BAMPFA | Fellini 100
March 4-May 14, 2022
Romantic. Elegant. Fantastical. We welcome back to the BAMPFA screen for the centennial tribute to Federico Fellini, a “larger-than-life maestro who created an inimitable cinematic style combining surreal carnival with incisive social critique” (Criterion).
"Federico Fellini (1920–1993) was a masterful artist of memory, dreams, fantasy, and desire. A central figure in the international art cinema movement that took off in the mid-1950s, he earned some of film’s highest honors, winning Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film for La strada, Nights of Cabiria, 8 1/2, and Amarcord, and the Palme d’Or at Cannes for La dolce vita. A hundred years after his birth, Fellini’s films still enthrall with their baroque flamboyance, emotional resonance, and grand visual design.
The young Fellini was far more interested in drawing, puppetry, the circus, and the movies than in academic pursuits. After an early job as a caricature artist and writer for a humor magazine, by the mid-1940s he was writing screenplays and working as an assistant director with Roberto Rossellini. Fellini soon emerged as a director in his own right, and elected to break with conventional approaches to production, creating a boldly realized body of work that speaks to generational change and to the imagination. Essential to his success were actors Marcello Mastroianni and Giulietta Masina, who was also his spouse for fifty years; and musician Nino Rota, who composed unforgettable scores for many of the films."
— Susan Oxtoby, Senior Film Curator
With the support of the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco.
The White Sheik (Lo sceicco bianco)
Friday, March 4 | 7 PM
Friday, April 8 | 6:30 PM
Italy, 1952, Digital Restoration
With: Alberto Sordi, Leopoldo Trieste, Brunella Bovo, Giulietta Masina
Provincial newlyweds arriving in Rome get sidetracked by the wife’s obsession with a fumetto photo-comic star in Fellini’s solo directorial debut. “A funny, sardonic, and clever satire on popular heroes and ordinary people’s illusions” (Chicago Reader).
VIEW DETAILS
La strada (The Road)
Sunday, March 6 4:30 PM
Italy, 1954, Digital Restoration
With: Giulietta Masina, Anthony Quinn, Richard Basehart, Aldo Silvani
Fellini’s muse, Giulietta Masina, modeled her timeless character Gelsomina after Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp. She stars with a brutish Anthony Quinn in this classic that Martin Scorsese called “the cornerstone of Fellini’s work.”
VIEW DETAILS
La dolce vita (The Sweet Life)
Saturday, March 12 | 7 PM
Friday, April 1 | 7 PM
Italy, 1960, Digital Restoration
With: Marcello Mastroianni, Yvonne Furneaux, Anouk Aimée, Anita Ekberg
Marcello Mastroianni stars as a jaded reporter drawn to the decadence of Rome in Fellini’s masterpiece, filled with jaw-dropping set pieces of both excess and warmth. “Fellini’s bizarre, extravagant visuals are absolutely riveting” (Time Out).
VIEW DETAILS
Il bidone (The Swindlers)
Friday, March 18 | 7 PM
Italy, 1955, Digital Restoration
With: Broderick Crawford, Richard Basehart, Franco Fabrizi, Giulietta Masina
Three con men pose as priests to trick peasants out of cash in Fellini’s sadly ironic study of misguided faith, whether in religion or upward mobility. This is the closest Fellini would come to film noir.
VIEW DETAILS
8 1/2 (Otto e mezzo)
Saturday, March 19 | 7 PM
Friday, April 15 | 7 PM
Italy, 1963, Digital Restoration
With: Marcello Mastroianni, Anouk Aimée, Claudia Cardinale, Sandra Milo
A jaded director (Marcello Mastroianni) fantasizes on his next great film—or his next sexual conquest—in Fellini’s metafictional masterpiece, “probably the most potent movie about filmmaking” (Guardian).
VIEW DETAILS
Nights of Cabiria (Le notti di Cabiria)
Friday, March 25 | 7 PM
Friday, May 6 | 7 PM
Italy, 1956, Digital Restoration
With: Giulietta Masina, François Périer, Amedeo Nazzari, Franca Marzi
The great Giulietta Masina portrays the spunky prostitute Cabiria in this humorous and ultimately transformative story of the survival of the human spirit. “The masterpiece of Masina’s collaboration with Fellini” (Albert Johnson).
VIEW DETAILS
Juliet of the Spirits (Giulietta degli spiriti)
Sunday, April 3 | 4 PM
Italy, 1965, Digital Restoration
With: Giulietta Masina, Mario Pisù, Sandra Milo, Lou Gilbert
A bourgeois housewife (a mesmerizing Giulietta Masina) embraces a world of fantasy in one of Fellini’s most spectacular, imaginative works.
VIEW DETAILS
The Clowns (I clown)
Sunday, April 10 | 4:30 PM
Italy, 1970, Digital Restoration
With: Federico Fellini, Maya Morin, Riccardo Billi, Gigi Reder
Fellini’s tribute to the world of the clown is—like so much of his supposedly nonfiction work—part documentary, part autobiography, and suffused with fantasy. “Fellini turns the world into his circus” (Time).
VIEW DETAILS
Amarcord
Saturday, April 16 | 7 PM
Thursday, May 12 | 7 PM
Italy, 1973, Digital Restoration
With Pupella Maggio, Magali Noël, Armando Brancia, Bruno Zanin
Fellini’s free-spirited portrait of Rimini in the 1930s, when fascism was a fact of life, is “as full of tales as Scheherazade, some romantic, some slapstick, some elegiacal, some bawdy, some mysterious... a film of exhilarating beauty” (New York Times).
VIEW DETAILS
Fellini Satyricon
Wednesday, May 4 | 7 PM
Italy, 1969, Digital Restoration
With: Martin Potter, Hiram Keller, Max Born, Capucine
Fellini’s tour of ancient Rome is less historical document than decadent fantasia, following the narrator, Encolpius, as he searches for his male lover through feasts, festivals, orgies, and death. “A surreal epic” (New York Times).
VIEW DETAILS
Fellini’s Roma (Roma)
Sunday, May 8 | 4 PM
Italy, 1972, Digital Restoration
With: Peter Gonzales, Fiona Florence, Pia De Doses, Alvaro Vitali
Fellini’s episodic, “panoramic album of impressions in praise of Rome and the Italians, past, present, and future” (Albert Johnson).
VIEW DETAILS
Fellini’s Casanova (Casanova)
Friday, May 13 | 7 PM
Italy, 1976, Digital Restoration
With: Donald Sutherland, Cicely Browne, Tina Aumont, Margareth Clémenti
Donald Sutherland plays Casanova in “Fellini’s most extravagant and courageous dream” (Albert Johnson). “The visual daring and pure imagination of every image leave it as an elegiac farewell to an era of Italian cinema” (Time Out).
VIEW DETAILS
Ginger and Fred (Ginger e Fred)
Saturday, May 14 | 7 PM
Italy, 1986, Digital Restoration
With: Giulietta Masina, Marcello Mastroianni, Franco Fabrizi, Frederick Ledebur
Giulietta Masina and Marcello Mastroianni star as an aging dance duo invited to perform on a television variety show in Fellini’s film, both a fond tribute to vaudeville and a withering assault on the meaningless opulence of commercial television.
VIEW DETAILS
