Repetition, plurivocality and autobiographical narration in the cinema of Federico Fellini

The starting point for the analysis contained in the paper are considerations about the significance of plurivocality and tanscription in the cinema of Fellini, which was deeply influenced – as I hope to prove – by the autobiographical narration, even if its author had never said it openly. The recurrence of the motives, themes, characters and the pleasure of re-narrating are basis of Fellini’s poetics, which contains inconspicuous «the incurable adolescence which might possess us forever», as Fellini said in an interview. That is to say the optics of a boy who continues to recount his life from the deepness of the memory. It’s where the monstrous and the magic, taken from popular stories heard and experienced during Fellini’s rural childhood, are indistinguishable from normality and reality and have the same rights. The lack of a strong, dividing line between those two permits to build a world in which plurality  of voices merge in the autobiographical narration. Definition of the characteristics of this specific kind of autobiographical narration will be the final point of the paper, in which, besidefilms directly linked to Fellini’s memory places, as Vitelloni or Amarcord, such pictures as 8½ and Il Casanova di Fellini will also be featured. 

The starting point for the analysis contained in the paper are considerations about the significance of plurivocality and tanscription in the cinema of Fellini, which was deeply influenced – as I hope to prove – by the autobiographical narration, even if its author had never said it openly. The recurrence of the motives, themes, characters and the pleasure of re-narrating are basis of Fellini’s poetics, which contains inconspicuous «the incurable adolescence which might possess us forever», as Fellini said in an interview. That is to say the optics of a boy who continues to recount his life from the deepness of the memory. It’s where the monstrous and the magic, taken from popular stories heard and experienced during Fellini’s rural childhood, are indistinguishable from normality and reality and have the same rights. The lack of a strong, dividing line between those two permits to build a world in which plurality  of voices merge in the autobiographical narration. Definition of the characteristics of this specific kind of autobiographical narration will be the final point of the paper, in which, besidefilms directly linked to Fellini’s memory places, as Vitelloni or Amarcord, such pictures as 8½ and Il Casanova di Fellini will also be featured.