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FELLINI, FEDERICO SIGNED AND DATED PHOTOGRAPH

ROME 1993 10.5X8 INCHES BLACK AND WHITE PRINTED PHOTO OF FELLINI LEANING OVER HIS DESK, MATTED AND NICELY FRAMED TO 15 X 12.25 INCHES NEATLYSIGNED AND DATED BY FELLINI

Federico Fellini Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI was an Italian film director and screenwriter. He is known for his distinctive style, which blends fantasy and baroque images with earthiness. He is recognized as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time

Federico Fellini Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (Italian: [fedeˈriːko felˈliːni]; 20 January 1920 – 31 October 1993) was an Italian film director and screenwriter. He is known for his distinctive style, which blends fantasy and baroque images with earthiness. He is recognized as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time. His films have ranked highly in critical polls such as that of Cahiers du Cinéma and Sight & Sound, which lists his 1963 film 8+1⁄2 as the 10th-greatest film.

Fellini's best-known films include I vitelloni (1953), La Strada (1954), Nights of Cabiria (1957), La Dolce Vita (1960), 8½ (1963), Juliet of the Spirits (1965), Fellini Satyricon (1969), Roma (1972), Amarcord (1973), and Fellini's Casanova (1976).

Fellini was nominated for 17 Academy Awards over the course of his career, winning a total of four in the category of Best Foreign Language Film (the most for any director in the history of the award). He received an honorary award for Lifetime Achievement at the 65th Academy Awards in Los Angeles. Fellini also won the Palme d'Or for La Dolce Vita in 1960, two times the Moscow International Film Festival in 1963 and 1987, and the Career Golden Lion at the 42nd Venice International Film Festival in 1985. In Sight & Sound's 2002 list of the greatest directors of all time, Fellini was ranked 2nd in the directors' poll and 7th in the critics' poll.

Early life and education

Rimini (1920–1938)

Fellini was born on 20 January 1920, to middle-class parents in Rimini, then a small town on the Adriatic Sea. On 25 January, at the San Nicolò church he was baptized Federico Domenico Marcello Fellini.[1] His father, Urbano Fellini (1894–1956), born to a family of Romagnol peasants and small landholders from Gambettola, moved to Rome in 1915 as a baker apprenticed to the Pantanella pasta factory. His mother, Ida Barbiani (1896–1984), came from a bourgeois Catholic family of Roman merchants. Despite her family's vehement disapproval, she had eloped with Urbano in 1917 to live at his parents' home in Gambettola.[2] A civil marriage followed in 1918 with the religious ceremony held at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome a year later.

The couple settled in Rimini where Urbano became a traveling salesman and wholesale vendor. Fellini had two siblings, Riccardo (1921–1991), a documentary director for RAI Television, and Maria Maddalena (m. Fabbri; 1929–2002).

In 1924, Fellini started primary school in an institute run by the nuns of San Vincenzo in Rimini, attending the Carlo Tonini public school two years later. An attentive student, he spent his leisure time drawing, staging puppet shows and reading Il corriere dei piccoli, the popular children's magazine that reproduced traditional American cartoons by Winsor McCay, George McManus and Frederick Burr Opper. (Opper's Happy Hooligan would provide the visual inspiration for Gelsomina in Fellini's 1954 film La Strada; McCay's Little Nemo would directly influence his 1980 film City of Women.)[3] In 1926, he discovered the world of Grand Guignol, the circus with Pierino the Clown and the movies. Guido Brignone's Maciste all'inferno (1925, Maciste in Hell), the first film he saw, would mark him in ways linked to Dante and the cinema throughout his entire career.[4]

Enrolled at the Ginnasio Giulio Cesare in 1929, he made friends with Luigi Titta Benzi, later a prominent Rimini lawyer (and the model for young Titta in Amarcord (1973)). In Mussolini's Italy, Fellini and Riccardo became members of the Avanguardista, the compulsory Fascist youth group for males. He visited Rome with his parents for the first time in 1933, the year of the maiden voyage of the transatlantic ocean liner SS Rex (which is shown in Amarcord). The sea creature found on the beach at the end of La Dolce Vita (1960) has its basis in a giant fish marooned on a Rimini beach during a storm in 1934.

Although Fellini adapted key events from his childhood and adolescence in films such as I Vitelloni (1953), 8+1⁄2 (1963), and Amarcord (1973), he insisted that such autobiographical memories were inventions:

It is not memory that dominates my films. To say that my films are autobiographical is an overly facile liquidation, a hasty classification. It seems to me that I have invented almost everything: childhood, character, nostalgias, dreams, memories, for the pleasure of being able to recount them.[5]

In 1937, Fellini opened Febo, a portrait shop in Rimini, with the painter Demos Bonini. His first humorous article appeared in the "Postcards to Our Readers" section of Milan's Domenica del Corriere. Deciding on a career as a caricaturist and gag writer, Fellini travelled to Florence in 1938, where he published his first cartoon in the weekly 420. According to a biographer, Fellini found school "exasperating"[6] and, in one year, had 67 absences.[7] Failing his military culture exam, he graduated from high school in 1939.[8]

Rome (1939)

In September 1939, he enrolled in law school at the Sapienza University of Rome to please his parents. Biographer Hollis Alpert reports that "there is no record of his ever having attended a class".[9] Installed in a family pensione, he met another lifelong friend, the painter Rinaldo Geleng. Desperately poor, they unsuccessfully joined forces to draw sketches of restaurant and café patrons. Fellini eventually found work as a cub reporter on the dailies Il Piccolo and Il Popolo di Roma, but quit after a short stint, bored by the local court news assignments.

Four months after publishing his first article in Marc'Aurelio, the highly influential biweekly humour magazine, he joined the editorial board, achieving success with a regular column titled But Are You Listening?.[10] Described as "the determining moment in Fellini's life",[11] the magazine gave him steady employment between 1939 and 1942, when he interacted with writers, gagmen, and scriptwriters. These encounters eventually led to opportunities in show business and cinema. Among his collaborators on the magazine's editorial board were the future director Ettore Scola, Marxist theorist and scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini, and Bernardino Zapponi, a future Fellini screenwriter. Conducting interviews for CineMagazzino also proved congenial: when asked to interview Aldo Fabrizi, Italy's most popular variety performer, he established such immediate personal rapport with the man that they collaborated professionally. Specializing in humorous monologues, Fabrizi commissioned material from his young protégé.[12]

Career and later life

Early screenplays (1940–1943)

Federico Fellini during the 1950s

Retained on business in Rimini, Urbano sent wife and family to Rome in 1940 to share an apartment with his son. Fellini and Ruggero Maccari, also on the staff of Marc'Aurelio, began writing radio sketches and gags for films.

Not yet twenty and with Fabrizi's help, Fellini obtained his first screen credit as a comedy writer on Mario Mattoli's Il pirata sono io (The Pirate's Dream). Progressing rapidly to numerous collaborations on films at Cinecittà, his circle of professional acquaintances widened to include novelist Vitaliano Brancati and scriptwriter Piero Tellini. In the wake of Mussolini's declaration of war against France and Britain on 10 June 1940, Fellini discovered Kafka's The Metamorphosis, Gogol, John Steinbeck and William Faulkner along with French films by Marcel Carné, René Clair, and Julien Duvivier.[13] In 1941 he published Il mio amico Pasqualino, a 74-page booklet in ten chapters describing the absurd adventures of Pasqualino, an alter ego.[14]

Writing for radio while attempting to avoid the draft, Fellini met his future wife Giulietta Masina in a studio office at the Italian public radio broadcaster EIAR in the autumn of 1942. Well-paid as the voice of Pallina in Fellini's radio serial, Cico and Pallina, Masina was also well known for her musical-comedy broadcasts which cheered an audience depressed by the war.

Giulietta is practical, and likes the fact that she earns a handsome fee for her radio work, whereas theater never pays well. And of course the fame counts for something too. Radio is a booming business and comedy reviews have a broad and devoted public.[15]

In November 1942, Fellini was sent to Libya, occupied by Fascist Italy, to work on the screenplay of I cavalieri del deserto (Knights of the Desert, 1942), directed by Osvaldo Valenti and Gino Talamo. Fellini welcomed the assignment as it allowed him "to secure another extension on his draft order".[16] Responsible for emergency re-writing, he also directed the film's first scenes. When Tripoli fell under siege by British forces, he and his colleagues made a narrow escape by boarding a German military plane flying to Sicily. His African adventure, later published in Marc'Aurelio as "The First Flight", marked "the emergence of a new Fellini, no longer just a screenwriter, working and sketching at his desk, but a filmmaker out in the field".[17]

The apolitical Fellini was finally freed of the draft when an Allied air raid over Bologna destroyed his medical records. Fellini and Giulietta hid in her aunt's apartment until Mussolini's fall on 25 July 1943. After dating for nine months, the couple were married on 30 October 1943. Several months later, Masina fell down the stairs and suffered a miscarriage. She gave birth to a son, Pierfederico, on 22 March 1945, but the child died of encephalitis 11 days later on 2 April 1945.[18] Masina and Fellini had no other children.[19]The tragedy had enduring emotional and artistic repercussions.[20]

Neorealist apprenticeship (1944–1949)

After the Allied liberation of Rome on 4 June 1944, Fellini and Enrico De Seta opened the Funny Face Shop where they survived the postwar recession drawing caricatures of American soldiers. He became involved with Italian Neorealism when Roberto Rossellini, at work on Stories of Yesteryear (later Rome, Open City), met Fellini in his shop, and proposed he contribute gags and dialogue for the script. Aware of Fellini's reputation as Aldo Fabrizi's "creative muse",[21] Rossellini also requested that he try to convince the actor to play the role of Father Giuseppe Morosini, the parish priest executed by the SS on 4 April 1944.

In 1947, Fellini and Sergio Amidei received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay of Rome, Open City.

Working as both screenwriter and assistant director on Rossellini's Paisà (Paisan) in 1946, Fellini was entrusted to film the Sicilian scenes in Maiori. In February 1948, he was introduced to Marcello Mastroianni, then a young theatre actor appearing in a play with Giulietta Masina.[22] Establishing a close working relationship with Alberto Lattuada, Fellini co-wrote the director's Senza pietà (Without Pity) and Il mulino del Po (The Mill on the Po). Fellini also worked with Rossellini on the anthology film L'Amore (1948), co-writing the screenplay and in one segment titled, "The Miracle", acting opposite Anna Magnani. To play the role of a vagabond rogue mistaken by Magnani for a saint, Fellini had to bleach his black hair blond.

Early films (1950–1953)

Fellini, Masina, Carla del Poggio and Alberto Lattuada, 1952

In 1950 Fellini co-produced and co-directed with Alberto Lattuada Variety Lights (Luci del varietà), his first feature film. A backstage comedy set among the world of small-time travelling performers, it featured Giulietta Masina and Lattuada's wife, Carla Del Poggio. Its release to poor reviews and limited distribution proved disastrous for all concerned. The production company went bankrupt, leaving both Fellini and Lattuada with debts to pay for over a decade.[23] In February 1950, Paisà received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay by Rossellini, Sergio Amidei, and Fellini.

After travelling to Paris for a script conference with Rossellini on Europa '51, Fellini began production on The White Sheik in September 1951, his first solo-directed feature. Starring Alberto Sordi in the title role, the film is a revised version of a treatment first written by Michelangelo Antonioni in 1949 and based on the fotoromanzi, the photographed cartoon strip romances popular in Italy at the time. Producer Carlo Ponti commissioned Fellini and Tullio Pinelli to write the script but Antonioni rejected the story they developed. With Ennio Flaiano, they re-worked the material into a light-hearted satire about newlywed couple Ivan and Wanda Cavalli (Leopoldo Trieste, Brunella Bovo) in Rome to visit the Pope. Ivan's prissy mask of respectability is soon demolished by his wife's obsession with the White Sheik. Highlighting the music of Nino Rota, the film was selected at Cannes (among the films in competition was Orson Welles's Othello) and then retracted. Screened at the 13th Venice International Film Festival, it was razzed by critics in "the atmosphere of a soccer match".[24] One reviewer declared that Fellini had "not the slightest aptitude for cinema direction".

In 1953, I Vitelloni found favour with the critics and public. Winning the Silver Lion Award in Venice, it secured Fellini his first international distributor.

Beyond neorealism (1954–1960)

Cinecittà – Teatro 5, Fellini's favorite studio.[25]

Fellini directed La Strada based on a script completed in 1952 with Pinelli and Flaiano. During the last three weeks of shooting, Fellini experienced the first signs of severe clinical depression.[26] Aided by his wife, he undertook a brief period of therapy with Freudian psychoanalyst Emilio Servadio.[26]

Fellini cast American actor Broderick Crawford to interpret the role of an aging swindler in Il Bidone. Based partly on stories told to him by a petty thief during production of La Strada, Fellini developed the script into a con man's slow descent. To incarnate the role's "intense, tragic face", Fellini's first choice had been Humphrey Bogart,[27] but after learning of the actor's lung cancer, chose Crawford after seeing his face on the theatrical poster of All the King's Men (1949).[28] The film shoot was wrought with difficulties stemming from Crawford's alcoholism.[29] Savaged by critics at the 16th Venice International Film Festival, the film did miserably at the box office and did not receive international distribution until 1964.

During the autumn, Fellini researched and developed a treatment based on a film adaptation of Mario Tobino's novel, The Free Women of Magliano. Set in a mental institution for women, the project was abandoned when financial backers considered the subject had no potential.[30]

Fellini during the filming of Nights of Cabiria, 1956

While preparing Nights of Cabiria in spring 1956, Fellini learned of his father's death by cardiac arrest at the age of sixty-two. Produced by Dino De Laurentiis and starring Giulietta Masina, the film took its inspiration from news reports of a woman's severed head retrieved in a lake and stories by Wanda, a shantytown prostitute Fellini met on the set of Il Bidone.[31] Pier Paolo Pasolini was hired to translate Flaiano and Pinelli's dialogue into Roman dialect and to supervise researches in the vice-afflicted suburbs of Rome. The movie won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 30th Academy Awards and brought Masina the Best Actress Award at Cannes for her performance.[32]

With Pinelli, he developed Journey with Anita for Sophia Loren and Gregory Peck. An "invention born out of intimate truth", the script was based on Fellini's return to Rimini with a mistress to attend his father's funeral.[33] Due to Loren's unavailability, the project was shelved and resurrected twenty-five years later as Lovers and Liars (1981), a comedy directed by Mario Monicelli with Goldie Hawn and Giancarlo Giannini. For Eduardo De Filippo, he co-wrote the script of Fortunella.[34]

The Hollywood on the Tiber phenomenon of 1958 in which American studios profited from the cheap studio labour available in Rome provided the backdrop for photojournalists to steal shots of celebrities on the via Veneto.[35] The scandal provoked by Turkish dancer Haish Nana's improvised striptease at a nightclub captured Fellini's imagination: he decided to end his latest script-in-progress, Moraldo in the City, with an all-night "orgy" at a seaside villa. Pierluigi Praturlon's photos of Anita Ekberg after an evening spent with the actress in a Rome night club provided further inspiration for Fellini and his screenwriters.[36]

Changing the title of the screenplay to La Dolce Vita, Fellini soon clashed with his producer on casting: The director insisted on the relatively unknown Mastroianni while De Laurentiis wanted Paul Newman as a hedge on his investment. Reaching an impasse, De Laurentiis sold the rights to publishing mogul Angelo Rizzoli. Shooting began on 16 March 1959 with Anita Ekberg climbing the stairs to the cupola of Saint Peter's in a mammoth décor constructed at Cinecittà. The statue of Christ flown by helicopter over Rome to St. Peter's Square was inspired by an actual media event on 1 May 1956, which Fellini had witnessed.

La Dolce Vita broke all box office records. Despite scalpers selling tickets at 1000 lire,[37] crowds queued in line for hours to see an "immoral movie" before the censors banned it. At an exclusive Milan screening on 5 February 1960, one outraged patron spat on Fellini while others hurled insults. Denounced in parliament by right-wing conservatives, undersecretary Domenico Magrì of the Christian Democrats demanded tolerance for the film's controversial themes.[38] The Vatican's official press organ, L'Osservatore Romano, lobbied for censorship while the Board of Roman Parish Priests and the Genealogical Board of Italian Nobility attacked the film. In one documented instance involving favourable reviews written by the Jesuits of San Fedele, defending La Dolce Vita had severe consequences.[39] In competition at Cannes alongside Antonioni's L'Avventura, the film won the Palme d'Or awarded by presiding juror Georges Simenon. The Belgian writer was promptly "hissed at" by the disapproving festival crowd.[40]

Art films and dreams (1961–1969)

Federico Fellini

A major discovery for Fellini after his Italian neorealism period (1950–1959) was the work of Carl Jung. After meeting Jungian psychoanalyst Dr. Ernst Bernhard in early 1960, he read Jung's autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963) and experimented with LSD.[41] Bernhard also recommended that Fellini consult the I Ching and keep a record of his dreams. What Fellini formerly accepted as "his extrasensory perceptions"[42] were now interpreted as psychic manifestations of the unconscious. Bernhard's focus on Jungian depth psychology proved to be the single greatest influence on Fellini's mature style and marked the turning point in his work from neorealism to filmmaking that was "primarily oneiric".[43] As a consequence, Jung's seminal ideas on the anima and the animus, the role of archetypes and the collective unconscious directly influenced such films as 8+1⁄2 (1963), Juliet of the Spirits (1965), Fellini Satyricon (1969), Casanova (1976), and City of Women (1980).[44] Other key influences on his work include Luis Buñuel,[a] Charlie Chaplin,[b] Sergei Eisenstein,[c] Buster Keaton,[45] Laurel and Hardy,[45] the Marx Brothers,[45] and Roberto Rossellini.[d]

Exploiting La Dolce Vita's success, financier Angelo Rizzoli set up Federiz in 1960, an independent film company, for Fellini and production manager Clemente Fracassi to discover and produce new talent. Despite the best intentions, their overcautious editorial and business skills forced the company to close down soon after cancelling Pasolini's project, Accattone (1961).[46]

Condemned as a "public sinner",[47] for La Dolce Vita, Fellini responded with The Temptations of Doctor Antonio, a segment in the omnibus Boccaccio '70. His second colour film, it was the sole project green-lighted at Federiz. Infused with the surrealistic satire that characterized the young Fellini's work at Marc'Aurelio, the film ridiculed a crusader against vice, interpreted by Peppino De Filippo, who goes insane trying to censor a billboard of Anita Ekberg espousing the virtues of milk.[48]

In an October 1960 letter to his colleague Brunello Rondi, Fellini first outlined his film ideas about a man suffering creative block: "Well then – a guy (a writer? any kind of professional man? a theatrical producer?) has to interrupt the usual rhythm of his life for two weeks because of a not-too-serious disease. It's a warning bell: something is blocking up his system."[49] Unclear about the script, its title, and his protagonist's profession, he scouted locations throughout Italy "looking for the film",[50] in the hope of resolving his confusion. Flaiano suggested La bella confusione (literally The Beautiful Confusion) as the movie's title. Under pressure from his producers, Fellini finally settled on 8+1⁄2, a self-referential title referring principally (but not exclusively)[51] to the number of films he had directed up to that time.

Giving the order to start production in spring 1962, Fellini signed deals with his producer Rizzoli, fixed dates, had sets constructed, cast Mastroianni, Anouk Aimée, and Sandra Milo in lead roles, and did screen tests at the Scalera Studios in Rome. He hired cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo, among key personnel. But apart from naming his hero Guido Anselmi, he still couldn't decide what his character did for a living.[52] The crisis came to a head in April when, sitting in his Cinecittà office, he began a letter to Rizzoli confessing he had "lost his film" and had to abandon the project. Interrupted by the chief machinist requesting he celebrate the launch of 8+1⁄2, Fellini put aside the letter and went on the set. Raising a toast to the crew, he "felt overwhelmed by shame… I was in a no exit situation. I was a director who wanted to make a film he no longer remembers. And lo and behold, at that very moment everything fell into place. I got straight to the heart of the film. I would narrate everything that had been happening to me. I would make a film telling the story of a director who no longer knows what film he wanted to make".[53] The self-mirroring structure makes the entire film inseparable from its reflecting construction.

Shooting began on 9 May 1962. Perplexed by the seemingly chaotic, incessant improvisation on the set, Deena Boyer, the director's American press officer at the time, asked for a rationale. Fellini told her that he hoped to convey the three levels "on which our minds live: the past, the present, and the conditional — the realm of fantasy".[54] After shooting wrapped on 14 October, Nino Rota composed various circus marches and fanfares that would later become signature tunes of the maestro's cinema.[55] Nominated for four Oscars, 8+1⁄2 won awards for best foreign language film and best costume design in black-and-white. In California for the ceremony, Fellini toured Disneyland with Walt Disney the day after.

Increasingly attracted to parapsychology, Fellini met the Turin antiquarian Gustavo Rol in 1963.[56] Rol, a former banker, introduced him to the world of Spiritism and séances. In 1964, Fellini took LSD[57] under the supervision of Emilio Servadio, his psychoanalyst during the 1954 production of La Strada.[58] For years reserved about what actually occurred that Sunday afternoon, he admitted in 1992 that

... objects and their functions no longer had any significance. All I perceived was perception itself, the hell of forms and figures devoid of human emotion and detached from the reality of my unreal environment. I was an instrument in a virtual world that constantly renewed its own meaningless image in a living world that was itself perceived outside of nature. And since the appearance of things was no longer definitive but limitless, this paradisiacal awareness freed me from the reality external to my self. The fire and the rose, as it were, became one.[59]

Fellini's hallucinatory insights were given full flower in his first colour feature Juliet of the Spirits (1965), depicting Giulietta Masina as Juliet, a housewife who rightly suspects her husband's infidelity and succumbs to the voices of spirits summoned during a séance at her home. Her sexually voracious next door neighbor Suzy (Sandra Milo) introduces Juliet to a world of uninhibited sensuality, but Juliet is haunted by childhood memories of her Catholic guilt and a teenaged friend who committed suicide. Complex and filled with psychological symbolism, the film is set to a jaunty score by Nino Rota.

Nostalgia, sexuality, and politics (1970–1980)

Fellini & Bruno Zanin on the set of Amarcord in 1973

To help promote Satyricon in the United States, Fellini flew to Los Angeles in January 1970 for interviews with Dick Cavett and David Frost. He also met with film director Paul Mazursky who wanted to cast him in a starring role alongside Donald Sutherland in his new film, Alex in Wonderland.[60] In February, Fellini scouted locations in Paris for The Clowns, a docufiction both for cinema and television, based on his childhood memories of the circus and a "coherent theory of clowning."[61] As he saw it, the clown "was always the caricature of a well-established, ordered, peaceful society. But today all is temporary, disordered, grotesque. Who can still laugh at clowns?... All the world plays a clown now."[62]

In March 1971, Fellini began production on Roma, a seemingly random collection of episodes informed by the director's memories and impressions of Rome. The "diverse sequences," writes Fellini scholar Peter Bondanella, "are held together only by the fact that they all ultimately originate from the director's fertile imagination."[63] The film's opening scene anticipates Amarcord while its most surreal sequence involves an ecclesiastical fashion show in which nuns and priests roller skate past shipwrecks of cobwebbed skeletons.

Over a period of six months between January and June 1973, Fellini shot the Oscar-winning Amarcord. Loosely based on the director's 1968 autobiographical essay My Rimini,[64] the film depicts the adolescent Titta and his friends working out their sexual frustrations against the religious and Fascist backdrop of a provincial town in Italy during the 1930s. Produced by Franco Cristaldi, the seriocomic movie became Fellini's second biggest commercial success after La Dolce Vita.[65] Circular in form, Amarcord avoids plot and linear narrative in a way similar to The Clowns and Roma.[66] The director's overriding concern with developing a poetic form of cinema was first outlined in a 1965 interview he gave to The New Yorker journalist Lillian Ross: "I am trying to free my work from certain constrictions – a story with a beginning, a development, an ending. It should be more like a poem with metre and cadence."[67]

Late films and projects (1981–1990)

Italian President Sandro Pertini receiving a David di Donatello Award from Fellini in 1985

Organized by his publisher Diogenes Verlag in 1982, the first major exhibition of 63 drawings by Fellini was held in Paris, Brussels, and the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York.[68] A gifted caricaturist, he found much of the inspiration for his sketches from his own dreams while the films-in-progress both originated from and stimulated drawings for characters, decor, costumes and set designs. Under the title, I disegni di Fellini (Fellini's Designs), he published 350 drawings executed in pencil, watercolours, and felt pens.[69]

On 6 September 1985 Fellini was awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 42nd Venice Film Festival. That same year, he became the first non-American to receive the Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual award for cinematic achievement.[3]

Fellini rewards Marcello Mastroianni with the Golden Lion Honorary Award at the 47th Venice International Film Festival.

Long fascinated by Carlos Castaneda's The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, Fellini accompanied the Peruvian author on a journey to the Yucatán to assess the feasibility of a film. After first meeting Castaneda in Rome in October 1984, Fellini drafted a treatment with Pinelli titled Viaggio a Tulun. Producer Alberto Grimaldi, prepared to buy film rights to all of Castaneda's work, then paid for pre-production research taking Fellini and his entourage from Rome to Los Angeles and the jungles of Mexico in October 1985.[70] When Castaneda inexplicably disappeared and the project fell through, Fellini's mystico-shamanic adventures were scripted with Pinelli and serialized in Corriere della Sera in May 1986. A barely veiled satirical interpretation of Castaneda's work,[71] Viaggio a Tulun was published in 1989 as a graphic novel with artwork by Milo Manara and as Trip to Tulum in America in 1990.

For Intervista, produced by Ibrahim Moussa and RAI Television, Fellini intercut memories of the first time he visited Cinecittà in 1939 with present-day footage of himself at work on a screen adaptation of Franz Kafka's Amerika. A meditation on the nature of memory and film production, it won the special 40th Anniversary Prize at Cannes and the 15th Moscow International Film Festival Golden Prize. In Brussels later that year, a panel of thirty professionals from eighteen European countries named Fellini the world's best director and 8+1⁄2 the best European film of all time.[72]

In early 1989 Fellini began production on The Voice of the Moon, based on Ermanno Cavazzoni's novel, Il poema dei lunatici (The Lunatics' Poem). A small town was built at Empire Studios on the via Pontina outside Rome. Starring Roberto Benigni as Ivo Salvini, a madcap poetic figure newly released from a mental institution, the character is a combination of La Strada's Gelsomina, Pinocchio, and Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi.[73] Fellini improvised as he filmed, using as a guide a rough treatment written with Pinelli.[74] Despite its modest critical and commercial success in Italy, and its warm reception by French critics, it failed to interest North American distributors.[75]

Fellini won the Praemium Imperiale, an international prize in the visual arts given by the Japan Art Association in 1990.[76]

Final years (1991–1993)

In July 1991 and April 1992, Fellini worked in close collaboration with Canadian filmmaker Damian Pettigrew to establish "the longest and most detailed conversations ever recorded on film".[77] Described as the "Maestro's spiritual testament" by his biographer Tullio Kezich,[78] excerpts culled from the conversations later served as the basis of their feature documentary, Fellini: I'm a Born Liar (2002) and the book, I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon.

In April 1993 Fellini received his fifth Oscar, for lifetime achievement, "in recognition of his cinematic accomplishments that have thrilled and entertained audiences worldwide". On 16 June, he entered the Cantonal Hospital in Zürich for an angioplasty on his femoral artery[79] but suffered a stroke at Rimini's Grand Hotel two months later. Partially paralyzed, he was first transferred to Ferrara for rehabilitation and then to the Policlinico Umberto I in Rome to be near his wife, also hospitalized. He suffered a second stroke and fell into an irreversible coma.[80]

Death

See also: Monumental Cemetery of Rimini § La grande prua

Fellini died in Rome on 31 October 1993 at the age of 73 after a heart attack he suffered a few weeks earlier,[81] a day after his 50th wedding anniversary. The memorial service, in Studio 5 at Cinecittà, was attended by an estimated 70,000 people.[82] At Giulietta Masina's request, trumpeter Mauro Maur played Nino Rota's "Improvviso dell'Angelo" during the ceremony.[83]

Five months later, on 23 March 1994, Masina died of lung cancer. Fellini is buried with Masina and their son, Pierfederico, in a bronze sepulchre sculpted by Arnaldo Pomodoro in the Monumental Cemetery of Rimini.[84][85] Rimini's Federico Fellini Airport is named in his honour.

Religious views

Fellini was raised in a Roman Catholic family and considered himself a Catholic, but avoided formal activity in the Catholic Church. Fellini's films include Catholic themes; some celebrate Catholic teachings, while others criticize or ridicule church dogma.[86]

In 1965 Fellini said:

I go to church only when I have to shoot a scene in church, or for an aesthetic or nostalgic reason. For faith, you can go to a woman. Maybe that is more religious.[86]

Political views

While Fellini was for the most part indifferent to politics,[87] he had a general dislike of authoritarian institutions, and is interpreted by Bondanella as believing in "the dignity and even the nobility of the individual human being".[88] In a 1966 interview, he said, "I make it a point to see if certain ideologies or political attitudes threaten the private freedom of the individual. But for the rest, I am not prepared nor do I plan to become interested in politics."[89]

Despite various famous Italian actors favouring the Communists, Fellini was opposed to communism. He preferred to move within the world of the moderate left, and voted for the Italian Republican Party of his friend Ugo La Malfa as well as the reformist socialists of Pietro Nenni, another friend of his, and voted only once for the Christian Democracy party (Democrazia Cristiana, DC) in 1976 to keep the Communists out of power.[90] Bondanella writes that DC "was far too aligned with an extremely conservative and even reactionary pre-Vatican II church to suit Fellini's tastes."[88]

Apart from satirizing Silvio Berlusconi and mainstream television in Ginger and Fred,[91] Fellini rarely expressed political views in public and never directed an overtly political film. He directed two electoral television spots during the 1990s: one for DC and another for the Italian Republican Party (PRI).[92] His slogan "Non si interrompe un'emozione" (Don't interrupt an emotion) was directed against the excessive use of TV advertisements. The Democratic Party of the Left also used the slogan in the referendums of 1995.[93]

Influence and legacy

Dedicatory plaque to Fellini on Via Veneto, Rome:

"To Federico Fellini, who made Via Veneto the stage for the La Dolce Vita – SPQR – 20 January 1995"

Personal and highly idiosyncratic visions of society, Fellini's films are a unique combination of memory, dreams, fantasy and desire. The adjectives "Fellinian" and "Felliniesque" are "synonymous with any kind of extravagant, fanciful, even baroque image in the cinema and in art in general".[11] La Dolce Vita contributed the term paparazzi to the English language, derived from Paparazzo, the photographer friend of journalist Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni).[94]

Contemporary filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Pedro Almodóvar, Roy Andersson, Darren Aronofsky, Ari Aster, Tim Burton,[95] Terry Gilliam,[96] Emir Kusturica,[97] Peter Greenaway, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Luca Guadagnino, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Yorgos Lanthimos, George Lucas, David Lynch,[98] Paolo Sorrentino, and Giuseppe Tornatore have cited Fellini's influence on their work.

Polish director Wojciech Has, whose two best-received films, The Saragossa Manuscript (1965) and The Hour-Glass Sanatorium (1973), are examples of modernist fantasies, has been compared to Fellini for the sheer "luxuriance of his images".[99]

Roman Polanski considered Fellini to be among the three film-makers he favored most, along with Akira Kurosawa and Orson Welles.[100]

I Vitelloni inspired European directors Juan Antonio Bardem, Marco Ferreri, and Lina Wertmüller and influenced Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973),[101] George Lucas's American Graffiti (1974), Joel Schumacher's St. Elmo's Fire (1985), and Barry Levinson's Diner (1982), among many others.[102] When the American magazine Cinema asked Stanley Kubrick in 1963 to name his ten favorite films, he ranked I Vitelloni number one.[103]

International film directors who have named La Strada as one of their favorite films include Stanley Kwan, Anton Corbijn, Gillies MacKinnon, Andreas Dresen, Jiří Menzel, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Mike Newell, Rajko Grlić, Spike Lee, Laila Pakalniņa, Ann Hui, Akira Kurosawa,[104] Kazuhiro Soda, Julian Jarrold, Krzysztof Zanussi, and Andrey Konchalovsky.[105] David Cronenberg credits La Strada for opening his eyes to the possibilities of cinema when, as a child, he saw adults leave a showing of the film openly weeping.[106]

Nights of Cabiria was adapted as the Broadway musical Sweet Charity and the movie Sweet Charity (1969) by Bob Fosse starring Shirley MacLaine. City of Women was adapted for the Berlin stage by Frank Castorf in 1992.[107]

8+1⁄2 inspired, among others, Mickey One (Arthur Penn, 1965), Alex in Wonderland (Paul Mazursky, 1970), Beware of a Holy Whore (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1971), Day for Night (François Truffaut, 1973), All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979), Stardust Memories (Woody Allen, 1980), Sogni d'oro (Nanni Moretti, 1981), Parad Planet (Vadim Abdrashitov, 1984), La Película del rey (Carlos Sorin, 1986), Living in Oblivion (Tom DiCillo, 1995), 8+1⁄2 Women (Peter Greenaway, 1999), Falling Down (Joel Schumacher, 1993), and the Broadway musical Nine (Maury Yeston and Arthur Kopit, 1982).[108] Yo-Yo Boing! (1998), a Spanish novel by Puerto Rican writer Giannina Braschi, features a dream sequence with Fellini inspired by 8+1⁄2.[109]

Alice by Woody Allen is a loose reworking of Fellini's 1965 film Juliet of the Spirits.[110]

Fellini's work is referenced on the albums Fellini Days (2001) by Fish, Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964) by Bob Dylan with Motorpsycho Nitemare, Funplex (2008) by the B-52's with the song Juliet of the Spirits, and in the opening traffic jam of the music video Everybody Hurts by R.E.M.[111] American singer Lana Del Rey has cited Fellini as an influence.[112] His work influenced the American TV shows Northern Exposure and Third Rock from the Sun.[113] Wes Anderson's short film Castello Cavalcanti (2013) is in many places a direct homage to Fellini.[114] In 1996, Entertainment Weekly ranked Fellini tenth on its "50 Greatest Directors" list.[115][116] In 2002 MovieMaker magazine ranked Fellini No. 9 on their list of The 25 Most Influential Directors of All Time.[117] In 2007, Total Film magazine ranked Fellini at No. 67 on its "100 Greatest Film Directors Ever" list.[118]

Various film-related material and personal papers of Fellini are in the Wesleyan University Cinema Archives, to which scholars and media experts have full access.[119] In October 2009, the Jeu de Paume in Paris opened an exhibit devoted to Fellini that included ephemera, television interviews, behind-the-scenes photographs, The Book of Dreams (based on 30 years of the director's illustrated dreams and notes), along with excerpts from La dolce vita and 8+1⁄2.[120]

In 2014 the weekly entertainment-trade magazine Variety announced that French director Sylvain Chomet was moving forward with The Thousand Miles, a project based on various Fellini works, including his unpublished drawings and writings.[121]

Filmography

Year Title Director Writer Notes

1942 Knights of the Desert No Yes

1942 Before the Postman No Yes

1943 The Peddler and the Lady No Yes

1943 L'ultima carrozzella No Yes

1945 Tutta la città canta No Yes

1945 Rome, Open City No Yes

1946 Paisà No Yes

1947 Il delitto di Giovanni Episcopo No Yes

1948 Senza pietà No Yes

1948 Il miracolo No Yes

1949 Il mulino del Po No Yes

1950 Francesco, giullare di Dio No Yes

1950 Il Cammino della speranza No Yes

1950 Variety Lights Yes Yes Co-credited with Alberto Lattuada

1951 La città si difende No Yes

1951 Persiane chiuse No Yes

1952 The White Sheik Yes Yes

1952 Il brigante di Tacca del Lupo No Yes

1953 I vitelloni Yes Yes

1953 Love in the City Yes Yes Segment: "Un'agenzia matrimoniale"

1954 La strada Yes Yes

1955 Il bidone Yes Yes

1957 Nights of Cabiria Yes Yes

1958 Fortunella No Yes

1960 La Dolce Vita Yes Yes

1962 Boccaccio '70 Yes Yes Segment: "Le tentazioni del Dottor Antonio"

1963 8+1⁄2 Yes Yes

1965 Juliet of the Spirits Yes Yes

1968 Spirits of the Dead Yes Yes Segment: "Toby Dammit"

1969 Fellini: A Director's Notebook Yes Yes TV Documentary

1969 Fellini Satyricon Yes Yes

1970 I Clowns Yes Yes

1972 Roma Yes Yes

1973 Amarcord Yes Yes

1976 Fellini's Casanova Yes Yes

1978 Orchestra Rehearsal Yes Yes

1980 City of Women Yes Yes

1983 And the Ship Sails On Yes Yes

1986 Ginger and Fred Yes Yes

1987 Intervista Yes Yes

1990 The Voice of the Moon Yes Yes

Television commercials

TV commercial for Campari Soda (1984)

TV commercial for Barilla pasta (1984)

Three TV commercials for Banca di Roma (1992)

Awards and nominations

Main article: List of awards and nominations received by Federico Fellini

Documentaries on Fellini

Ciao Federico (1969). Dir. Gideon Bachmann (60').

Federico Fellini – un autoritratto ritrovato (2000). Dir. Paquito Del Bosco (RAI TV, 68').

Fellini: I'm a Born Liar (2002). Dir. Damian Pettigrew. Feature documentary (Arte, Eurimages, Scottish Screen, 102').

How Strange to Be Named Federico (2013). Dir. Ettore Scola.

Fellini degli spiriti (2020). Dir. Selma Dell'Olio [it].

Cahiers du Cinéma (French pronunciation: [kaje dy sinema], lit. 'notebooks on cinema') is a French film magazine co-founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca.[1][2] It developed from the earlier magazine Revue du Cinéma (lit. 'review of cinema' established in 1928) involving members of two Paris film clubs—Objectif 49 (Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, and Alexandre Astruc, among others; lit. 'objective 49') and Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin (lit. 'cinema club of the Latin Quarter').

Initially edited by Doniol-Valcroze and, after 1957, by Éric Rohmer (aka, Maurice Scherer), it included amongst its writers Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and François Truffaut,[1] who went on to become highly influential filmmakers. It is the oldest French-language film magazine in publication.[3]

History

The first issue of Cahiers appeared in April 1951.[4] Much of its head staff, including Bazin, Doniol-Valcroze, Lo Duca, and the various younger, less-established critics, had met and shared their beliefs about film through their involvement in the publication of Revue du Cinéma from 1946 until its final issue in 1948; Cahiers was created as a successor to this earlier magazine.[5]

Early issues of Cahiers were small journals of thirty pages which bore minimalist covers, distinctive for their lack of headlines in favor of film stills on a distinctive bright yellow background. Each issue contained four or five articles (with at least one piece by Bazin in most issues),[6] most of which were reviews of specific films or appreciations of directors, supplemented on occasion by longer theoretical essays.[7] The first few years of the magazine's publication were dominated by Bazin, who was the de facto head of the editorial board.[7][8]

Bazin intended Cahiers to be a continuation of the intellectual form of criticism that Revue had printed, which prominently featured his articles advocating for realism as the most valuable quality of cinema. As more issues of Cahiers were published, however, Bazin found that a group of young proteges and critics serving as editors underneath him were beginning to disagree with him in the pages of the magazine.[8] Godard would voice his discontent with Bazin as early as 1952, when he challenged Bazin's views on editing in an article for the September issue of Cahiers.[9][10] Gradually, the tastes of these young critics drifted away from those of Bazin, as members of the group began to write critical appreciations of more commercial American filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks rather than the canonized French and Italian filmmakers that interested Bazin.[6]

The younger critics broke completely with Bazin by 1954, when an article in the January issue by Truffaut attacked what he called La qualité française (lit. ' the French quality', usually translated as "The Tradition of Quality"), denouncing many critically respected French films of the time as being unimaginative, oversimplified, and even immoral adaptations of literary works.[11][8] The article became the manifesto for the politique des auteurs (lit. ' the policy of the authors '), which became the label for Cahiers younger critics' emphasis on the importance of the director in the creation of a film—as a film's "author"—and their re-evaluation of Hollywood films and directors such as Hitchcock, Hawks, Jerry Lewis, Robert Aldrich, Nicholas Ray, and Fritz Lang.[2] Subsequently, American critic Andrew Sarris latched onto the word, "auteur", and paired it with the English word, "theory"; hence coining the phrase the "auteur theory" by which this critical approach is known in English-language film criticism.[12]

After the publication of Truffaut's article, Doniol-Valcroze and most of the Cahiers editors besides Bazin and Lo Duca rallied behind the rebellious authors; Lo Duca left Cahiers a year later,[8] while Bazin, in failing health, gave editorial control of the magazine to Rohmer and largely left Paris, though he continued to write for the magazine.[6] Now with control over the magazine's ideological approaches to film, the younger critics (minus Godard, who had left Paris in 1952, not to return until 1956)[13] changed the format of Cahiers somewhat, frequently conducting interviews with directors deemed "auteurs" and voting on films in a "Council" of ten core critics.[14] These critics came to champion non-American directors as well, writing on the mise en scène (the "dominant object of study" at the magazine)[15] of such filmmakers as Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini, Kenji Mizoguchi, Max Ophüls, and Jean Cocteau, many of whom Bazin had introduced them to.[14]

By the end of the 1950s, many of the remaining editors of Cahiers, however, were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the mere act of writing film criticism. Spurred on by the return of Godard to Paris in 1956 (who in the interim had made a short film himself), many of the younger critics became interested in making films themselves. Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Doniol-Valcroze, and even Rohmer, who had officially succeeded Doniol-Valcroze as head editor in 1958, began to divide their time between making films and writing about them.[16] The films that these critics made were experimental explorations of various theoretical, artistic, and ideological aspects of the film form, and would, along with the films of young French filmmakers outside the Cahiers circle, form the basis for the cinematic movement known as the French New Wave.[8][17] Meanwhile, Cahiers underwent staff changes, as Rohmer hired new editors such as Jean Douchet to fill the roles of those editors who were now making films, while other existing editors, particularly Jacques Rivette, began to write even more for the magazine.[18] Many of the newer critical voices (except for Rivette) largely ignored the films of the New Wave for Hollywood when they were not outright criticizing them, creating friction between much of the directorial side of the younger critics and the head editor Rohmer. A group of five Cahiers editors, including Godard and Doniol-Valcroze and led by Rivette, urged Rohmer to refocus the magazine's content on newer films such as their own. When he refused, the "gang of five" forced Rohmer out and installed Rivette as his replacement in 1963.[19]

Rivette[20] shifted political and social concerns farther to the left, and began a trend in the magazine of paying more attention to non-Hollywood films. The style of the journal moved through literary modernism in the early 1960s to radicalism and dialectical materialism by 1970. Moreover, during the mid-1970s the magazine was run by a Maoist editorial collective. In the mid-1970s, a review of the American film Jaws marked the magazine's return to more commercial perspectives, and an editorial turnover: (Serge Daney, Serge Toubiana, Thierry Jousse, Antoine de Baecque, and Charles Tesson). It led to the rehabilitation of some of the old Cahiers favourites, as well as some new film makers like Manoel de Oliveira, Raoul Ruiz, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Youssef Chahine, and Maurice Pialat. Recent writers have included Daney, André Téchiné, Léos Carax, Olivier Assayas, Danièle Dubroux, and Serge Le Péron.

In 1998, the Editions de l'Etoile (the company publishing Cahiers) was acquired by the press group Le Monde.[21] Traditionally losing money, the magazine attempted a make-over in 1999 to gain new readers, leading to a first split among writers and resulting in a magazine addressing all visual arts in a post-modernist approach. This version of the magazine printed ill-received opinion pieces on reality TV or video games that confused the traditional readership of the magazine.[1][2]

Le Monde took full editorial control of the magazine in 2003, appointing Jean-Michel Frodon as editor-in-chief. In February 2009, Cahiers was acquired from Le Monde by Richard Schlagman, also owner of Phaidon Press, a worldwide publishing group which specialises in books on the visual arts.[1] In July 2009, Stéphane Delorme and Jean-Philippe Tessé were promoted respectively to the positions of editor-in-chief and deputy chief editor.

In February 2020, the magazine was bought by several French entrepreneurs, including Xavier Niel and Alain Weill.[22] The entire editorial staff resigned, saying the change posed a threat to their editorial independence.[23][24]

Annual top 10 films list

Main article: Cahiers du Cinéma's Annual Top 10 Lists

The magazine has compiled a list of the top 10 films of each year for much of its existence.

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Giulietta Masina

Italian actress

Also known as: Giulia Anna Masina

Written and fact-checked by

Last Updated: Apr 23, 2024 • Article History

In full: Giulia Anna Masina

Born: February 22, 1921, San Giorgio di Piano, near Bologna, Italy

Died: March 23, 1994, Rome (aged 73)

Notable Family Members: spouse Federico Fellini

Giulietta Masina (born February 22, 1921, San Giorgio di Piano, near Bologna, Italy—died March 23, 1994, Rome) was an Italian motion-picture actress and the wife of Italian film director Federico Fellini. Her portrayal of waiflike innocents served as the emotional focal point for some of Fellini’s best films.

Masina began acting in student theatre productions when she was in her teens. Although she enrolled as a student at the University of Rome in 1938, she continued to devote a good deal of time to acting in university plays and on radio. In 1939 she made her professional debut in an Italian translation of Thornton Wilder’s Happy Traveler. By 1943 Masina was gaining notice as a radio actress and had been cast as Pallina in Cico e Pallina, a radio serial about a young married couple written by Fellini. Soon after, on October 30, 1943, she and Fellini were married.

USA 2006 - 78th Annual Academy Awards. Closeup of giant Oscar statue at the entrance of the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles, California. Hompepage blog 2009, arts and entertainment, film movie hollywood

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Giulietta Masina and Federico Fellini

Giulietta Masina being photographed by Federico Fellini on the set of La Strada (1954).

Masina won a Silver Ribbon (Italy’s major film award) for best supporting actress for her first important movie role, that of a prostitute in Alberto Lattuada’s Senza pietà (1948; Without Pity), coscripted by Fellini. She then played roles in several other Italian films before Fellini cast her in his first solo directorial effort, Lo sceicco bianco (1952; The White Sheik). In the minor role of the good-hearted prostitute Cabiria, Masina revealed her gift for pantomime and the charm and naïveté that would serve as the springboard for more fully realized characters in later Fellini films. With La Strada (1954; “The Road”), both Fellini and Masina achieved international success. As the childlike Gelsomina, the virtual chattel of a cruel circus performer, Masina relied on her remarkably expressive face and body to convey a range of emotions from sorrow and pathos to happiness and love, prompting many critics to describe her as a female Charlie Chaplin. She received similar praise for Le notti di Cabiria (1957; The Nights of Cabiria), in which Fellini and Masina revisited and amplified the character of Cabiria; Masina’s eloquent portrayal of the sentimental, gullible, and naively optimistic prostitute earned her the best-actress award at the Cannes Film Festival.

Throughout her career Masina’s talents remained allied with her husband’s films, never more so than in the semibiographical Giulietta degli spiriti (1965; Juliet of the Spirits). The film examines the dynamics of a strained marriage, and Masina plays the wife, Giulietta (the choice of name was not a coincidence), who faces the difficulties of asserting her own identity. After the film was released, Masina continued to perform regularly on radio and television but appeared less frequently in films. She also continued, as she had done throughout her marriage, to advise and collaborate with Fellini. Masina returned to the movies in 1986 in Fellini’s Ginger e Fred (Ginger and Fred). Her death in 1994 occurred just months after her husband’s.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Encyclopaedia Britannica.

La Dolce Vita

Table of Contents

Introduction

Production notes and credits

Cast

Academy Award nominations (* denotes win)

References & Edit History

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La Dolce Vita

film by Fellini [1960]

Written by

Fact-checked by

Last Updated: Apr 2, 2024 • Article History

Italian: “The Sweet Life”

Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg in La dolce vita

Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg in La dolce vita (1960), directed by Federico Fellini.

La Dolce Vita, Italian film, released in 1960, that was widely hailed as one of the most important ever made and the first of several acclaimed collaborations between director Federico Fellini and actor Marcello Mastroianni, who came to represent the director’s alter ego.

(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)

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In La Dolce Vita, Mastroianni portrayed a disillusioned journalist and gossip writer, ashamed of the shallowness of his profession but too weak to remove himself from the nightly temptations it offers: booze, easy women, and exotic fun. Rife with irony and surreal imagery whose meaning may only have been known to the director himself, the film is a compelling indictment of the decadence of modern life, mass consumerism, and what passes for high culture.

The film’s opening scene—a helicopter flying a statue of Christ to Rome is juxtaposed with a shot of a bevy of bikini-clad women—is but one of many that mix the sacred with the shallow. Such sequences caused controversy and led some countries—and the Vatican—to condemn or outright ban the film. The sets are strange and exotic, the costumes are elaborate, and many of the movie’s scenes now rank among the most famous in film history, such as one showing the blonde, zaftig Anita Ekberg frolicking in the Trevi Fountain. La Dolce Vita is credited with contributing the word paparazzi to the English language (it derives from the name of the photographer in the film, Paparazzo) and adding the adjective “Felliniesque,” referring in part to the director’s embrace of the surreal, to the movie critic’s lexicon.

Production notes and credits

Studio: Astor Pictures Corporation

Director: Federico Fellini

Writer: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, and Brunello Rondi

Music: Nino Rota

Running time: 174 minutes

Cast

Marcello Mastroianni (Marcello Rubino)

Anita Ekberg (Sylvia)

Anouk Aimée (Maddalena)

Annibale Ninchi (Marcello’s father)

Walter Santesso (Paparazzo)

Academy Award nominations (* denotes win)

Best director

Writing

Costume design (black and white)*

Art direction (black and white)

Lee Pfeiffer

Open City

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Academy Award nomination

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Open City

film by Rossellini [1945]

Also known as: “Roma, città aperta”, “Rome, Open City”

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Also called: Rome, Open City

Italian: Roma città aperta

Open City, Italian Neorealist film, released in 1945, that portrayed life in Nazi-occupied Rome during World War II. Directed by Roberto Rossellini in a documentary style that was innovative for the time, the movie brought international attention to the Neorealist movement and became one of its defining works, influencing numerous later filmmakers.

The film depicts a wide cross section of Romans who, despite their obvious social, economic, and religious differences, are united in their suffering during the German occupation. Pina (played by Anna Magnani) is a widowed pregnant working-class mother of two children; her fiancé, Francesco (Francesco Grandjacquet), works for a communist newspaper and aids the resistance; Marina (Maria Michi) is a nightclub singer whose desire for love and normality leads to collaboration with the enemy; Marina’s former boyfriend, Giorgio Manfredi, who is also known as Luigi Ferraris (Marcello Pagliero), is a resistance leader hunted by the Nazis; and Don Pietro Pellegrini (Aldo Fabrizi) is a lovable priest who musters unexpected bravery and courage to aid the resistance. Don Pietro and Manfredi are eventually caught by the Gestapo, and Manfredi is tortured in front of the priest, who refuses to betray his friend (who is an atheist) or his faith. Don Pietro’s relationship with Manfredi, and Pina’s pending (Roman Catholic) marriage to a communist, reflect the united front that developed among those in the resistance movement in their struggle against the Nazis.

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Because of the recentness of the events depicted on the screen—Open City was shot just months after the Allies liberated Rome—Rossellini considered calling the film A Story of Yesterday. He used the city’s still rubble-strewn streets and war-damaged buildings to great effect, and he maintained realism with his cast, many of whom were not actors; real German POWs portrayed enemy soldiers. The screenplay, which was cowritten by Federico Fellini, earned an Academy Award nomination. Open City, along with Paisan (1946) and Germany Year Zero (1947), formed Rossellini’s “war trilogy.”

Production notes and credits

Studio: Excelsa Film

Director: Roberto Rossellini

Writers: Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini, and Sergio Amidei

Producers: Roberto Rossellini, Giuseppe Amato, Ferruccio De Martino, and Rod E. Geiger

Music: Renzo Rossellini

Running time: 100 minutes

Cast

Aldo Fabrizi (Don Pietro Pellegrini)

Anna Magnani (Pina)

Marcello Pagliero (Giorgio Manfredi/Luigi Ferraris)

Francesco Grandjacquet (Francesco)

Maria Michi (Marina Mari)

Academy Award nomination

Screenplay

Lee Pfeiffer

theatrical production

Table of Contents

Introduction

Elements of theatrical production

Aspects of theatrical production

References & Edit History

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Key People: William Shakespeare Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Matthew Macfadyen Mandy Patinkin Cheryl Hines

Related Topics: theatre circus puppetry acting directing

Theatrical production, the planning, rehearsal, and presentation of a work. Such a work is presented to an audience at a particular time and place by live performers, who use either themselves or inanimate figures, such as puppets, as the medium of presentation. A theatrical production can be either dramatic or nondramatic, depending upon the activity presented.

While dramatic productions frequently conform to a written text, it is not the use of such a text but rather the fictional mimetic (from Greek mimēsis, “imitation,” “representation”) nature of the performer’s behaviour that makes a work dramatic. For example, a person walking a tightrope is performing an acrobatic act, whereas a person who pretends to be an acrobat walking a tightrope is performing a dramatic act. Both performers are engaged in theatrical presentation, but only the latter is involved in the creation of dramatic illusion. Though a dramatic performance may include dancing, singing, juggling, acrobatics, or other nondramatic elements, it is concerned mainly with the representation of actual or imagined life.

In nondramatic theatrical productions there is no imitation of “another existence” but simply the entertainment or excitation of the audience by the performer. Whether acrobatic or musical, gestural or vocal, such activity is theatrical because it is presented by a live performer to an audience, but it remains nondramatic so long as it has a purely presentational quality rather than a representational one.

In any single theatrical production, one or another type of activity may so prevail that there is little difficulty in determining the aesthetic nature of the final work. A play by the 19th-century Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, with its depiction of middle-class behaviour, minimizes nondramatic activity; the recital of a song by the 19th-century Romantic composer Franz Schubert, by contrast, with its emphasis upon musical values, may ignore dramatic elements and, to a considerable extent, even the act of presentation itself. Between these two extremes, however, there are many types of theatrical production in which the aesthetic nature of the form is less simple. Opera, for example, employs both drama and music in shifting patterns of emphasis.

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In Europe and the United States several forms arose in the 20th century that combine dramatic and nondramatic material. Vaudeville, or music hall, for instance, employs a succession of various acts, such as fictional sketches, musical and dance numbers, and feats of dexterity, of which some are representational and others are not. In the musical theatre, song and dance serve both to further the narrative and to provide a break from purely dramatic presentation. This variety also characterizes much Asian theatre, in which dramatic moments are elaborated in dance exhibitions. In light of these examples, the definition of what constitutes theatrical production must remain elastic.

For a general discussion of theatre as an art form, as well as a specific treatment of the crafts of acting and directing, see theatre, directing, and acting. The aesthetic dimension of a dramatic production is discussed under stage design. Drama as a literary genre is treated under dramatic literature. Drama or dramatic literature is also treated in numerous other articles, including those on the literature or theatre of a specific country or region, of which the following are examples: Western theatre; African literature; American literature; English literature; French literature; German literature; Greek literature; Japanese literature; and Oceanic literature. Other articles that pertain to theatrical production include circus and puppetry.

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Elements of theatrical production

According to the British director Peter Brook, theatre occurs whenever someone crosses neutral space and is watched by another person. This definition of theatre raises some problems, such as the difficulty of determining neutral space, but it is useful in its firm commitment to demystifying theatrical production. In former times the idea of the actor as motivated by a desire to create astonishment and wonder was sometimes seen as the basis of all theatre. Certainly there are types of theatrical performance that entail ritual and magic, but theatre is far more frequently rooted in attempts to structure emotion and experience.

Generally speaking, all theatrical productions have certain elements in common: the performer or performers, their acting in space (usually some sort of stage) and time (some limited duration of performance), and a producing process and organization. These elements are treated in separate sections below.

The performer

Skills and attributes

The work of the actor falls into five main areas: (1) the exhibition of particular physical, including vocal, skills; (2) the exhibition of mimetic skills, in which physical states and activities are simulated; (3) the imaginative exploration of fictitious situations; (4) the exhibition of patterns of human behaviour that are not natural to the actor; and (5) interaction, while engaging in these activities, with other actor-characters and with members of the audience.

At certain times in the history of Western theatre, the highest degree of physical skill has been associated with nondramatic performance. In Asian theatre, however, such distinctions do not apply. Chinese opera and Japanese drama require an actor to play one type of role for his entire professional life. The actor must play this role in a manner strictly determined by tradition, reproducing specific patterns of movement and speech that can be mastered only by first gaining control of complex physical skills. Later, if especially gifted, an actor may bring to a role certain refinements of the tradition, which may be handed down to a succeeding generation.

Western drama, however, does not usually provide the actor with quite so defined a repertoire of movements and utterances. It is true that actors in the Italian commedia dell’arte of the 16th to the 18th centuries specialized in one role and transmitted to their successors a body of situations, speeches, and lazzi (stage sketches, or routines). Nevertheless, they seem to have had more leeway than their Asian counterparts in exercising invention and personal expression. Great rhetorical skill has been demanded of the Western actor, for the intricate metrical patterns of Greek, Latin, French, English, and Spanish drama have been part of the glory of their respective theatres.

Naturalistic theatre, which flowered in the late 19th century, made rhetoric obsolete, requiring the actor to hide virtuoso performing skills by creating the illusion of everyday behaviour. This meant that more weight was given to the actor’s depictions of psychological attributes. The magnetism of a performance derived no longer from stylized behaviour but from intense personal revelation. This requires a marked ability to focus energies, to concentrate intently either upon the audience directly or upon a fellow actor and, thereby, indirectly upon the audience. All good actors can project a concentrated force, or “presence,” which has become increasingly important to the actor as set patterns of playing have disappeared. Presence is not a fixed, definable quality but rather a process of continuous growth and change that takes place before the eyes of the audience.

Relation to the audience

In nondramatic theatre the performer generally acknowledges the presence of the audience and may even play directly to it. In dramatic theatre the actor may or may not do so. In Greek Old Comedy, for example, an actor speaking for the author might cajole, advise, or challenge the spectators. By contrast, the naturalistic actor plays as though a “fourth wall” closes off the room of the stage. Between these two extremes fall a variety of relationships. In some instances, although direct contact is made, the audience is itself assumed to be playing a role, as in trial plays in which the audience is treated as a jury or as spectators in the court of justice. In other instances, the actor may address the audience one moment and play as though there were a fourth wall the next.

The quality of the contact between performer and audience is subtly modified by the nature of the performer’s place and role in society. In the broadest terms, the performer may be seen as a celebrant, servant, or critic of society. As a celebrant, the actor performs an almost priestly function, and in certain types of production the actor may in fact be a priest. In such instances, the actor mediates between the audience and the divine or spiritual dimension. In Greek tragedy, Japanese Noh theatre, and medieval mystery plays, the actions of the performers have both a religious and dramatic significance, but this is by no means always the case.

More often the actor has been a servant, akin to the household retainer or court jester. In classical Rome, for example, actors were slaves or lowly freedmen. In Elizabethan England the actor was nominally the protégé of a powerful courtly patron, but, if he lacked patronage, he was legally considered a rogue and vagabond. Such performers, as servants or inferiors, necessarily approached their audiences in supplicatory terms. However, with the growth of the commedia dell’arte companies, which were established on a commercial basis, the relationship between the performer and the audience changed into one of producer and consumer.

In the late 18th and 19th centuries, with the flourishing of the Romantic movement and the rise of nationalist consciousness throughout Europe, the actor as rebel began to appear. The role of the theatre was then a powerful one; actors learned to utilize the material of the play, even of classic works, to make political statements. Later, in the 20th century, the traditional boundaries between actors and spectators were broken down, and the performer became in some cases a virtual assailant of the audience. The Living Theatre, formed in 1947 in New York City by Julian Beck and Judith Malina, engaged the audience in direct personal and physical contact. In the 1970s, Augusto Boal of Brazil developed the theatre of the oppressed, in which performance was intended to serve the triple function of entertainment, education, and consciousness-raising. Similar techniques found wide use in the 1970s and ’80s in such movements as feminist theatre, homosexual theatre, black theatre, prison theatre, theatre of the deaf, theatre of the handicapped, and theatre of the aged.

The actor as character

Another aspect of the dramatic performer’s work has to do with the portrayal of characters, both as individuals and as types. In portraying an individual character, the performer adopts a fictional framework and acts according to the text’s demands. When playing Macbeth, for instance, he behaves “as if” he sees the phantom dagger referred to in the text. In many roles, however, the actor must work within established categories of stock types. Roman comedy, for instance, utilized a limited number of stock characters, such as the cunning slave, the passionate young lover, and the suspicious old father. The king, the wise counselor, the raging tyrant are examples derived from historical and biblical sources; the leading man, the juvenile, the ingenue, and the villain are examples from theatrical tradition itself.

While stock types stress those features of personality common to all human beings, naturalistic, or “slice-of-life,” drama seeks to individualize each role. This requires that the actor as well as the author draw from personal observation and experience. With the rise of dramatic realism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there arose corresponding theories of acting, notably those of Konstantin Stanislavsky, director of the Moscow Art Theatre. While an actor of this period might start with a generalized “type” (a country doctor, for example), efforts during rehearsal were bent on differentiating this doctor from any other. This style of acting demanded extensive preparation, with rehearsal periods of up to a year.

Realistic acting raises questions about the relation between the actor and the role performed: Does the actor merely simulate behaviour, or does he in some sense actually experience the passions and thoughts of the character? Central to the actor’s art though this question is, it has never been satisfactorily answered. The clearest statements of the problem were rendered in Denis Diderot’s essay Paradoxe sur la comédien (written 1773, published 1830; The Paradox of Acting) and subsequent commentary by William Archer in Masks or Faces (1888).

Space and time

The distinction between actor as performer and actor as character is matched by a distinction between the presentational and representational nature of space and time in theatrical production.

The playhouse area

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Celebratory performance marking the opening of the Globe Theatre in London, June 12, 1997.

Performer and audience exist together in a common area, within which there is a clearly delineated performing space (ring, stage platform, pit) and an audience space, the two structurally related. Some of the more common patterns of relationship are (1) an amphitheatre, with a bank of spectators half surrounding a playing area; (2) a circle of spectators standing or sitting around a ring in which the performance takes place; and (3) rows of seated spectators facing a raised platform. Theatre space is often associated with a special building, but this has not always been the case, nor is it always the case in modern times. Often theatre space has embraced a town square or even an entire town so that performers and audience are able to mingle. Modern attempts to create a space within which the distinction between performer and audience is blurred (called environmental theatre) echo earlier examples from the popular theatre.

Isolation of the performer

Almost all productions (the so-called happenings of the 1960s and guerrilla theatre are notable exceptions) endeavour to achieve two basic aims. First, every production seeks to impart a special quality to the theatrical area. Use of a theatrical building may in itself provide a heightened sense of locale. Otherwise, special decoration of familiar locales (town, market square) may transform them into ceremonial or festive spaces. Next, every production tries to make the performer visible and audible to the audience. On flat ground the circle or ring has often proved best. In hilly country the amphitheatre is the readiest solution. When a playing area is to be permanent, some means of raising the performer above the level of the crowd is often introduced, such as boards laid over trestles. The degree to which the performer is to be isolated depends partly on how complete and detailed a view of the presentation the audience expects.

The isolation of the performer has, however, another property. Marking out a playing area was in early antiquity an activity connected with religion. In classical Greece, for instance, the altar of the god Dionysus was surrounded by a circle for dancing. This was the origin of the performance space. Even when the direct religious tie was broken, stepping into the ring or onto the stage still marked a passage into another world. This is equally true of the sawdust ring of the circus and the bare boards of the trestle stage. Some traditional theatres, especially those of Asia, still regard the act of preparing to go on stage (putting on makeup, for instance) as sacred. Because of this, the isolation of the actor is spiritual almost as much as physical.

Illusion of place

In dramatic production the magical property with which a performing area is invested is augmented by the fictional action of the drama. The stage becomes another locale by an act of imagination undertaken by both actors and audience. The illusion of place may be created simply by speech: at the opening of a scene in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, for instance, one of the characters asks, “What country, friends, is this?” and is told, “This is Illyria, lady.” It may be created visually, by the designer’s ingenuity; the audience sees a room or a garden, and its attention is fixed on this imaginary setting, while its consciousness of the stage as a performing space becomes secondary. Alternately, it may be established through sound: crickets or birds evoke a garden as clearly as a visual image.

In some productions, especially those inspired by the antinaturalistic theories of the Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold, the audience is constantly reminded that it is in a theatre. Realist productions, in contrast, following the principles of Stanislavsky, encourage a clear distinction between performing area and viewing area. On the other hand, the theatre has often reconciled the contradictory elements of dramatic space. Renaissance masques combined the actor’s platform with a more public dancing circle, to which there was ready access from the seats. The 18th-century English stage moved out from a recessed picture of a representational locale to a projecting apron that merged with the auditorium. In both examples, the theatre found a physical convention for mediating between actor and audience.

Real versus illusory time

Time likewise has a dual character in drama. The performer and audience exist together in chronological time. But the actor as character exists in dramatic time. Neoclassical drama of the 17th century, especially in France, endeavoured to make the duration of the performance coincide with that of the play’s action. But, as a rule, drama has achieved its effects by accentuating the discrepancy between “real” and “illusory” time.

On one hand, the performer projects a sequence of activity upon which the audience concentrates intensely. Because it is difficult to maintain full attention over very long periods, it must be modulated; that is, stimulated, relaxed, and stimulated again. These contrasts and suspense make the real time spent at a performance absorbing and deeply felt. This experience is heightened by the illusion that another time scheme is also operating, that of the fictional event. Some drama gains its effects by suggesting that chronological and dramatic time differ between, but not within, scenes; that is, months may pass between Act I and Act II of Three Sisters by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, but within any act the dramatic time scale is the same as the chronological one. Shakespeare, however, presents a scene in Othello (Act II, scene 2) that takes about 25 minutes to play, yet during this scene an entire night supposedly passes. One of the most extensive temporal schemes in drama is to be found in the medieval cycles of miracle plays, which unfolded over a period of two to four days and which covered the history of the universe from a time before Genesis to the Day of Judgment yet to come. Indian and Indonesian performances of the epics Mahabharata and Ramayana may last for up to a day.

In contrast to this ambitious inclusion of all time is the handling of time in Japanese Noh theatre, in which real time, with its inevitable passage, is retarded to create a sensation of timelessness. The deliberate pace of the performer, the reiteration of the drum, and the unchanging facade of the stage add to this impression. During the second half of the 20th century, the American Robert Wilson devised performances that lasted through the night. In these circumstances, the tension that results from expectation and that directs the mind to anticipate events and outcomes is dissipated, the spectator tires, and the mind fluctuates between waking and half-sleeping states in which the events on the stage mingle with mental fantasies to produce a new mode of consciousness.

The piece and its performance

Preparation of content

Traditionally the dramatic piece has been planned in advance and rehearsed, although there are degrees of advance planning and rehearsal. Even the supposedly impromptu performances of the commedia dell’arte players could not take place without detailed preparation beforehand. In much dramatic theatre advance planning involves the preparation of a written script, sometimes prepared by a dramatist and sometimes created by the actors themselves in collaboration with each other or with a writer. The script thus may be either a tentative scenario or a finished blueprint of the final presentation (a playtext).

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Whether scenario or playtext, a piece consists of segments of activity arranged in a meaningful sequence. More often than not this is a narrative sequence, and thus each segment of activity presents a step in the unfolding of a story. But the sequence may also be based on a common motif or recurrent characters. The segments of activity, usually termed episodes or scenes, can include many kinds of behaviour—e.g., persuasion of one person by another, delivery of a speech, singing of a song, hand-to-hand combat.

Theatrical tradition and social practice largely determine the scope of the material to be presented. In ancient Greece, for example, myths often provided the material for tragedy, with debate, lamentation, prophecy, and choral comment constituting the main activities. In other traditions, storytelling, singing, acrobatics, and speeches are the ingredients. The dramatist, manager, and actor all operate within the context of performing routines and production conditions. Material drawn from other arts and from personal experiences may also be used.

Performing the piece

The occasion affects the manner in which the actor addresses the audience or represents a character; it also influences his physical appearance. In Japanese Noh theatre and ancient Greek drama, the actor is often transformed by costume into a superhuman figure. Raised headdresses, painted or masked faces, enveloping robes all contribute to the creation of a figure endowed with symbolic significance. In some societies, the actor is viewed not as a hero or demigod but as the epitome of contemporary society; elsewhere, the actor is a quixote, a member of a low class whose convincing impersonations unsettle concepts of order and rationality.

Although the actor is the focus of attention while performing, the preparatory and rehearsal phases tend to be organized by others. While in the Renaissance the actors themselves were in control of all phases of production, at other times they have been under the control of theatre managers and stage directors. A significant part of the alternative theatre movement in the mid-20th century was an attempt on the part of actors to establish a collective organization and to reclaim a share of power in the process of making theatre.

The importance of stage scenery is determined by the degree to which either the auditorium or playing area needs to be transformed for a performance. Four possibilities exist: little or no change is introduced into either area (as in the Elizabethan public theatre); the playing area remains unaltered while the audience area is changed (as in erecting banks of seating in a town square); the playing area is changed while the audience area remains fixed (as in proscenium theatre, in which a frame or arch separates the stage from the auditorium); or both areas are transformed (as in Renaissance court theatre or some contemporary theatrical productions).

The fixed playing space often has emblematic significance. In Japan, the Noh stage has three pine trees symbolizing heaven, Earth, and man, and on the Kabuki stage the right-hand side is more eminent than the left. The Elizabethan playhouse used trap doors to signify transit from Earth to heaven or hell. The practice of changing the visual and physical arrangement of the playing area became widespread in Europe during the Renaissance. At first, designers devised generalized scenery to be used for tragic, comic, and pastoral dramas. Later they created a setting unique to a particular play. With the emergence of designed space and changeable scenery, there arose an entire profession of scenic architects and mechanics whose work at times overshadowed that of the actors in importance. By the 20th century the designer’s task had become so complex that it was usually divided among scenic, costume, and lighting personnel and involved technicians, electricians, stagehands, prop masters, wardrobe keepers, and many others working together.

No single pattern for production exists, since there are too many social and personal variables at work. Certain broad observations can be made, however. First, any production is normally part of a more continuous enterprise. The continuity may be provided by the civic or religious life of the community, the stable associations of an acting troupe, or the permanence of a producer’s office.

Next, the production process tends to be either cooperative or hierarchical. The company for which Shakespeare wrote and to which he belonged seems to have been a collective. It remained for more than 25 years a community of professional associates and friends. More usual is the hierarchical organization, in which a single individual controls a production. In most instances, the professional specialty of that leader is dictated by the conditions of the particular theatre in which he works. In 17th-century France, for instance, the leader virtually had to be an actor (Molière was an actor turned actor-manager-dramatist). In the commercial theatre of the 20th-century United States he virtually had to be an impresario.

Finally, the mode of planning and rehearsing a production may be influenced by the artistic concept of an individual or a group. As long as theatre was part of a continuing tradition, its mode of production varied little, being conditioned partly by the social role of theatre and partly by the type of material the actor performed. Thus, the actor who played one type of role for an entire professional life concentrated on perfecting recurrent stage routines, while the actor who handled many different roles within a brief season had to be more adaptable.

During the 19th century there evolved new theories of production that affected both styles of performance and methods of rehearsal. Gradually, the idea of ensemble arose, stressing harmony of ideal and craft among what was usually a small group of actors in order to achieve a unity of effect. These ideas necessitated the careful orchestration of all elements of production. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the dominant element was the star actor; it then became the star ensemble (the Moscow Art Theatre, for instance) and, through the ensemble, the director.

Aspects of theatrical production

The development of international communications has had its effect on the theatre. The advent of railway and steamship travel in the 19th century led to an increase in international touring by theatre companies, and performers such as the French actress Sarah Bernhardt and the Italian operatic tenor Enrico Caruso became as well known in North and South America as in Europe. In the 20th century the cinema, radio, and television and video recording extended even further the range of potential audiences for theatrical performances. In the 1960s the Living Theatre inspired a generation of performers throughout the world, and Jerzy Grotowski’s Polish Laboratory Theatre influenced performers who had never been to Europe or seen him work firsthand. International theatre festivals that brought together performers from many varied traditions were regular occurrences by the end of the 20th century.

Types of production

Numerous forms of spectacle, such as dramatic and nondramatic pageants, the circus, son et lumière, and gymnastic presentations, are closely allied with theatre and indeed are considered by some classifications to be theatrical.

Pageantry

Nondramatic pageantry includes civic processions, such as parades, as well as static displays, such as gymnastic demonstrations. The appeal of nondramatic pageantry lies in coordinated visual spectacle. The performer is presented as a member of the collective, and, even where one individual may stand out, such as the parade “royalty,” he is essentially passive and wins attention merely as the focal point of a number of performers. In certain religious pageants the focal figure is not a living person at all but the icon or statue of a god or saint.

Dramatic pageantry has much in common with the nondramatic: both have communal involvement, stress on visual display, processional or static masses, and fictional or allegorical characters. Segments of the pageant may illustrate a historical or legendary incident, or the pageant as a whole may have a historical, mythical, or allegorical theme. Performers in the United States reenacting the dumping of tea into Boston Harbor exemplify historical pageantry; in England the assault on the Castle of Beauty by Knights of the Mount of Love, a pageant celebrating the marriage of Prince Arthur to Catherine of Aragon in 1501, exemplifies the allegorical type common at Renaissance courts. Pageantry of both the dramatic and nondramatic sort continues to play a significant role in the legitimization of political actions and the assertion of social prestige.

Nondramatic theatre

Nondramatic productions include diverse oral and musical presentations, circus and vaudeville acts, sporting displays, and ceremonial occasions such as the coronation of a monarch. There is no narrative line in such productions, but the technical virtuosity of the performers or the ritual significance of the event becomes the focus of audience attention. There may be the element of catharsis (purging), which Aristotle identified as the aim of tragedy. As a form of presentation, the circus encompasses a wide range of different types of performance, including feats of daring, illusion, and skill. The type of circus performance that comes closest to dramatic theatre is that of clowns. The clown engages in simplified and circumscribed dramatic activity, sometimes a ludicrous parody of other forms of perfor