In the following essay, Burke discusses how Fellini's major works reflect key issues in literary and film theory, namely the notions of authorship and identity.

In the following essay, originally published in Italian Journal in 1990, Lawton discusses the unifying motifs of Fellini's oeuvre.

In essence, the whole of Fellini can be found in [the first] sequence from La Strada [which ends with Gelsomina following the circus band after leaving Zampano]. His thematic centre is here. To begin with, reinforced by the title itself, there is the sense of life as a journey, as a constant tearing away from things known and a plunging into the unfamiliar. Unlike Bergman, however, whose allegoric wanderings are generally from place to place … in Fellini, there is seldom any sense of direction or eve...

Murray is an American film critic, drama critic, and educator. In the following chapter from the enlarged edition of his critical study Fellini: The Artist, originally published in 1976, he discusses visual elements, the concept of neorealism, major themes, and notable stylistic influences in relation to Fellini's career and works.

In the following tribute, Kauffmann discusses the contrast between Fellini's early and late films, their critical reception, and Fellini's unique approach to filmmaking. He also reviews Voices of the Moon and relates some of his personal memories of the filmmaker

Dillard is an American educator, poet, novelist, and film critic. In the following essay, he emphasizes Fellini's lasting influence on a generation of filmmakers and comments on the importance of individual, rather than "politically codified," expression in his films.

If we were to single out one quality that distinguishes Fellini's career-long imaginative evolution, it would be the drive for individuation, the search for ever more authentic ways of rendering growth in his world. Even his early movies—films of increasing alienation—reveal growing pressure for individuation within his imagination and his characters. (His characters individuate themselves from, rather than through, their world; hence their ultimate alienation.) And as Fellini's ...

A Roman Catholic priest, Blake is also an American film reviewer, editor, critic, and educator. In the following essay, he argues that Fellini's Catholic heritage was an important source of artistic inspiration.

In another age Fellini would have been a Botticelli or a Bosch rather than a Leonardo. His vision is comic and surreal rather than realist. (p. 71) Fellini is a thoroughly filmic artist. He is often put down as being a romantic. But, as with objective and subjective, the description is irrelevant. (p. 73)

What we see [in Amarcord] is not a year from the lives of several citizens of Rimini during the Fascist period, but Fellini's poetically stylized remembrance of things past. Like Proust, Fellini organizes his experiences subjectively, as in a dream, where "insignificant" details loom overwhelmingly, and "important" facts are either ignored, or casually noted then cast aside as emotionally irrelevant…. In keeping with the impure nature of the film, Fellini the docume...

Kauffmann is an American dramatist, editor, and theater and film critic. In the following review of Intervista, he applauds Fellini's nostalgic and poignant examination of his life as a movie maker.

In the review below, Williamson offers a positive assessment of Ginger and Fred, praising Fellini's ambivalent treatment of the role of television in the modern world.

Canby is a novelist, playwright, and the chief film critic for the New York Times. In the following excerpt from a review of a Fellini retrospective held just before the filmmaker's death, Canby provides an overview of the major films of Fellini's career.

Go to see Spirits of the Dead about an hour after it begins. It's a three-part film—three Poe horror stories made by three different directors. The first two are silly bores, by the justly disregarded Roger Vadim and the greatly overrated Louis Malle. The third is by Federico Fellini. And his horror story is joyous. Joyous, not because Fellini has no sense of the macabre—after all, his story ends with decapitation—but because he revels in making films and because his darting inve...

Fellini's imagination is inexhaustible. He rarely uses scripts, but follows his own inspiration from moment to moment to decide what sequence to adopt, working out the details, via facendo, as he goes along. What emerges is the full and varied complexity of modern life. The existential noia, the lethargy of man face to face with his reconstituted tabula rasa, is but a single moment, a small corner of that life. Fellini does not dissipate his artistic energies in the desperate task of trying to extrac...

Time and again I have written that after 8 1/2, a deeply flawed but suggestive satire and, in a scene or two, even affecting film, Federico Fellini was a burnt-out case. There were signs of decline even before that, but few major film-makers have, after two or three great films and as many estimable ones, gone on to a series of abominations comparable to what Fellini has spewed out since 8 1/2. This, for me, includes even his one subsequent success, Amarcord, which I found a gross, witless, ham-fisted rehas...

Fellini's avowed purpose in Amarcord is very straightforward: "I simply wanted to create a portrait of a little Northern Italian town for a couple of hours. A town with its fantasy, its cynicism, its superstitions, its confusions, its fetes, and the passing of seasons." The film, however, is much more complex than a simple reverie or unvarnished history. No one remembers quite like Fellini, as we all know, so the film is really a quite personal and idiosyncratic vision of social history...

Amarcord may be the director's warmest, most subdued film (who goes to Fellini for warmth and good nature?), but it is also his safest. I miss the grand flourishes, the master showmanship, the epic heightening, that I've come to expect from Fellini. Amarcord lacks the vigor and drive, the joyous high spirits and sense of release that have been for me the chief pleasures of Fellini's work…. Amarcord is a trimming away, a paring down, rather than a return to the style of his earlie...

Federico Fellini, whose habit it is to offend the sensibilities of his fellow Italians, is at it again in a film with the precisely accurate title, Orchestra Rehearsal, and an explanatory subtitle, "The Decline of the West in C# Major." Beginning with La Dolce Vita, Fellini has made a series of films dealing with moral and social decadence; here he turns allegorically to political chaos and violence. (p. 221) The message is clear enough, if perhaps a little simplistic: shape up, do your jobs, ...

In his art Fellini reflects an Italy facing harsh and complicated realities yet fortified with the traditional wisdom of the centuries. He offers an image of hope, an image of a magic land which has rejuvenated itself throughout history more than any in the world…. Though his vision includes sin, Fellini is too Christian for despair, too convinced, even in the face of the worst human perversity, that God is love and cares for us through those ministering angels which find their way into every Fellini...

For the first few minutes of Orchestra Rehearsal it is as if the early, good Fellini had miraculously risen from the ashes of his self-indulgent, self-parodying, overblown and vacuous later works. A decrepit music copyist sets the scene for a symphonic rehearsal in a trecento oratory where several buried popes and bishops seem somehow to make the acoustics perfect, and where a TV crew is about to film the rehearsal. The atmosphere is vintage Fellini: the old fellow, an amateur actor and typical Fellinian od...

[Can] one ever have too much of Federico Fellini's special brand of excess? The maestro, after one of his customary long silences, has come out with all cameras firing…. [For his film Provo d'orchestra] Fellini had the majestically simple idea of using a rehearsing orchestra as a symbol of social order and hierarchy. And of their fragility. No sooner does discipline break down in the orchestra—when its members stage a sudden, headstrong rebellion against their autocratic conducto...

Amarcord is a haunting, funny, beautiful work that makes most other recent movies, with the exception of Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, look as drab as winter fields without snow…. [The film] is his memory of a year in the life of Rimini, or a town much like it, and for Fellini memory has a lot in common with dream. It needn't be what literally happened but what he wanted to believe, or perhaps what time has forced him to believe. (p. 264)

The first film of Federico Fellini, a highly touted young Italian director, to be shown publicly in these parts is a 4-year-old item called "The White Sheik."… In fairness to Signor Fellini, we will not speculate on his talents until we see a few more of his films. For the truth is that this little item, which significantly has to do with the naive and farcical adventures of a hick honeymoon couple in Rome, is surprisingly broad and ingenuous, in the manner of early silent comedies. And...