Federico fellini in Foreign DVDs & Videos

Description:

In Federico Fellini's seminal film LA DOLCE VITA, a three-hour masterpiece that shows one man's descent into "the sweet life" of debauchery, Marcello Mastroianni stars as eccentric journalist Marcello Rubini. On assignment to chronicle the lives of the rich and famous Italian aristocracy in a gossip column for a Roman newspaper, Marcello floats from one fabulous party to the next, meeting all varieties of beautiful, extravagant people. While he would never protest this seemingly ideal job, it makes him feel lonely and empty, and he stays up drinking and dancing night after night only to wake up each morning unbalanced and unfocused. The film follows Marcello's ups and downs in an episodic pattern in which each evening is a new story, a new adventure, a new dare, a new woman with whom to fall helplessly in love--but only for that night. Each morning the slate is wiped clean, and Fellini resets Marcello's score to zero. Sprinkled with religious images and gestures at salvation, LA DOLCE VITA is supreme in the beauty of its all-encompassing symbolism that is expressed through lavish sets, an alluring script, overemphasized physical movements, roller-coaster jazz music, and helpless emotions.

Description:

In SATYRICON, Italian New Wave director Federico Fellini depicts the hedonistic, amoral, pre-Christian world of ancient Rome. Using the unfinished classical writings of Petronius as his guide, Fellini invents a dreamlike culture full of strange, distant characters and odd, grotesque events. Though the film lacks a definitive plot or narrative structure, its constants are Gitone (Max Born) and Encolpius (Martin Potter), whose unsavory encounters with sex, the theater, and religion are the film's focal point. Presenting a loosely structured episodic tale of decadence and depravity in ancient Rome, SATYRICON follows the adventures of two students as they negotiate their way through a variety of mishaps, dangers, and sexual encounters. What results is a bizarre journey through ancient Rome. This story is a perfect example of Fellini's accomplished skill in bringing fantasy to the screen.

Description:

A friendly satire in which a honeymooning bride, dazzled by glamour and illusion, escapes the frightening security of her future by running off with a photo-novel actor who portrays a seductive "White Sheik," but soon finds insidious reality sneaking into her romantic fantasy.

Description:

Federico Fellini's Oscar-nominated 8 1/2 is a masterpiece of storytelling and cinema. The most autobiographical of Fellini's films, the plot of which concerns a 43-year-old film director who is having a midlife crisis, it is a career benchmark for this magnificent Italian New Wave director. Beautifully choreographed with flashbacks, dream sequences, exaggerated fantasy scenes, and magical surrealist episodes, 8 1/2 is one of the richest, most exuberant movies ever made, in the mode of Fellini's artfully abstract LA DOLCE VITA and AMARCORD. Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) is at a crisis point in his life and his work; in the opening sequence, Guido, suffocating, is caught in traffic with the windows of his car locked shut. He climbs out of the sunroof and literally rises up over the highway into the clouds, seemingly free, when he realizes there's a rope tied around his ankle that is violently pulling him back to earth. Cutting from this dream to the health spa where Guido is trying to recapture his creativity and write the screenplay for his next film, his vices become clear: Guido is self-absorbed, and he's distracted by the fabulous cast of actresses, intellectuals, and eccentrics who have joined him at the spa. Additionally he struggles with Freudian complexes about his wife (Anouk Aimée), his lover (Sandro Milo), his ideal woman (Claudia Cardinale), and his dead parents; and his repressive Catholic guilt follows him everywhere like a haunting mist.

Description:

ROMA, the Federico Fellini-directed benchmark of the Italian New Wave, explores the city of Rome from several different perspectives, giving it a mystical life of its own that hangs in the balance between its rich history and its modern identity. With no real chronology, ROMA is a tapestry of bizarre scenes and familiar images (Fellini peppers the film with easily identifiable references to his earlier works) that blend together into a gorgeous visual carnival. Typical of Fellini, with the carnival comes a critique--and ROMA tears through the city's political and religious history, satirizing the Catholic church and various faces of Italian government from Renaissance times through Mussolini's reign and on into the 1960s. While the camera lavishes affectionately over Rome's art and architecture and is clearly a tribute to the Eternal City, most of the sets in the film are constructed, reinforcing Fellini's narrative imagination and keeping viewers caught in a perpetual contradiction between reality and fantasy, history and the present, fact and fiction.

Description:

This mock-documentary provides a multi-layered look at Fellini by Fellini in which he's interviewed by Japanese journalists while filming an adaptation of Kafka's "Amerika" on the legendary stages of Rome's Cinecitta. A personal look at moviemaking from a very personal filmmaker.

Description:

Five adolescent loafers in the Adriatic city of Romini postpone adulthood by idling in their home town. Fellini's elegy to the passage of youth reveals true insights through the characters of the likeable boys, one of whom depends on his sister while another is a careless Lothario.

Description:

Fellini's nostalgic love story as two entertainers rediscover love and one another in a reunion on a TV variety show.

Description:

With SPIRITS OF THE DEAD, three titans of European cinema--Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini--team up for a stylish film based on the works of macabre author Edgar Allan Poe. Vadim directs the first segment, METZENGERSTEIN, with Jane Fonda portraying the spoiled, vicious Frederique. When she finally meets her neighbor, Baron Wilhelm (played by her brother Peter), her advances toward him are met with rejection. Humiliated, she takes matters into her own hands, leading her into a downward spiral with a tragic ending. Malle takes the middle slot with WILLIAM WILSON, featuring Alain Delon as the troubled hero, a man who has been haunted since childhood by a man with his exact name. After torturing a gorgeous woman (Brigitte Bardot), a final duel brings William's ghosts home once and for all. Last but not least is Fellini's segment, a story set in the 1970s entitled TOBY DAMMIT, which stars Terence Stamp as a spacey English actor who travels to Rome in order to play Christ in a New Testament Western. When he gets the keys to a brand-new Ferrari, he embarks on a dangerous drive that just might cost him his life. SPIRITS OF THE DEAD is a real gem for those who enjoy the surreal and grotesque.

Description:

Fellini takes the viewer on a sea voyage in 1914, complete with a collection of passengers of every description - an Austrian duke, peasant refugees, and members of the cast of an Italian opera company, who are transporting the ashes of a departed friend to her homeland. As it is the eve of WWI, the ship encounters the first war refugees and takes them aboard, thus broadening the classes aboard the vessel. An impressive opening, an unexpected ending and a steady parade of Fellini's trademark set pieces and inconsequential, amusing events color this late work from the director's ouvre.

Description:

Federico Fellini's AMARCORD, an acclaimed semiautobiographical episodic drama, examines life in a small Adriatic village just before Mussolini's reign in the 1930s. As the weather changes and spring arrives, the village holds a festival in which it burns a symbolic bonfire and celebrates new life. This gathering in the central square is the first of many others throughout the film. Each time the community assembles, its colorful members show themselves in full force, boasting their bizarre, disjointed personalities--and pure mischief is the result. Several of the village ladies wear their eyebrows penciled on in high, provocative arches, a style that seethes sex and drama, coaxing the camera to follow them. The film takes on a circusy, chaotic tone, making it difficult to see a clear plot structure; AMARCORD instead breaks up into several memorably surreal sequences, a few of which follow a young man named Titta (Bruno Zanin) who wanders in and out of the animated provincial landscape, meeting assorted crazy characters and obsessing over sex. The beautiful clashes with the grotesque and politics and family matters blend together while sex is offset by violence in the inimitable style of Italy's late master of cinema, whose tour de force won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

Description:

Zampano (Anthony Quinn), a performer in a traveling carnival outside of Rome, purchases the young, poor Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina) to be his wife and assistant. Although she shows genuine enthusiasm as an assistant, putting on a fabulous clown act akin to Charlie Chaplin, nobody seems to appreciate her; she quietly endures a life of emotional coldness and cruelty. When she meets "The Fool," Ilmatto (Richard Basehart), a quicksilver trapeze artist who befriends her and offers her warmth, kindness, and an uplifting vision of the world, Gelsomina convinces herself that she and Zampano are in love. She is plunged into despair, however, after Zampano interferes in a jealous rage, precipitating a tragedy that will haunt him forever. Federico Fellini establishes a style and certain key themes in this film that he repeats as trademarks in subsequent films: the beach as a symbol of purity and release; haunting, soft female singing as a symbol of memory; examinations of Catholics and their religion as a cult behavior; and, above all, a chaotic, circus-oriented cyclical pattern that guides his films. The Oscar-winning LA STRADA is the perfect place from which to begin an exploration of Fellini's expertly crafted movies.

Description:

Zampano (Anthony Quinn), a performer in a traveling carnival outside of Rome, purchases the young, poor Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina) to be his wife and assistant. Although she shows genuine enthusiasm as an assistant, putting on a fabulous clown act akin to Charlie Chaplin, nobody seems to appreciate her; she quietly endures a life of emotional coldness and cruelty. When she meets "The Fool," Ilmatto (Richard Basehart), a quicksilver trapeze artist who befriends her and offers her warmth, kindness, and an uplifting vision of the world, Gelsomina convinces herself that she and Zampano are in love. She is plunged into despair, however, after Zampano interferes in a jealous rage, precipitating a tragedy that will haunt him forever. Federico Fellini establishes a style and certain key themes in this film that he repeats as trademarks in subsequent films: the beach as a symbol of purity and release; haunting, soft female singing as a symbol of memory; examinations of Catholics and their religion as a cult behavior; and, above all, a chaotic, circus-oriented cyclical pattern that guides his films. The Oscar-winning LA STRADA is the perfect place from which to begin an exploration of Fellini's expertly crafted movies.

Description:

Federico Fellini's Oscar-nominated 8 1/2 is a masterpiece of storytelling and cinema. The most autobiographical of Fellini's films, the plot of which concerns a 43-year-old film director who is having a midlife crisis, it is a career benchmark for this magnificent Italian New Wave director. Beautifully choreographed with flashbacks, dream sequences, exaggerated fantasy scenes, and magical surrealist episodes, 8 1/2 is one of the richest, most exuberant movies ever made, in the mode of Fellini's artfully abstract LA DOLCE VITA and AMARCORD. Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) is at a crisis point in his life and his work; in the opening sequence, Guido, suffocating, is caught in traffic with the windows of his car locked shut. He climbs out of the sunroof and literally rises up over the highway into the clouds, seemingly free, when he realizes there's a rope tied around his ankle that is violently pulling him back to earth. Cutting from this dream to the health spa where Guido is trying to recapture his creativity and write the screenplay for his next film, his vices become clear: Guido is self-absorbed, and he's distracted by the fabulous cast of actresses, intellectuals, and eccentrics who have joined him at the spa. Additionally he struggles with Freudian complexes about his wife (Anouk Aimée), his lover (Sandro Milo), his ideal woman (Claudia Cardinale), and his dead parents; and his repressive Catholic guilt follows him everywhere like a haunting mist.

Description:

Five adolescent loafers in the Adriatic city of Romini postpone adulthood by idling in their home town. Fellini's elegy to the passage of youth reveals true insights through the characters of the likeable boys, one of whom depends on his sister while another is a careless Lothario.

Description:

A delightful, visually inventive fantasy, Federico Fellini's JULIET OF THE SPIRITS is about a bored Italian housewife (Giulietta Masina, Fellini's real-life wife) who finds relief from the mundane--and her philandering husband (Mario Pisu)--through sensual escapades in the spirit realm. This fantastic world just happens to be in Juliet's subconscious and is populated with people both from her past and her imagination. As Juliet spends more time in touch with her desires, she slowly gains more independence. Fellini's first color film is, unsurprisingly, a stunning spectacle that makes the most of its incredible premise. Awash in both bold colors and eroticism, JULIET OF THE SPIRITS favors the visual over the narrative and dreams over reality.

Description:

In Federico Fellini's seminal film LA DOLCE VITA, a three-hour masterpiece that shows one man's descent into "the sweet life" of debauchery, Marcello Mastroianni stars as eccentric journalist Marcello Rubini. On assignment to chronicle the lives of the rich and famous Italian aristocracy in a gossip column for a Roman newspaper, Marcello floats from one fabulous party to the next, meeting all varieties of beautiful, extravagant people. While he would never protest this seemingly ideal job, it makes him feel lonely and empty, and he stays up drinking and dancing night after night only to wake up each morning unbalanced and unfocused. The film follows Marcello's ups and downs in an episodic pattern in which each evening is a new story, a new adventure, a new dare, a new woman with whom to fall helplessly in love--but only for that night. Each morning the slate is wiped clean, and Fellini resets Marcello's score to zero. Sprinkled with religious images and gestures at salvation, LA DOLCE VITA is supreme in the beauty of its all-encompassing symbolism that is expressed through lavish sets, an alluring script, overemphasized physical movements, roller-coaster jazz music, and helpless emotions.

Description:

A slapdash vaudeville troupe is turned on its ear when an ambitious young woman joins the troupe and commences an affair with its maestro. Federico Fellini's directorial debut, with Alberto Lattuada.

Description:

Federico Fellini's AMARCORD, an acclaimed semiautobiographical episodic drama, examines life in a small Adriatic village just before Mussolini's reign in the 1930s. As the weather changes and spring arrives, the village holds a festival in which it burns a symbolic bonfire and celebrates new life. This gathering in the central square is the first of many others throughout the film. Each time the community assembles, its colorful members show themselves in full force, boasting their bizarre, disjointed personalities--and pure mischief is the result. Several of the village ladies wear their eyebrows penciled on in high, provocative arches, a style that seethes sex and drama, coaxing the camera to follow them. The film takes on a circusy, chaotic tone, making it difficult to see a clear plot structure; AMARCORD instead breaks up into several memorably surreal sequences, a few of which follow a young man named Titta (Bruno Zanin) who wanders in and out of the animated provincial landscape, meeting assorted crazy characters and obsessing over sex. The beautiful clashes with the grotesque and politics and family matters blend together while sex is offset by violence in the inimitable style of Italy's late master of cinema, whose tour de force won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

Description:

A slapdash vaudeville troupe is turned on its ear when an ambitious young woman joins the troupe and commences an affair with its maestro. Federico Fellini's directorial debut, with Alberto Lattuada.

Description:

A portrait of a gang of swindlers who prey on the poor and ignorant peasants of the Italian countryside. Although comic at times, this film powerfully depicts characters who realize the meaninglessness of their actions too late in their own lives.

Description:

Federico Fellini's classic drama, NIGHTS OF CABIRIA, is about a childlike prostitute who remains curiously unsullied by the brutal world she inhabits, even as the love and respectability she seeks elude her. Guilietta Masina plays Cabiria, a wide-eyed waif, a streetwalker living in a poor section of Rome where she owns her own little house, has a bank account, and dreams of a miracle. We follow her nights and days and watch as her boyfriend steals her purse and tosses her in the river, a movie star on the Via Veneto takes her home with him, and she visits the Madonna. When she meets an accountant who watches her act out her heart's longings while under hypnosis on a vaudeville stage, she thinks that at long last she has found her ticket out of the slums. Is it fate that led to their meeting? Is this finally a man who appreciates her for who she is? Is it true love? These suspenseful--and strangely comical--questions that will decide Cabiria's fate once and for all make this film one of Federico Fellini's most haunting works.

Description:

A delightful, visually inventive fantasy, Federico Fellini's JULIET OF THE SPIRITS is about a bored Italian housewife (Giulietta Masina, Fellini's real-life wife) who finds relief from the mundane--and her philandering husband (Mario Pisu)--through sensual escapades in the spirit realm. This fantastic world just happens to be in Juliet's subconscious and is populated with people both from her past and her imagination. As Juliet spends more time in touch with her desires, she slowly gains more independence. Fellini's first color film is, unsurprisingly, a stunning spectacle that makes the most of its incredible premise. Awash in both bold colors and eroticism, JULIET OF THE SPIRITS favors the visual over the narrative and dreams over reality.

Description:

An orchestra rehearsal session being filmed by a documentary crew turns out to be anything but harmonious, as the discord between its members symbolizes the fragmentation in the world at large. Highlighted by the original compositions by longtime Fellini collaborator Nino Rota. Made for Italian television.

Description:

A middle-aged, self-doubting Lothario on the make confronts his worst fears when he follows a beautiful stranger right into a conference of feminists. A wry and fanciful meditation on the vulnerability and power politics involved in human relationships, and a pure Fellini experience.

Description:

With SPIRITS OF THE DEAD, three titans of European cinema--Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini--team up for a stylish film based on the works of macabre author Edgar Allan Poe. Vadim directs the first segment, METZENGERSTEIN, with Jane Fonda portraying the spoiled, vicious Frederique. When she finally meets her neighbor, Baron Wilhelm (played by her brother Peter), her advances toward him are met with rejection. Humiliated, she takes matters into her own hands, leading her into a downward spiral with a tragic ending. Malle takes the middle slot with WILLIAM WILSON, featuring Alain Delon as the troubled hero, a man who has been haunted since childhood by a man with his exact name. After torturing a gorgeous woman (Brigitte Bardot), a final duel brings William's ghosts home once and for all. Last but not least is Fellini's segment, a story set in the 1970s entitled TOBY DAMMIT, which stars Terence Stamp as a spacey English actor who travels to Rome in order to play Christ in a New Testament Western. When he gets the keys to a brand-new Ferrari, he embarks on a dangerous drive that just might cost him his life. SPIRITS OF THE DEAD is a real gem for those who enjoy the surreal and grotesque.

Description:

An orchestra rehearsal session being filmed by a documentary crew turns out to be anything but harmonious, as the discord between its members symbolizes the fragmentation in the world at large. Highlighted by the original compositions by longtime Fellini collaborator Nino Rota. Made for Italian television.

Description:

With SPIRITS OF THE DEAD, three titans of European cinema--Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini--team up for a stylish film based on the works of macabre author Edgar Allan Poe. Vadim directs the first segment, METZENGERSTEIN, with Jane Fonda portraying the spoiled, vicious Frederique. When she finally meets her neighbor, Baron Wilhelm (played by her brother Peter), her advances toward him are met with rejection. Humiliated, she takes matters into her own hands, leading her into a downward spiral with a tragic ending. Malle takes the middle slot with WILLIAM WILSON, featuring Alain Delon as the troubled hero, a man who has been haunted since childhood by a man with his exact name. After torturing a gorgeous woman (Brigitte Bardot), a final duel brings William's ghosts home once and for all. Last but not least is Fellini's segment, a story set in the 1970s entitled TOBY DAMMIT, which stars Terence Stamp as a spacey English actor who travels to Rome in order to play Christ in a New Testament Western. When he gets the keys to a brand-new Ferrari, he embarks on a dangerous drive that just might cost him his life. SPIRITS OF THE DEAD is a real gem for those who enjoy the surreal and grotesque.

Description:

With SPIRITS OF THE DEAD, three titans of European cinema--Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini--team up for a stylish film based on the works of macabre author Edgar Allan Poe. Vadim directs the first segment, METZENGERSTEIN, with Jane Fonda portraying the spoiled, vicious Frederique. When she finally meets her neighbor, Baron Wilhelm (played by her brother Peter), her advances toward him are met with rejection. Humiliated, she takes matters into her own hands, leading her into a downward spiral with a tragic ending. Malle takes the middle slot with WILLIAM WILSON, featuring Alain Delon as the troubled hero, a man who has been haunted since childhood by a man with his exact name. After torturing a gorgeous woman (Brigitte Bardot), a final duel brings William's ghosts home once and for all. Last but not least is Fellini's segment, a story set in the 1970s entitled TOBY DAMMIT, which stars Terence Stamp as a spacey English actor who travels to Rome in order to play Christ in a New Testament Western. When he gets the keys to a brand-new Ferrari, he embarks on a dangerous drive that just might cost him his life. SPIRITS OF THE DEAD is a real gem for those who enjoy the surreal and grotesque.

Description:

This mock-documentary provides a multi-layered look at Fellini by Fellini in which he's interviewed by Japanese journalists while filming an adaptation of Kafka's "Amerika" on the legendary stages of Rome's Cinecitta. A personal look at moviemaking from a very personal filmmaker.