Imaginary Worlds and Startling Creatures: Federico Fellini and Popular Culture

In 1993, with these words, Umberto Eco commented on Federico Fellini’s ability to promote a cinema that would enable one to go beyond physical reality and into the inner spaces of the human soul. The previous year, Peter Bondanella had aptly stated: “More than any other director of the postwar period, Fellini’s public persona … projected the myth of the director as creative superstar, as imaginative magician” (1992, xix). Indeed, Federico Fellini was not only a masterful director, but a true alchemist of spectacle who forever changed the relationship between the world and its iconic representations in movies; and yet, he also contributed to the thorough transformation of the spectator’s rapport with the filmic image that took place in the very heart of the twentieth century, with the 1960s Modernist “revolution.” Moreover, over the decades, we have witnessed a true “cannibalism” of the Fellinian filmic body whose images and sounds, light and movement have been constantly appropriated and repurposed as icons or myths of popular culture; Fellini’s cinema has thus been progressively emptied and incessantly replicated as an unrestrained and exciting simulacrum of itself and of the very culture it fed upon. In time, Fellini’s own name has become more frequently associated to wild imagination and exuberant creativity, and his images have thus penetrated contemporary Western culture to the point that almost thirty years after his untimely death, Fellini and the felliniesque are recognized even by those who have never seen his films.