A filmmaker who prefers ideas to images will never advance above the second rank because he is fighting the nature of his art. The critic Alan Stone, writing in the Boston Review, deplores Fellini's "stylistic tendency to emphasize images over ideas." I celebrate it. The earlier films, wonderful as they often are, have their Felliniesque charm weighted down by leftover obligations to neorealism. What we think of as Felliniesque comes to full flower in "La Dolce Vita" and "8 1/2." His later films, except for "Amarcord," are not as good, and some are positively bad, but they are stamped with an unmistakable maker's mark. This conventional view is completely wrong. Then all is downhill, in a career that lasted until 1987, except for "Amarcord" (1974), with its memories of Fellini's childhood that one is so charming that you have to cave in and enjoy it, regardless of theory. "La Dolce Vita" was bad enough, "8 1/2" (1963) was worse, and by the time he made "Juliet of the Spirits" (1965), he was completely off the rails. The precise observation in "La Strada" (1954) was the high point of his career, according to this view, and then he abandoned his neorealist roots. The conventional wisdom is that Federico Fellini went wrong when he abandoned realism for personal fantasy that starting with "La Dolce Vita" (1959), his work ran wild through jungles of Freudian, Christian, sexual and autobiographical images.
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