“Rossellini stands out from the rest of the so-called neorealists for his eye, his intervention as a strong and compassionate witness who knew how to photograph the air around things, and for his disregard of cinema as a spectacle. I took part as a spectator in Paisan and Rome, Open City and I may have learnt my way of approaching cinema from Rossellini, who worked in the most incredible confusion: expiring bills, romantic complications, conflicts, the war. I remember in Naples, during the shooting of Paisan, in the middle of the street, with the allies’ tanks parading behind our backs, and there he was, with his beret and the megaphone: the casualness of a god who’s creating an earthquake only to be able to photograph it. This is the true lesson that neorealism taught me.” — Federico Fellini

Behind the scenes of Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria.

You refused lucrative offers from Hollywood. You probably could have made millions of dollars.
Perhaps I could become the richest man in the world, or even the poorest. More likely the latter. No, I simply cannot imagine leading my army into my creative battles in any other way than my own. What good is money in exchange for giving up my independence, my friends, my Roman restaurants, my crazy Italian people, traffic at rush hour by the Colosseum? I would have made money and lost my joy of life. And that’s all filming has been about for me: joy of life, battle of life, comedy of life, fascination of life. Life! Life! Life!

Federico Fellini
January 20, 1920 – October 31, 1993

“I always say Fellini inspired me. I love being in Fellini’s worlds. And Billy Wilder and Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock. To revisit those certain films and go in that world is just—It’s a world that didn’t exist and now it exists. There are some people that are—I always say that they don’t like so much abstraction. They don’t like to feel lost. They like to know always, always, always what’s going on. And when they don’t feel that, they feel a little crazy. And they don’t like that. Other people—and I’m one of them—I love to go into a world, be taken into a world and get lost in there and feel-think my way and have these experiences that I know… I know that feeling, but I don’t know how to put it into words. I know that feeling and it’s magical that this cinema brought it out. This is what I love.” — David Lynch

Among your friends, you have a reputation as a teller of tall tales. One of them, in fact, has gone so far as to call you “a colossal, compulsive, consummate liar.” What’s your reaction?
FELLINI: At least he gives me credit for being consummate. Anyone who lives, as I do, in a world of imagination must make an enormous and unnatural effort to be factual in the ordinary sense. I confess I would be a horrible witness in court because of this—and a terrible journalist. I feel compelled to tell a story the way I see it, and this is seldom the way it actually happened, in all its documentary detail.

You’ve been accused of embroidering the truth outrageously even in recounting the story of your own life. One friend says you’ve told him four completely different versions of your breakup with your first sweetheart. Why?
FELLINI: Why not? She’s worth even more versions. Che bella ragazza! People are worth much more than truth, even when they don’t look as great as she did. If you want to call me a liar in this sense, then I reply that it’s indispensable to let a storyteller color a story, expand it, deepen it, depending on the way he feels it has to be told. In my films, I do the same with life.

Sight & Sound Critics’ Poll 2012

1. Vertigo (dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
2. Citizen Kane (dir. Orson Welles)
3. Tokyo Story (dir. Yasujiro Ozu)
4. The Rules of the Game (dir. Jean Renoir)
5. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (dir. F.W. Murnau)
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (dir. Stanley Kubrick)
7. The Searchers (dir. John Ford)
8. Man with a Movie Camera (dir. Dziga Vertov)
9. The Passion of Joan of Arc (dir. Carl Th. Dreyer)
10. 8½ (dir. Federico Fellini)

And the loser is – Citizen Kane. After 50 years at the top of the Sight & Sound poll, Orson Welles’s debut film has been convincingly ousted by Alfred Hitchcock’s 45th feature Vertigo – and by a whopping 34 votes, compared with the mere five that separated them a decade ago. So what does it mean? Given that Kane actually clocked over three times as many votes this year as it did last time, it hasn’t exactly been snubbed by the vastly larger number of voters taking part in this new poll, which has spread its net far wider than any of its six predecessors. [More…, x]

distancetouch:

Federico Fellini’s face and costume sketches for The Clowns

Magali Noël, Federico Fellini, Giulietta Masina, and Robert Favre Le Bret at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival.