John Baxter, in this first major biography of the director (and the first since his death), limns the life and career of a man who made dreams and lies into great films. He was a man deeply disturbed, who proved that with genius came hardness: Fellini elicited extraordinary work from all around him, but bridled when their fame approached his; constantly won love he was unable to return; wove a filmworld whose fantasy seemed truer than real life. One producer compared him to Attila the Hun; another charged, "He's as phoney as a glass eye." The genius of his films rests on a foundation of deceptions, creations, and, above all, lies - woven by a man who frankly admitted that he invented everything. By a meticulous study of original sources in Italian, French, and English, and through interviews with friends and collaborators, as well as with the man himself, Baxter has brought into focus the real life of the man universally recognized as one of the greatest filmmakers ever: Fellini. From The Critics BookList - Mary Ellen Sullivan It's strange: a biography that says you can learn the most about its subject--one of the world's best-known, most revered filmmakers--by watching his films. On-screen, Fellini's childhood and adolescence, his fantasies and dreams, his politics and passion are all played out. Offscreen, the fanciful stories about his life and the garbled facts about family history he relayed make no sense, anyway, so why not just enjoy the spectacle of his films to understand their maker? Why not, indeed? concludes Baxter in his life of the arguably greatest postwar Italian film director, who died in 1992. Baxter erects the scaffolding of Fellini's life with all the relevant facts, then fleshes them out with detailed accounts of each film and its production, implying that the man's life was so much about moviemaking that the line where it ended and the rest of his activities began is indelibly blurred. Fortunately, this is also an account of the heyday of Italian neorealist cinema, and it captures Fellini's eccentricity and enigmatic quality well enough to be enjoyable.
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