To Inhabit the Film: Fellini, a Master of Improvisation

Abstract

By starting with City of Women (1980), the goal in this paper is to build a line to connect Fellinian biography and mythology to that director’s style, which becomes more and more of an improvisation, that is, it leaves aside the traditional narrative in order to base himself on an exercise that comes to life at the filming set. 81/2 (1963), a film that bears a close relation to City of Women, helps to understand such a tentative, jokingly way of filming, which mixes dream and reality, memory and fiction in one spectacle in which laughter and reflection are the main characters.