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Fellini film festival hits Michigan Theater

Italian director's spirit lives on through restored films

The spirit of Federico Fellini has descended upon Ann Arbor in the form of a month long retrospective of the late director's fascinating and influential work. The Michigan Theater is one of just a handful of venues in the country to screen the carefully-restored prints spanning Fellini's entire career.

Local audiences were given their first taste of the restored oeuvre last Friday with a screening of the Academy Award winning "Amarcord" (1974). And this was but the first of the over 20 Fellini films that will be shown from the end of March to the middle of April at the Michigan Theater.

The restoration was initiated by Fellini, near the end of his life, because of the poor condition of the original prints of his films. In particular peril were prints from the 1970s, like "Amarcord," whose once vibrant colors had become dreary and washed-out. To undertake this monumental and time-consuming task, which often included returning to the original negatives, Fellini enlisted his longtime friend, collaborator and adviser, Dr. Gianfranco Angelucci. Angelucci served as the dying director's surrogate, returning the prints to their intended splendor and, in his words, "regenerating the Fellini inside me."

Sadly, the entire project was completed only days after Fellini's death. In honor of Fellini's contribution to the art of film, Cinecitta International, the Italian studio that produced most of his work, spearheaded this retrospective -- which has already visited cities, including New York and Boston. It was the work of the Italian Consulate in Detroit and other groups, such as the University's Program in Film and Video Studies and the Michigan Theater Film Institute, that helped secure Ann Arbor's place as a stop on the tour.

The Ann Arbor leg of the tour was distinguished by the presence of Angelucci, who attended the screening of "Amarcord" and delivered remarks, before the film, about his relationship with Fellini.

Earlier Friday afternoon, Angelucci spoke to me about Fellini's significance. "Fellini is a saint," he said. "The miracles of Fellini were the films. They were given to each of us to live our lives freer and more aware." Angelucci talked with reverence about Fellini, characterizing him not only as a saint, but also as a wizard and a magician.

Angelucci first met "il maestro" after completing his thesis on the films of Fellini at the Art Institute of Bologna in 1969. He assisted in the writing of several sequences of Fellini's "Roma" (1972). From that time forward, he had an intimate role in the production of Fellini's films, contributing both ideas and dialogue. Angelucci says this gave him "an opportunity to share my life with Fellini."

Even while pursuing his own side projects in television, film and teaching, Angelucci was always closely involved with Fellini's work. This collaboration reached its pinnacle in 1987 when Angelucci wrote the entire screenplay for "Intervista."

Both Angelucci and Fellini grew up in eastern Italy, Fellini in the seaside resort town of Rimini. He was born there in 1920 and experienced a strict Catholic upbringing under the specter of Benito Mussolini's fascist regime. Fellini's childhood was dominated by an active imagination that manifested itself in interests in the circus, movies, comic strips and drawing. After aborted careers as a cartoonist and journalist, Fellini entered the film industry as a gag writer and script doctor.

It was following the Allied liberation of Italy that Fellini began his collaboration with Roberto Rosselini on works such as "Open City" (1945). This partnership made it clear to Fellini that films have the potential for extraordinary power. He realized that he wanted to spend the rest of his life in the cinema.

Over the course of his career, Fellini won four Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film: For "La Strada" (1956), "The Nights of Cabria" (1957), "8 1/2" (1963), and "Amarcord" (1974). And in 1993, less than a year before his death, Fellini was honored by the Academy with a Lifetime Achievement Award. He had developed a carefully cultivated visual world that bespoke the co-existence of an enchanting, lost innocence and a jaded, aloof sophistication.

Fellini's work precipitated the addition of the term "Fellini-esque" to the vocabulary of film. This notion gets at the sublime moments in his work when a startling or unusual element invades the taken-for-granted order of everyday life. One such instance in "Amarcord" is when a peacock suddenly displays its plume in the middle of a snow storm.

In many ways "Amarcord" was the ideal film with which to start the festival. This largely autobiographical tale of coming-of-age in fascist Italy has the mark of many traits that identify Fellini's distinctive style. In full effect is Fellini's concern with vitality, an attribute notably missing in the work of some of the director's more self-consciously cerebral contemporaries (i.e., Bergman).

Also present is the aforementioned interest in images that have a phantasmagoric or hallucinatory power. And perhaps most telling is the extent to which the narrative is drawn from Fellini's own adolescence in pre-war Italy. Fellini, who once said that "the pearl is the autobiography of the oyster," saw all art as inextricably bound up with the artist's life. He therefore created numerous works that must have resonated for him in personal ways.

Despite the intimacy of theme in Fellini, there are universal concerns present with which all viewers can relate. Indeed, his stature in Italy, at the time of his death, was unlike that which we generally accord artists in the United States.

It is best evoked by Angelucci, who said, that for 16 hours, more than 100,000 people filed through Fellini's favored Cinecitta studio, where his funeral was held. The music of Nino Rota, a longtime Fellini collaborator, resounded while the mourners "walked slowly to have only a moment to stop and express their gratitude to this big soul that was disappearing."