BUY TICKETS HERE
Join us at 1 p.m. Sunday, March 22, for a screening of “I Vitelloni,” director Federico Fellini’s Oscar-nominated 1953 classic about five young Italian men at crucial turning points in their small-town lives.
Federico Fellini’s second outing as a solo director yielded his first commercial success, a clear-eyed portrait of five young men lingering in a postadolescent limbo, dreaming of adventure and escape from their small coastal town.
Drawing on memories tucked between the childhood nostalgia of “Amarcord” and the big-city hangover of “La dolce vita,” Fellini crafts a semiautobiographical masterpiece of sharply drawn character sketches: of skirt-chasing Fausto, forced to marry a girl he has impregnated; Alberto, the perpetual child; Leopoldo, a writer thirsting for fame; and Moraldo, the conscience of the group.
An Oscar nominee for best original screenplay, “I vitelloni” captures the lassitude and longing of its protagonists with comic insight and compassion.
“In the long dream of image and spectacle that was Federico Fellini’s career, “I Vitelloni” occupies a nodal point. Filmed in 1953, between the brilliant but somewhat superficial “The White Sheik” (1952) and his first fully characteristic work, “La Strada” (1954), “I Vitelloni” marks a big step forward in Fellini’s ability to get deep into his characters’ psychology; it points ahead both to the bitter social satire of “La Dolce Vita” (1960) and to the great canvases of nostalgia and the artist’s nature, “8 1/2” (1963), “Amarcord”—and the neglected late masterpiece “Intervista” (1987).
“In terms of technique, “I Vitelloni” may be the least “Felliniesque” of the director’s major films. It makes far less use of the odd foreshortenings, the unexpected close-ups, the expert manipulation of relations between foreground and background that formed so much of Fellini’s expressive vocabulary, and there are fewer of the gargoyles and dreamlike surreal characters that populate his most recognizable work. In places the camera work is uncharacteristically static, as in the early scenes in which Fausto prepares to leave his father’s house after learning that Sandra is pregnant.
“Yet despite its relatively conventional technique, I Vitelloni takes the first definitive plunge into many of Fellini’s dominant thematic and imagistic preoccupations: arrested development in men, marriage and infidelity, the life of provincial towns versus the city, the melancholy and mystery of deserted nighttime streets, the seashore, the movies themselves. Many of these themes and major images can be found in somewhat germinal form in “The White Sheik,” and even to some degree in “Variety Lights.” But in “I Vitelloni” they move from being accessories to the action to being the heart of the matter. — Tom Piazza
Tickets are $6 and available at the link above. UM students use code UMSTUDENT at checkout for free admission. Cane cards must be shown at the door.
