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Federico Fellini: La Strada
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[The birth of] Federico was followed a year and a half later by a brother, and, in another five years, by a sister, Maddalena. Discipline in the family was provided mostly by Ida, a handsome, humorous woman with a wide smile and a touch of mischief in her black eyes. She was ... intensely religious, and determined that her children would receive proper religious educations.
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Fellini had to move frequently when he first left school because he would often have romantic affairs with his landladies, and he'd have to move when they ended. Fellini went on to have what he called "the most important year of his life" in 1939, when he traveled with his friend, the comedian Aldo Fabrizi, all across Italy with a vaudeville troupe.
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Fellini found himself and his film in the middle of a battle between conservative and church forces on the one hand, and the ideological (Marxist) left on the other. Catholics saw La Strada as a parable of Christian love, grace, and salvation, while leftist critics deplored it as a departure from orthodox neorealism.
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Fellini earned a reputation as a good sketch writer, scenery painter, bit player, and "company poet." It was during this trip that Fellini saw his country and experienced the variety of what he called its "human landscape." He said, "A different language is a different vision of life."
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Fellini's formative influences can be traced back to the popular Italian culture of the period, and not primarily the cinema. The cartoons, caricature sketches, and radio comedy that were his popular art métier brought him to the cinema as a gagman and scriptwriter. Novelist Italo Calvino diagnosed the influence of mass culture on Fellini's later sophisticated cinematic language as a "forcing of the photographic image in a direction that carries it from an image of caricature toward that of the visionary." (2) Fellini trained for a professional life as a visionary with over ten years of scriptwriting and on-the-set apprenticeship.
This lavish autobiography, full of "lush fantasy sequences and monumental pageantry," (Los Angeles Times) begins with Fellini as a youngster living in the Italian countryside. In school he studies the eclectic but parochial history of ancient Rome and then is introduced as a young man to the real thingarriving in this strange new city on the outbreak of World War II. Here, through a series of "visually stunning" (Los Angeles Times) vignettes brimming with satire and spark, the filmmaker comes to grips with a "sprawling, boisterous, bursting-at-the-seams portrait of Rome" (Interview), reinterpreting with his inimitable style an Italian history full of "rich sensual imagery and extravagant perception" (Playboy).
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