LA Theatres will be screening the Documentary, "Fellini: I'm a Born Liar," and many of Fellini's greatest works, including "8 1/2," "I Vitelloni," "Nights of Cabiria" and "La Strada."

Fellini, along with directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni, was among the wave of filmmakers who brought international cinema to the American public during the 1950s and '60s, achieving tremendous popularity and acclaim. Massively influential during his creative heyday, Fellini would win four Academy Awards for best foreign-language film, as well as an honorary lifetime achievement award.

To merely associate Frederico with "Felliniesque", would be gross oversimplification.

Fellini's outsized personality, both on-screen as a filmmaker and off-screen as a loquacious raconteur and tall-tale teller, has led many people to view his films as chapters in an ongoing autobiography.

"Fellini was a hugely original spirit," "a bona fide gagman, the king of contradiction, a well-oiled motor mouth..

Fellini's worldview seemed to comprise equal parts hope and resignation.
"With a few exceptions, Fellini's films have failure and despair running through them: Life continues, but 'Felliniesque' is not an exclusively uplifting adjective. Fellini's best films are the ones that distill this essence -- the paradoxical quality of melancholic ecstasy, a surreal, bittersweet vitality -- to perfection."

Fellini should be remembered, "Probably for one thing only: a deeply personal vision of cinema that, at its height, expanded the boundaries of what cinematic art could be."
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World Cinema
LURKING BENEATH THE LEGEND, FELLINI IS THERE FOR THE DISCOVERY

Ten years after the director's death, his aesthetic and style
can be reappraised in several local screenings.

Los Angeles Times
By Mark Olsen
Special to The Times
April 11 2003

Beware the adjective. As the descriptive term "Felliniesque" has become part of the lexicon, it has lost its specificity with regard to the output of Italian film director Federico Fellini. Any fresh consideration of his life and work requires a viewer to set aside the vague images of grotesque clowns at the seaside that have attached themselves to the term in order to fully appreciate the stunning breadth and beauty of Fellini's films.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of Fellini's passing, and two local art-house exhibitors are commemorating the occasion. The Landmark chain will be showing Damian Pettigrew's new documentary, "Fellini: I'm a Born Liar," at its Nuart theater for one week beginning today, while Laemmle Theatres will screen many of Fellini's greatest works, including "8 1/2," "I Vitelloni," "Nights of Cabiria" and "La Strada," on weekend mornings throughout the spring and summer at their Sunset 5 and Monica 4 theaters.

Fellini, along with directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni, was among the wave of filmmakers who brought international cinema to the American public during the 1950s and '60s, achieving tremendous popularity and acclaim. Massively influential during his creative heyday, Fellini would win four Academy Awards for best foreign-language film, as well as an honorary lifetime achievement award.

A Canadian-born documentarian living in Paris and a longtime fan, Pettigrew first met Fellini in 1983 while working on a project about the writer Italo Calvino. It was not until the early 1990s, however, that Fellini would sit for more than 10 hours of interviews.

Combining the interviews with recollections from actors Terence Stamp, Donald Sutherland and Roberto Benigni, as well as such collaborators as production designer Dante Ferretti, screenwriter Tullio Pinelli and cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, the film is less a straightforward biography than a survey of Fellini's aesthetics and style.

Fellini's outsized personality, both on-screen as a filmmaker and off-screen as a loquacious raconteur and tall-tale teller, has led many people to view his films as if each were only about him, chapters in an ongoing autobiography. While there is certainly a large element of that in his work -- "8 1/2" is in fact the eighth film he directed (plus one co-direction for the 1/2), and he frequently cast his wife, Giulietta Masina, as a much-put-upon spouse -- it is shortsighted to think of his films only in this way.

As Pettigrew concedes via e-mail from Paris, Fellini's own showmanship and urge to talk were rarely about revealing himself to others. "Fellini was a hugely original spirit," says Pettigrew, "a bona fide gagman, the king of contradiction, a well-oiled motor mouth -- in short, anything except a thinker. He needed the interviews and the media because it was during these seeming exercises in vanity that he discovered things about himself. If you pushed him hard enough, he would come up with things that surprised even him."

If the passage of time has left Fellini's popular standing in flux, as viewers struggle to find the merits of the films themselves beneath the weight of their reputation, the difficulty of grappling with Fellini is nothing new.

Even at the height of his productivity, Fellini underwent a fair amount of critical reappraisal. For example, writing about "Nights of Cabiria" in 1959, Andrew Sarris noted positively the "familiar landmarks of the anarchic sub-world of Fellini's imagination." Ten years later, Fellini's "Toby Dammit," a loose adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe short story for the omnibus film "Spirits of the Dead," would move Sarris to ask, "At what point, therefore, does a personal cinematic language become a tired cliche?"

Which brings back the vexing notion of the "Felliniesque." Whether one sees the filmmaker as mining the same vein over and over again or creating and engaging an aesthetic world all his own is perhaps a matter of personal taste. Simply cataloging the similarities from film to film overlooks the extreme breadth of styles Fellini's work could encompass, from the cluttered, hallucinogenic kaleidoscope of "Juliet of the Spirits" to the spare, haunted, Giorgio de Chirico- inspired imagery of "8 1/2." Although he did often resort to his infamous "life is a circus" metaphor, Fellini's worldview seemed to comprise equal parts hope and resignation.

As Pettigrew notes, "With a few exceptions, Fellini's films have failure and despair running through them: Life continues, but I can't imagine 'Felliniesque' as an exclusively uplifting adjective. Fellini's best films are the ones that distill this essence -- the paradoxical quality of melancholic ecstasy, a surreal, bittersweet vitality -- to perfection." Taken together, Pettigrew's documentary and the retrospective screenings provide an excellent opportunity to discover with fresh eyes what it was that vaulted the films of Federico Fellini, as well as their creator, to international acclaim.

Asked to summarize how Fellini should be remembered, Pettigrew replies, "Probably for one thing only: a deeply personal vision of cinema that, at its height, expanded the boundaries of what cinematic art could be."

Los Angeles Times: Lurking beneath the legend, Fellini is there for the discovery
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