Political Fellini

Federico Fellini is often considered a disengaged filmmaker, interested in self-referential dreams and grotesquerie rather than contemporary politics. This book challenges that myth by examining the filmmaker''s reception in Italy, and by exploring his films in the context of significant political debates. By conceiving Fellini''s cinema as an individual expression of the nation''s "mythical biography," the director''s most celebrated themes and images – a nostalgia for childhood, unattainable female figures, fantasy, the circus, carnival – become symbols of Italy''s traumatic modernity and perpetual adolescence.

Federico Fellini is often considered a disengaged filmmaker, interested in self-referential dreams and grotesquerie rather than contemporary politics. This book challenges that myth by examining the filmmaker’s reception in Italy, and by exploring his films in the context of significant political debates. By conceiving Fellini’s cinema as an individual expression of the nation’s “mythical biography,” the director’s most celebrated themes and images — a nostalgia for childhood, unattainable female figures, fantasy, the circus, carnival — become symbols of Italy’s traumatic modernity and perpetual adolescence.

Preface to the English edition
Acknowledgments
Essential Chronology by Fabio Benincasa

Introduction: Political Fellini?

Chapter 1. Fellini and “Italian Ideology”
Chapter 2. Mythical biography of a Nation
Chapter 3. La dolce vita, our contemporary
Chapter 4. Fellini, Mussolini and the complex of Rome
Chapter 5. Fellini and feminism
Chapter 6. A public dream. The Italy of Prova d’orchestra
Chapter 7. You don’t interrupt an emotion

Appendix: the Maestro and the Divo, Fellini in the Andreotti archives

Selected Bibliography
Index