifth Studio of “Cinechita”. In this room, when it is empty, I create a world overwhelmed by Absolute Feeling, by Ecstasy!
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Light is the substance of cinema. It is ideology, feeling, color, tone, depth, atmosphere and even narrative!
Light in the cinema helps, erases, enriches, nuances, emphasizes: it makes the fantastic real and the real a dream.
The light suggests, suggests, turns the banal and the everyday into a mirage. Light shines or streaks: it creates expression where the latter is lacking.
Light outlines the elegance of a figure, emphasizes a landscape, makes even the simplest decor magical.
Light is the first of the effects in the cinema – it is considered magic, alchemy, a machine for miracles…
The film is not written with ink, but with light, and style is expressed only through it!
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I would have been happy if I had been born at least twenty years ago, so that I could work in the cinema of the pioneers. To participate in the birth of this amazing art. I would be more satisfied than I am now when there is talk of structuralism or semiotics.
I’m sorry that I lost a lot of time between my individual films, that I dropped a lot of projects, and I shouldn’t have…
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Many years ago, I believed that as I grew older, I would be able to read the books that had been waiting for me for so long faithfully and endlessly patiently, that I would go to museums, I would even visit India and Tibet. And now I console myself, if only temporarily, by thinking of the great old men of whom Simon de Beauvoir speaks in his wonderful book.
I read and re-read the pages on Tolstoy, Giuseppe Verdi and Victor Hugo. And I’m looking for some parallels between them and me, but I still can’t find them…
Note and translation from Italian:
Ognyan Stamboliev
#Cinema #written #light #years #birth #Federico #Fellini
