No director in the history of film has so successfully mined his own dreams to make great art in the way Italian master Federico Fellini did. If the ultimate mark of success for a director's style is to have their last name proceeded by the suffix "-esque," then Fellini sits high atop a list of filmmakers that includes Frank Capra, Quentin Tarantino, and Tim Burton. Fellini transcended the work of his contemporaries by creating films that looked and felt like no other filmmakercould have made them, with his films fitting comfortably in their own genre—Felliniesque—that needed no other qualifiers.
Prior to Fellini's emergence on the scene, Italian filmmaking was mostly concerned with what was known as Neorealism, a movement that rejected artifice and brought filmmaking down to street level, focusing on the poor and destitutepeople of Italy and their plight in the post-war world. Directors like Roberto Rossellini (Rome Open City, Paisan), Vittorio De Sica (Bicycle Thieves, Umberto D.), and Luchino Visconti (Ossessione, Senso) used the medium as a way of giving voice to the voiceless among their countrymen and broadcasting theirdifficulties to the world.
Fellini himself broke into the filmmaking world by working on Rossellini's films, earning an Oscar nomination for co-writing Rome, Open Citybefore working as assistant director on Paisan. His first three features—Variety Lights,The White Sheik,and I Vitelloni—mostly operated in the vein of Neorealism, though they were much more elliptical than the more strict adherents to the movement. It was his fourth feature, 1954's La Strada, where Fellini's personal style began to dominate and he pushed Italian filmmaking beyond the gloom and doom of Neorealism and toward a fantastical new place where realistic characters and situations resided comfortably alongside the strange, unusual, and grotesque.
His avoidance of overtly political overtones in his film is another thing that set Fellini apart from many other Italian filmmakers. While he had no love for government, once referring to censorship as "advertising paid by the government," he also wasn't consumed by the possibilities of film as a message delivery system. Rather, Fellini sought to explore the subconscious desires of his characters by externalizing them. Often the greatest thing standing in the way of a Fellini protagonist was him (or her) self, with external forces simply conspiring to make their journeys more complex. None of his protagonists ever rage against the machine, so to speak, but are rather at war with themselves.
Fellini's career also began when censorship laws were more restrictive and while his earlier work often challenged these laws, their loosening also helped him explore a greater variety of subjects in terms of sex and nudity. Fellini's films are often dripping with sex, even when there's no nudity or overt sexual content on display. Fellini's films were nothing if not personal, and sex was obviously a huge part of his personality. Sex, the pursuit of sex, and the consequences—both good and bad—of sexual dalliances were all integral elements of his filmography.
La Dolce Vita (1960)
After winning back-to-back Foreign Language Film Oscars for La Strada and Nights of Cabiria (later turned into the musical Sweet Charity), Fellini embarked on his first true epic. An absolute sensation upon its release in Italy, La Dolce Vita (orThe Sweet Life) is a non-linear exploration of seven non-sequential days and nights in the company of gossip journalist Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni),as he searches for love and meaning in his life while also hoping to one day be seen as a serious writer. Nothing about the film, including its themes, is concerned with intimacy. This is the pursuit of the titular goal writ large on one of the biggest canvasses of all time.
Fellini crafted the film with the help of a team of writers, including an uncredited Pier Paolo Pasolini, presenting multiple characters with mostly tragic arcs who pass in and out of Marcello's purview. Marcello spends the second day and night of the film in pursuit of alone time with a Swedish-American actress named Sylvia (Anita Ekberg), finally securing his goal just before dawn at the Trevi Fountain. Here, Sylvia wades into the water in her long black dress, beckoning Marcello to join her withher amazing cleavage in one of the most famous sequences in film history...
On the film's final night, an older but substantially less wise Marcello breaks into his friend Riccardo's beach house to have a party with some friends. Desperate to get an orgy going—and who isn't—Marcello entices his friend and Riccardo's ex-wife Nadia (Nadia Gray) to do a striptease for the guests, but Riccardo's arrival home puts an abrupt end to things. Thankfully we get some boffo cleavage from Nadia before the good times come to an end...
La Dolce Vita was an immense smash hit in Italy and around the world when it was released, but the Catholic Church managed to keep the film stifled in many countries in which they still had an iron grip. This was mostly due to the perceived blasphemy of the opening shot of a helicopter transporting a statue of Jesus through Rome. However, the film would go on to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, though it would lose the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar to Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly.It has since become a cultural milestone not just in Italian film, but in motion picture history. It has even spawned a term which entered the lexicon shortly after its release, with the name of Marcello's dogged photographer friend Paparazzo (Walter Santesso) becoming the accepted term for groups of salacious photogs that track every move made by celebrities.
Juliet of the Spirits (1965)
Fellini's first film after winning at third Oscar for his brilliant, career defining autobiographical film 8½ wasalso his first in color. He reunites herewithhis wife of fifty years, the radiant Giulietta Masina, for theirpenultimate collaboration, casting her in the title role of an unhappily married woman consumed with the freewheeling lifestyle of her promiscuous neighbor Suzy (Sandra Milo). As Giulietta begins to reflect upon her own desires, she begins to be haunted by apparitions,eventually leading her to the conclusion that shewants to leave her husband Giorgio (Mario Pisu).
Despite the French, Brits, and other Italians having embraced nudity, this would remain another skinless affair from Fellini, although it is not devoid of sexuality. Sandra Milo shows off her impressive cleavage in a number of sexy outfits throughout the film...
And co-star Sylva Koscina is positively falling out of her dress in this scene, though Fellini clearly seems more intrigued with the tease of nudity rather than showing it...
Satyricon (1969)
Fellini finally brings female nudity into the equation with his 1969 bacchanal often referred to as Fellini Satyricon, as if there's any doubtafterlooking at even a frame of this film that it wasn't directed by Fellini. While nudity fans may want to jump right into this one, I must caution that this is not a film for students of Fellini 101, but rather those who have already seen most of his work—chronologically is probably the best way to approach his films. Every filmmaker of the last fifty years who revels in historical works riddled with anachronisms—like Baz Luhrmann, Sofia Coppola, and Julie Taymor to name just three—is likely to worship at this film's altar.
Loosely based on the work of the same name by ancient Roman scribe Petronius, the film is one of the most prototypical efforts by the director in his career, blending Roman, Greek, and North African mythology into a fable about the amorous adventures of ascholar and his friendthat doesn't shy away from their homosexuality or the institutional pederasty of the time. Both men are in amorous pursuit of the same youngslave boy as they trace his journey being sold to various masters, making them borderline impossible protagonists to root for. Along the way they witness behandings, beheadings, hermaphrodites, sorcerers, orgies, and even a Minotaur, with Fellini being one of the first filmmakers to de-romanticize his country's first century history.
Near the end of their journey, the pair come upon an abandoned villa where they meet an African slave played by the lovely Hylette Adolphe, who entertains the men with her topless antics...
The filmmay not have been the beginning of Fellini's embrace of the fantastical, but it certainly was the mostfantastical film of his career and the one that pops into most people's heads when they hear the term Felliniesque. Even his more "realistic" films after this would retain more of these fantastical elements than his previous work, making this a substantial turning point for the filmmaker.
Roma (1972)
Following a brief diversion into the world of documentary films with 1970's The Clowns, Fellini once more returned to the city he loved most for this film that celebrates his own relationship to Rome. Devoid of any traditional protagonist,Romaonce again embraces Fellini's love of non-linear storytelling to paint a picture of not so much how much the city has changed over time, but rather how it has provided countless groups of misfits and miscreants over time with a place to call home.
Fiona Florence plays Dolores, a youngwoman who makes a living working the streets of Rome, and provides us with the only nudity in the film, briefly baring her right breast as she gets dressed after her latest dalliance...
There's also an anachronistic homage to the city's past with Elisa Mainardi dancing seductively on top of a car, her breasts visible beneath sheer fabric, while surrounded by men dressed as Roman senators of old...
Amarcord (1973)
While there are myriad autobiographical details in nearly all of his films, 1973's Amarcord is perhaps the closest Fellini gets to actually documenting his memories of childhood. It is also perhaps his most political film without necessarily calling attention to politics in and of themselves. Instead, the film mocks the callowness of Italians at the time, who had yielded their agency to both Mussolini and the Catholic Church, leading them tocomport themselves like stunted adolescents. That he doesn't belabor this point and instead wraps it all up in whimsy only strengthens this message, particularly when revisiting the film.
It plays a lot like another film set in the same time period—Bob Fosse's Cabaret from a year earlier—wrapping up the audience in fun and nostalgia while showing all of that to be nothing more than a patchwork placed over a cracking and festering evil that was bubbling up in both Germany and Italy at the time. The protagonist's sexual awakening comes when he has an encounter with the big-breasted tobacconist (Maria Antonietta Beluzzi) of his village, who unleashes her massive mammaries and presses them against the young man's face...
Composer Nino Rota wrote perhaps his most famous score of his nearly 20 scores for Fellini's films for this film, and hearing it sets the mood instantly. It's wistful, nostalgic, and immediately sets the tone for Fellini's memory play. I never tire of listening to it, and you can hear its most famous theme below...
City of Women (1980)
Fellini reunites with his favorite leading man, Marcello Mastroianni, for this dream-infused drama about a man namedSnàporaz who falls asleep on a train, follows an attractive woman off of the train, and finds himself smack dab in the midst of a city exclusively populated and controlled by women. Fellini's love of women as subjects for his films explodes here with this allegory about the power women hold over men without the men realizing it on a subconscious level. Like many other great filmmakers of the 60s and 70s, Fellini stumbled his way into thenew decadewith an unprecedented level of creative control that would ultimately find a difficult time connecting in the brave new world of the 1980s.
As with so many of Fellini's films, it was ultimately misunderstood in its day, extolling the virtues of women rather than using those virtues to condemn them. The framing device of Snàporaz falling asleep and later waking up on a train might have clued audiences at the time of the film's ultimate dreamlike intentions, but the film never really caught on with audiences and floundered outside of its home country. The film is far and away Fellini's most overtly sexual film, which no doubt contributed to audiences "missing the point" so to speak.
Anna Prucnal plays Elena,Snàporaz's ex-wife who appears to him frequently throughout the film, arguing with him and in one scene, showing off her breasts in an open robe as she awaits his return...
Busty bethonged beauties Donatella DamianiRosaria Tafuri also show off in skimpy bikinis as they helpSnàporaz perform a musical number in a hotel lobby...
And he also has a bizarre encounter with a motorcyclist (Jole Silvani) who offers to give him a ride back to the train station, but instead brings him to a barn where she attempts to assault him, baring her breasts one at a time in a manner not unlike Maria Antonietta Beluzziin Amarcord...
The film's absolute most outlandish sequence comes late in the film when Stèphanie Loïk, as the wife of the only other man in town Dr. Xavier Katzone (Ettore Manni), gives a performance in which she sucks gold and jewels into her vagina using telekinesis. While Loïk does descend a staircase in a mesh robe, showing off her breasts,the hindquarters we see are prosthetic to aid in the telekinetic powers...
Intervista (1987)
Always a very self-aware and self-referential filmmaker, Fellini's final film we're discussing today bringsboth of those tendencies to the forefront. As the title of the fascinating 2002 documentary Fellini: I'm a Born Liar indicates, the filmmaker considered himself a professional embellisher of the truth, and this film plays the most with this notion of any film he made. The film'snarrative structure finds Fellini, playing himself, preparing for an interview with a Japanese film crew, whom he takes behind the scenes at Cinecittà, the studio where he produces all of his films.
In the semi-fictional narrative of the film, the growing weight of expectations has clearly begun to hang heavily on the director, and he can no longer channel them into a coherent film the way he did 25 years earlier with8½. He finds himself being crushed by these expectations, despite a willing insistence to follow his muse, even though he knows that's going to lead him away from making a film the studio finds "commercial." During one of his trips around the various sound stages with the Japanese crew, they happen upon a young actress played by Eva Grimaldi shooting a scene for a commercial, giving us a nice look at her breasts beneath an open blazer...
There's also a scene where Paola Liguori, the star of his latest film—fictionalized for the purposes of this film—can be seen nude in a shower, though we only get a clear look at her left breast as she steps out of the shower...
Fellini sprinkles cheeky callbacks to his own workthroughout the film, including an older Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg taking a romp through a fountain as they did in La Dolce Vita. This level of self-referential filmmaking might seem cloying in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, but rather than celebrating his own work the way someone like Tarantino does, Fellini uses this device to criticize himself. A true artist, Fellini's driving impulse is to cut himself down before the critics or anyone else can. That he manages to make this compulsionendearing rather than maudlin is a testament to how well he managed to harness his own self-loathing into his art.
Fellini is like no one else that ever made a film or likely ever will make a film. His likes will never be seen again and the world is a lesser place as a result. Thankfully he left behind one of the most incredible filmographies to dive in to, becoming a true gift to the world in the process.
Federico Fellini Films with Nudity for Which We Don't Have Content
—Spirits of the Dead (1968)
—Casanova (1976)
—The Voice of the Moon (1990)
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All non-nude images courtesy of IMDb
