alr

Intervista

Directed by Federico Fellini.
With Sergio Rubini, Antonella Ponziani, Maurizio Mein.
Italy, 1987, DCP, color, 105 min.
Italian, Japanese and English with English subtitles.
DCP source: Luce Cinecittà, Cineteca di Bologna and Cineteca Nazionale

Cinecittà was the ground upon which Fellini built his life’s work, and with Intervista, four decades into his career, he finally turns his camera on the studio lot itself. Undergoing great change from both new modes of production and the encroachment of urban development, the backlot appears here as a flurry of activity from early morning through late in the night, with various productions often butting into one another and an eccentric workforce comprised of what feel like thinly veiled stand-ins for real Cinecittà mainstays. The loose narrative throughline follows Fellini himself (though more often the gallery of assistants who do his bidding) as preparations are made for what is allegedly a feature adaptation of Franz Kafka’s Amerika, though the periods of filming we do encounter imply a more Fellini-centric project with various reinterpretations of scenes from his filmography. Through it all, a Japanese student crew films a documentary about this process, periodically asking high-minded questions of the fabled director—to which he rarely gives complete answers. Eventually Marcello Mastroianni shows up as a flamboyant magician figure, and the entire production crew takes a detour to Anita Ekberg’s countryside villa for an afternoon screening of La Dolce Vita, a scenario that prompts a poignant meditation on the passing of time and the meaning of artistic legacy.

ORDER TICKETS

Part of film series

Read more

The Complete Federico Fellini

Other film series with this film

Read more

The Divine Comedy of Federico Fellini

Read more

Film and Autobiography

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

Música de Câmara. The Cinema of Rita Azevedo Gomes

Read more

From the Harvard Film Archive Collection …

Read more

Chile Año Cero / Chile Year Zero

Read more

People and their Virtue. Two Films by Wang Bing

Read more

Trenque Lauquen by Laura Citarella

Read more

I Heard It Through the Grapevine with James Baldwin

Read more

Filmmaker, Guest Worker: Zelimir Zilnik’s Expatriates

Read more

Adachi Masao’s Revolution+1

Read more

Out of the Ashes – The US-ROK Security Alliance & the Emergence of South Korean Cinema