Fellini: A Director's Notebook
Italy, 1969, DCP, color, 52 min.
English and Italian with English subtitles.
DCP source: Luce Cinecittà, Cineteca di Bologna and Cineteca Nazionale
As a peak behind the curtain at Fellini’s filmmaking process, the television documentary Fellini: A Director’s Notebook, which aired on NBC in 1969, is only intermittently enlightening. As a piece of director mythology put together by Fellini himself, however, it’s a revealing look into the artist’s mind during a critical juncture in his career: namely, the period between his initial acclaim and the upcoming decade of films that would face charges of self-indulgence. The film that would come to kickstart that critical narrative, Fellini Satyricon, is the project being developed during A Director’s Notebook, though one wouldn’t necessarily know it from the strange assortment of locations Fellini visits over the course of the hour-long film: the Colosseum, a subway, a slaughterhouse, the Appian Way, Marcello Mastroianni’s villa during a photo shoot, and, finally, a nondescript office where a variety of eccentrics flaunt their talents for the director. Fellini is a fleeting presence throughout, glimpsed only briefly and rarely saying much, but the film’s peculiar montage—alternating between dreamy tracking shots and fly-on-the-wall handheld work—is clearly a reflection of his divided attention as he balances his own wandering imagination with the demands and inquiries of the associates guiding the documentary’s production.
Part of film series
Screenings from this program
La strada
Variety Lights
Juliet of the Spirits - DCP
Juliet of the Spirits - 35mm
Variety Lights
Casanova
Fellini: A Director's Notebook
Satyricon
