Customer Reviews

Federico Fellini: His Life and Work

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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