Federico Fellini

Fellini won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for La strada (1954), in which his wife Giulietta Masina plays the waif Gelsomina opposite Anthony Quinn's travelling strongman, and again for Le notti di Cabiria (1957), with Masina as an optimistic Roman prostitute. Shanahan notes that critics on the political Left attacked both films for leaving the neorealist social brief behind.

La dolce vita (1960) follows a Roman gossip reporter, played by Marcello Mastroianni, through the city's nightlife of celebrity and scandal, and gave English the word 'paparazzi' through the photographer character Paparazzo. Dixon calls it an immediate commercial and critical sensation despite condemnation by the Catholic Church, and Bosley Crowther's 1961 New York Times review judged that Fellini had come closest of recent filmmakers to a comprehensive picture of frantic modern civilisation.

In 8 1/2 (1963) Mastroianni plays a film director who cannot remember the film he is supposed to be making, and dream, memory and fantasy mix with the working day of a production. The film won the Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film and for Best Costume Design in black and white, and Dixon notes it is regularly cited among the greatest films in international critics' polls.

Amarcord (1973), set in a fascist-era Rimini assembled from remembered and invented stories, won him his fourth Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, at the 1975 ceremony. Fellini said of it that he had invented the whole tale, and Jackson notes that its sea and ocean liner were deliberately built to look artificial.

Frustrated by the pressures of shooting on the real Via Veneto for La dolce vita, Fellini had designer Piero Gherardi rebuild the street at Cinecittà. Thirty years later he wrote that, passing the Café de Paris, he could not stop himself thinking the authentic Via Veneto was the one in Studio 5, adding that the studio street's dimensions seemed to him more accurate, or certainly more attractive. For Intervista (1987) he again used a scale model of the studio so as to re-route its avenues and recolour its roofs.

Preferring a built street to the real one, and a model of the studio to an aerial shot, is consistent with aesthetic sensitivity; the quotations are Fellini's own later recollections, relayed by a magazine writer. Aesthetic Sensitivity

When the first producer of La dolce vita, Dino De Laurentiis, wanted Paul Newman in the lead, Dixon reports that Fellini refused to give up Marcello Mastroianni, and after strenuous negotiations De Laurentiis dropped out. Fellini was then involved with three producers at once before settling on Angelo Rizzoli and Giuseppe Amato's company, and signed the contract on 28 October 1958.

Holding to his own casting choice at the price of losing his first producer is consistent with a need for control over the film's key decisions; Dixon's account of the other producers' positions is brief. Need for Autonomy

Fellini began preparing 8 1/2 in 1961-62 with a spa setting and a leading cast but, he told his friend Angelo Solmi, without knowing the plot, and he said he was fifty times on the point of telling the producer he could not go on. The change that unlocked the film, Dixon writes, was making the hero a film director like himself, a burnt-out man who must begin a film he cannot remember. The result won two Academy Awards.

Proceeding with sets and casting while the story was still open, and then turning the problem itself into the film's subject, is consistent with a high tolerance for ambiguity; the account depends on Fellini's own later description as relayed by Solmi. Ambiguity Tolerance