The cartoons, caricature sketches, and radio comedy that were his popular art métier brought him to the cinema as a gagman and scriptwriter. The famed humor bi-weekly served as an unofficial training ground for scriptwriters and directors of the postwar period.įellini’s formative influences can be traced back to the popular Italian culture of the period, and not primarily the cinema. Young Fellini supported himself as a wandering caricaturist until hired by Marc’Aurelio in 1939. When pressed for his influences, Fellini preferred Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx brothers, Pietro Germi, and Buñuel (with his black humor) to “cine-club” names such as Dreyer, Griffith and Eisenstein. And unlike his contemporaries, he never frequented the cinema clubs that screened the best Italian directors’ films and international titles from France, Germany and Russia. He never considered attending Rome’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, whose graduates he would later collaborate with.
Enrolled in law school, he abandoned the degree. Born in the seaside town of Rimini in Italy in 1920, he quit the provinces for Rome at age 18. Web resources Federico Fellini’s Cinema (1)įederico Fellini, a canonical name of personal expression and artistic fantasy in the cinema, had no formal technical training in his profession. January 20, 1920, Rimini, Emiglia-Romagna, Italy.
