Bibliography

Selected readings on Federico Fellini

Cinecitta

Federico Fellini
ISBN: 978-0289800287

Federico Fellini had a 40-year long association with Cinecitta, a film studio based in Rome founded by Benito Mussolini in 1937. This book looked at the Fellini’s work though his  journey with the studio.

The Cinema of Federico Fellini

Peter Bondanella
ISBN: 978-0691008752

This major artistic biography of Federico Fellini shows how his exuberant imagination has been shaped by popular culture, literature, and his encounter with the ideas of C. G. Jung, especially Jungian dream interpretation. Covering Fellini’s entire career, the book links his mature accomplishments to his first employment as a cartoonist, gagman, and sketch-artist during the Fascist era and his development as a leading neo-realist scriptwriter. Peter Bondanella thoroughly explores key Fellinian themes to reveal the director’s growth not only as an artistic master of the visual image but also as an astute interpreter of culture and politics. Throughout the book Bondanella draws on a new archive of several dozen manuscripts, obtained from Fellini and his scriptwriters. These previously unexamined documents allow a comprehensive treatment of Fellini’s important part in the rise of Italian neorealism and the even more decisive role that he played in the evolution of Italian cinema beyond neorealism in the 1950s. By probing Fellini’s recurring themes, Bondanella reinterprets the visual qualities of the director’s body of work–and also discloses in the films a critical and intellectual vitality often hidden by Fellini’s reputation as a storyteller and entertainer. After two chapters on Fellini’s precinematic career, the book covers all the films to date in analytical chapters arranged by topic: Fellini and his growth beyond his neorealist apprenticeship, dreams and metacinema, literature and cinema, Fellini and politics, Fellini and the image of women, and La voce della luna and the cinema of poetry.

Source: Amazon.com

Federico Fellini

Lietta Tornabuoni
ISBN: 978-0847818785

This is the first detailed appraisal of Federico Fellini’s universe. Collected here, in addition to a biography and filmography, is a wealth of previously unpublished material allowing a detailed and often personal view of the master of cinema. Published for the first time in these pages are the texts for four films Fellini never made, complete with sketches and notes; and the director’s correspondence with other filmmakers, artists, and famous writers. Fellini’s descriptions of his dreams, accompanied by splendid drawings, allow a glimpse of the subconscious world that contributed so much to the creation of his films. His comic strips of unmade films provide an intriguing account of his activity in the last years of his life. The filmography is illustrated with posters, sketches, and stills from all of Fellini’s masterpieces – including his best-loved La Strada, 8 1/2, The Clowns, La Dolce Vita, Roma, Amarcord, and La Voce Della Luna.

Source: Amazon.com

Federico Fellini : interviews

Federico Fellini & Bert Cardullo
ISBN: 978-1578068852

The films of Federico Fellini (1920-1993) deal equally with truth-tellers and pretenders, realists and fabulists. His colorful, surreal vision of cinema is so distinctive that the term “Felliniesque” is common among film buffs, even those who have not seen any of his films. This collection of interviews spans the director’s entire career from 1957 to 1993.

Source: Amazon.com

Federico Fellini The Book of Dreams

Federico Fellini, Tullio Kezich, Vittorio Boarini, Vincenzo Mollica & Fondazione Federico Fellini.
ISBN: 978-0847831357

Federico Fellini is one of the most beloved and revered filmmakers of the twentieth century, having entertained audiences worldwide with his ability to breathe life into imagery normally confined to human memory and emotion. His insights into the world of dreams have contributed to his many famous cinematic creations, including La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, and La Strada. A unique combination of memory, fantasy, and desire, this illustrated volume is a personal diary of Fellini’s private visions and nighttime fantasies. Fellini, winner of four Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film, kept notebooks filled with unique sketches and notes from his dreams from the 1960s onward. This collection delves into his cinematic genius as it is captured in widely detailed caricatures and personal writings. This dream diary exhibits Fellini’s deeply personal taste for the bizarre and the irrational. His sketches focus on the profound struggle of the soul and are tinged with humor, empathy, and insight. Fellini’s Book of Dreams is an intriguing source of never-before-published writings and drawings, which reveal the master filmmaker’s personal vision and his infinite imagination.

Source: Amazon.com

Federico Fellini: His Life and Work

Tullio Kezich
ISBN: 978-0571211685

With the revolutionary 8 1/2, Federico Fellini put his deepest desires and anxieties before the lens in 1963, permanently impacting the art of cinema in the process. Now, more than forty years later, film critic and Fellini confidant Tullio Kezich has written the work by which all other biographies of the filmmaker are sure to be measured. In this moving and intimately revealing account of a lifetime spent in pictures, Kezich uses his friendship with Fellini as a means to step outside the frame of myth and anecdote that surrounds him—much, it turns out, of the director’s own making.

A great lover of women and a meticulous observer of dreams, Fellini, perhaps more than any other director of the twentieth century, created films that embodied a thoroughly modern sensibility, eschewing traditional narrative along with religious and moral precepts. His is an art of delicate pathos, of episodic films that directly address the intersection of reality, fantasy, and desire that exists as a product of mid-century Italy—a country reeling from a Fascist regime as it struggled with an outmoded Catholic national identity. As Kezich reveals, the dilemmas Fellini presents in his movies reflect not only his personal battles but those of Italian society. The result is a book that explores both the machinations of cinema and the man who most grandly embraced the full spectrum of its possibilities, leaving his indelible mark on it forever.

Source: Amazon.com

Federico Fellini: The Films

Tullio Kezich, Vittorio Boarini & Fondazione Federico Fellini.
ISBN: 978-0847832699

Published on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the debut of La Dolce Vita, this is the most authoritative survey ever of Federico Fellini’s complete oeuvre. This definitive and important contribution on Federico Fellini chronicles the body of work of one of the most influential and revered directors of all time, and one of Italy’s most important modern cultural icons. It features the great director’s own drawings, sketches, storyboards, notes, and commentary along with behind-the-scenes photographs—both on set and off—and covers each film from the entire span of his career. Largely never before published, the material collected in this lavishly illustrated volume is drawn primarily from the archives of the Fellini Foundation and from the Fellini family’s private collection.

Source: Amazon.com

Fellini On Fellini

Federico Fellini
ISBN: 978-0306806735

Fellini on Fellini is a fascinating collection of his articles, interviews, essays, reminiscences, and table talk, carefully arranged to chart the progress of his life and work. There are boyhood memories of his hometown, Remini, and his highly improbable beginnings as a scriptwriter for Rossellini; letters to Jesuit priests and Marxist critics defending his first international success, La Strada; anecdotes and revelations about the making of La Dolca Vita, 8 1/2, and The Clowns; and insights into all aspects of filmmaking. Here, Fellini reveals, as no one else can, a rich digest of his brilliant and controversial career.

Source:  Back cover of the book

Fellini!

Vincenzo Mollica, Marta Cattaneo, Elena Bajetta, Timothy Stroud & Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
ISBN: 978-8884917683

Federico Fellini, the master of the Italian art film, was an active visual artist for whom drawing was integral to the creative process. Fellini’s funny, grotesque and irreverent sketches of faces, voluptuous women, costumes and larger scenes Fellini fans will recognize reveal an obsession with line and form. Rarely viewed sketches for his films, excerpts from his illustrated dream journals, and a late body of erotic drawings set new, ever larger boundaries for the Fellini vision. Fellini’s lifelong affinity for the comic strip is seen in a range of works which were conceived as films but ultimately realized as strips and graphic books. The remarkable body of drawings, cartoons, and caricatures in this catalogue attest to the primacy of drawing in his technique and provides a new insight into the working mind of a film genius.

Source: Amazon.com

The films of Federico Fellini

Peter E Bondanella
ISBN: 978-0521575737

This study examines the career of one of Italy’s most renowned filmmakers through close analysis of five masterpieces that span his career: La Strada, La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, Amarcord and Interview. Providing an overview of Fellini’s early career as a cartoonist and scriptwriter for Neorealist directors such as Roberto Rosselini, it traces the development of his unique and personal cinematic vision as it transcends Italian Neorealism. Rejecting an overtly ideological approach to Fellini’s cinema, Bondanella emphasizes the director’s interest in fantasy, the irrational, and individualism.

Source: Amazon.com

I, Fellini

Charlotte Chandler
ISBN: 978-0815411437

Forged from the many conversations Charlotte Chandler conducted with director Federico Fellini over the course of fourteen years, and featuring a forward by Billy Wilder, I, Fellini is a portrait of one of Italy’s greatest filmmakers in his own words. In the book, Fellini recounts the stories behind his classic films La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, La Strada, and others, describing the inspirations from which they arose and the struggles to get them filmed. He also speaks at length on actors Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Sophia Loren, and Anna Magnani, and on directors Roberto Rossellini, Ingmar Bergman, and Michelangelo Antonioni.

Source: Amazon.com

Making a Film

Federico Fellini, Italo Calvino, Liliana Betti & Christopher Burton White
ISBN: 978-1940625096

Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini (1920-1993) is one of the most renowned figures in world cinema. Director of a long list of critically acclaimed motion pictures, including La strada, La dolce vita, 8½, and Amarcord, Fellini’s success helped strengthen the international prestige of Italian cinema from the 1950s onward. Often remembered as an eccentric auteur with a vivid imagination and a penchant for quasi-autobiographical works, the carnivalesque, and Rubenesque women, Fellini’s inimitable films celebrate the creative potential of cinema as a medium and also provide thought-provoking evocations of various periods in Italian history, from the years of fascism to the age of Silvio Berlusconi’s media empire. In Making a Film Fellini discusses his childhood and adolescence in the coastal town of Rimini, the time he spent as a cartoonist, journalist, and screenwriter in Rome, his decisive encounter with Roberto Rossellini, and his own movies, from Variety Lights to Casanova. The director explains the importance of drawing to his creative process, the mysterious ways in which ideas for films arise, his collaborations with his wife, Giulietta Masina, his thoughts on fascism, Jung, and the relationship between cinema and television. Often comic, sometimes tragic, and rife with insightful comments on his craft, Making a Film sheds light on Fellini’s life and reveals the motivations behind many of his most fascinating movies. Available for the first time in its entirety in English, this volume contains the complete translation of Fare un film, the authoritative collection of writings edited and reworked by Fellini and initially published by Giulio Einaudi in 1980. The text includes a new translation of the Italo Calvino essay “A Spectator’s Autobiography,” an introduction by Italian film scholar Christopher B. White, and an afterward by Fellini’s longtime friend and collaborator Liliana Betti.

Source: Amazon.com