The Italian film director Federico Fellini (1920-1993) began as an exponent of poetic neorealism and later became the cinema's undisputed master of psychological expressionism and surrealist fantasy. Federico Fellini was born of middle-class family on th...

BEFORE THE late Federico Fellini's more-famous movies about big-breasted whores, stern nuns and womanizing artists was a charming, black-and-white gem called "La Strada." A deftly simple tale about the romance between touring strongman Anthony Quinn and wandering waif Giulietta Masina, it won the 1954...

A deceptively simple and poetic parable, Federico Fellini's "La Strada" was the focus of a critical debate when it premiered in 1954 simply because it marked Fellini's break with neorealism - the hard-knocks school that had dominated Italy's postwar cinema. "{Neorealism should embrace}...

Everyone remembers the blowhard on the movie line in Annie Hall. But almost nobody remembers that some of what he says is right. “We saw the Fellini film,” he begins, and forget the blather about La Strada being a great film for its use of...

Everyone remembers the blowhard on the movie line in Annie Hall. But almost nobody remembers that some of what he says is right. “We saw the Fellini film,” he begins, and forget the blather about La Strada being a great film for its use...

In its internal consistency, La Strada is more than a remarkable example of personal style. We may then ask: What is Fellini's image of the world we live in, his conception of man and the ethic he advances? Men are separated by astral distances and do not realize their unity in the human condition. Obstinately and gropingly they quest for understanding and belonging: everyone needs someone…. Undeniably, man's highest quest is to give meaning to his existence in the world. But neither pu...

Avoiding the studied poetic imagery of [La Strada], Vitelloni is at once a subtler and a more perceptive work. The protagonists, no longer alienated from the conventions of civilization, are now isolated within the social organism. Existing under the watchful observation of family and friends, these vitelloni, too young to have fought in the war but old enough to have suffered its consequences, are trapped in a wasteland of their own devising. The young wastrels chosen to represent the modern generation in ...