Fellini’s Films and Commercials: From Postwar to Postmodern, by Frank Burke

• Main Author: Flavia Brizio-Skov
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University College Cork 2021-01-01
• Series: Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media
• Subjects: fellini; cinema; italy; auteur; criticism
• Online Access: http://www.alphavillejournal.com/Issue20/HTML/ReviewBrizioSkov.html

Revisiting his 1996 book entitled Fellini’s Films: From Postwar to Postmodern, Frank Burke has published an updated analysis of the director’s films, adding to the original treatment a preface and a new chapter on Fellini’s commercials. The occasion of the revival is, of course, the centenary of Fellini’s birth. This volume and the 2020 edited collection A Companion to Federico Fellini, which Burke coedited with Marguerite Waller and Marita Gubareva, are most welcome as a counterbalance to the notable underappreciation of Fellini’s production in Anglo-American film studies in the past, where feminists dismissed Fellini’s works, disapproving of his construction of gender, even if a more careful analysis would have revealed the complexity of such a construction in his filmic universe. The hyper-intellectualism of French post-1968 semiological theory, in conjunction with a puritanical British counter-cinema that rejected cinematic pleasure, marginalised not only Fellini, but a good deal of Italian cinema. French-infused British theory was incapable of reading Fellini’s work in the light of his own culture, and of a vast sensual tradition of Italian visual art. Dismissing them a priori on theoretical grounds, the academic theorists did not pay close attention to Fellini’s films.