Fellini’s Films and Commercials: From Postwar to Postmodern, by Frank Burke

Abstract

Revisiting his 1996 book entitled Fellini’s Films: From Postwar to Postmodern, Frank Burke has published an updated analysis of the director’s films, adding to the original treatment a preface and a new chapter on Fellini’s commercials. The occasion of the revival is, of course, the centenary of Fellini’s birth. This volume and the 2020 edited collection A Companion to Federico Fellini, which Burke coedited with Marguerite Waller and Marita Gubareva, are most welcome as a counterbalance to the notable underappreciation of Fellini’s production in Anglo-American film studies in the past, where feminists dismissed Fellini’s works, disapproving of his construction of gender, even if a more careful analysis would have revealed the complexity of such a construction in his filmic universe. The hyper-intellectualism of French post-1968 semiological theory, in conjunction with a puritanical British counter-cinema that rejected cinematic pleasure, marginalised not only Fellini, but a good deal of Italian cinema. French-infused British theory was incapable of reading Fellini’s work in the light of his own culture, and of a vast sensual tradition of Italian visual art. Dismissing them a priori on theoretical grounds, the academic theorists did not pay close attention to Fellini’s films.

Keywords

• fellini
• cinema
• italy
• auteur
• criticism