Federico Fellini: His Life and Work [Paperback]

Tullio Kezich (Author), Minna Proctor (Translator)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0865479615 | ISBN-13: 978-0865479616 | Publication Date: March 6, 2007 | Edition: 1st

"Trenchant in its critical analysis, absorbing and sympathetic in its account of his private life, Kezich's Fellini is a revelation. It effaces virtually everything written to date about the Italian maestro . . . This engrossing biography mirrors its subject. It's affectionate, garrulous and often rambling, and in sudden flashes of brilliance it offers a penetrating view of Fellini's life and art." --Peter Cowie, The Nation

"Few writers are able to approach Fellini with the privilege of intimate experience and friendship . . . Kezich fills the pages of this biography with uncommon detail and artistry, presenting a chronicle that weaves life with film, fact with fantasy, in a style reminiscent of the great director's avant-garde style . . . For the aficionado of Fellini's works, this narrative of his life provides a sea of subtle, precious anecdotes. To those yet unacquainted with the Italian master, the book is an introduction not only to the man's life, but his art, also. It's a captivating read." --Karoun Demirjian, The Christian Science Monitor

"Kezich's forty-year friendship with the maestro allows him to offer up an intimate and lively portrait of Fellini filled with revealing anecdotes and psychological insight." --Michel Ciment, author of Kubrick and Kazan on Kazan

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This is a revised and updated edition of Kezich's 1988 biography of Fellini (1920–1993), one of several books the Italian film critic has written about his longtime friend since the two met at a film festival in the early 1950s. Despite the close author-subject connection, however, the biography rarely presents an intimate view of the director, preferring to view Fellini primarily through the prism of his films and other work. Much of what readers learn of Fellini's life before movies, for example, comes through Kezich's examination of Fellini's old newspaper columns and radio scripts; the personal, conversely, is largely reduced to the anecdotal. The translation, which sets a conversational, at times flippant, tone by using the present tense, reinforces the lightness of Kezich's account, suggesting early on that it's up to readers whether to believe what they read. As a guided tour through films like 1960's La Dolce Vita and 1963's 8½, with unusual side paths, like the discussion of an aborted collaboration with Carlos Castaneda, this is entertaining enough, but fans hoping for more than an occasional glimpse of the man behind the movies will have to keep looking. B&w illus. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Italian film critic Kezich, a longtime friend of Fellini's, limns the filmmaker's life and career from childhood in the small seaside town, Rimini, to his arrival in Rome in 1940 and his creation of such internationally acclaimed films as La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2. After those masterworks, his movies grew more florid and more vacuous, though Kezich finds positive things to say about each of them. Considering Kezich's friendship with the director, the book views him rather remotely. It touches upon his private life, particularly his durable marriage to actress Giulietta Masina and, perhaps a bit too delicately, his many love affairs; but fans will perhaps most appreciate the early pages on Fellini in Rimini, a period reflected in the autobiographical I Vitelloni and Amarcord, and early in Rome as a newspaper columnist, radio scriptwriter, and screen playwright before becoming a director in 1950. The subsequent decades of filmmaking matter most, of course, and Kezich somehow fails to write as compellingly or as evocatively of them as of the maestro's formative years. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Faber & Faber; 1st edition (March 6, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865479615
• ISBN-13: 978-0865479616
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,378,543 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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17 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Hagiography, not biography, April 25, 2006

By 

Jerry Saperstein (Evanston, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Federico Fellini: His Life and Work (Hardcover)

Tullio Kezich claims to have been a long time friend of Federico Fellini and perhaps that's one of the several reasons this biography is very disappointing.

Kezich approaches his subject as an insider, someone who shared the same social circle and perhaps artistic pretensions. (Kezich is descibed as a film critic, author of numerous boks on cinema and a playwright.)

The book is worshipful of Fellini, talks a lot about parties, drops a lot of names, but gives precious little information about Fellini. What information it does provide reads more like a campaign tract for sainthood. Comments such as "[t]he grief over his death is indescribable" add nothing to our understanding of Fellini as man or artist.

The situation is not helped by Kezich's writing style which, charitably, can only be described as bloated and pretentious. Perhaps the blandness is partly due to translation. Paragraphs run on forever, sentences are often incomplete and reminiscent of a high school student trying really, really hard to be impressive.

Amazingly, for a book about one of the greatest of all film makers, there is not a single photograph. Likewise the author presumes that any one reading the book will remember every detail of Fellini's films, most of which I haven't seen in 30 years or so.

I had hoped for a biography that would lead me into Fellini's life and mind. Instead all I got was a list of parties he went to and some fluffly, adulatory prose about great his movies were. I already knew that --- I wanted to know more about Fellini made such great movies. Not in this book.

Jerry