Political Fellini

Federico Fellini is often considered a disengaged filmmaker, interested in self-referential dreams and grotesquerie rather than contemporary politics. This book challenges that myth by examining the filmmaker s reception in Italy, and by exploring his films in the context of significant political debates. By conceiving Fellini s cinema as an individual expression of the nation s mythical biography, the director s most celebrated themes and images a nostalgia for childhood, unattainable female figures, fantasy, the circus, carnival become symbols of Italy s traumatic modernity and perpetual adolescence.