The Emory Cinematheque, a series of professional film screenings offered by the Department of Film and Media and Emory College of Arts and Sciences, is back. For Fall 2022, we are pleased to present “Federico Fellini: A Centennial Celebration.” The most widely acclaimed Italian filmmaker of the 20th century, Fellini (1920-1993) worked as a writer and director across forty years; four of his films won the Best Foreign Film Award at the Academy Awards and Fellini himself won a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993.
“In the decades after World War II, Fellini brought to the cinema a unique sensibility and vision, one that grew out of his fascination with human nature, morality and amorality, despair, love, human desire and human fantasy,” says Dr. Matthew H. Bernstein of the Department of Film and Media, who co-curated the series with Dr. Angela Porcarelli of the Program in Italian Studies. “With accomplished screenwriters, production designers, cinematographers and stars (most notably his wife and muse Giulietta Masina and Marcello Mastroianni), Fellini produced some of the most inventive and moving films of the second half of the twentieth century.”
“Fellini was one of the most distinctive, celebrated, and influential directors of all time,” Dr. Porcarelli notes. “His vision and style were so innovative that a new adjective had to be coined: Felliniesque, a word that indicates the unique, baroque and often surreal atmosphere, images and symbols of the director’s fantastic imagination where life assumes the consistency of dreams. His ability to connect an international audience with his very personal conception of the world was astounding. We are pleased to be showing the best of his films in chronological order so that we can chart his extraordinary development as an artist.”
The series begins on August 31st with the landmark but lesser-known Italian Neorealist classic, Paisan (1946), which represented Fellini’s first true engagement with filmmaking via screenwriting and the direction of specific shots. The series concludes with Paolo Sorrentino’s highly-acclaimed and Oscar-winning film The Great Beauty (2013), merely one example of Fellini’s extraordinary influence over filmmaking not just in Italy but worldwide.
All screenings are on Wednesdays at 7:30 p.m. in White Hall, Room 208. The Cinematheque runs from August 31st until November 30 and is free and open to the public. Unless otherwise noted, all screenings will be 4k restorations on DCP. They will be introduced by curators Bernstein and Porcarelli, with post-screening q. and a.’s. For more information, visit the Emory Film and Media website or call 404-727-6761.