Political Fellini: Journey to the End of Italy

Federico Fellini is often considered a disengaged filmmaker, interested in self-referential dreams and grotesquerie rather than contemporary politics. This book challenges that myth by examining the filmmaker’s reception in Italy, and by exploring his films in the context of significant political debates. By conceiving Fellini’s cinema as an individual expression of the nation’s ＂mythical biography,＂ the director’s most celebrated themes and images - a nostalgia for childhood, unattainable female figures, fantasy, the circus, carnival - become symbols of Italy’s traumatic modernity and perpetual adolescence.

Andrea Minuz is Assistant Professor of Film & Media Studies in the Department of Art History and Perfor;ming Arts, University of Rome ＂La Sapienza＂. He is the author of La Shoah e la cultura visuale. Cinema, memoria, spazio pubblico (Bulzoni Editore, 2010) [The Holocaust and Visual Culture: Film, Memory, the Public Sphere].