Federico Fellini: His Life and Work

We tend to divide biographies into neat categories: There are scholarly footnoted works (Richard Ellmann’s magisterial James Joyce), gossipy hatchet jobs (Kitty Kelley’s His Way: An Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra) and loving personal remembrances (Jerry Lewis’s recent Dean and Me: [A Love Story]).

How, then, to categorize film critic Kezich’s biography of his longtime friend Federico Fellini? At times, Kezich sounds like a scholarly mythbuster. He starts his account by debunking the widely circulated, but always suspect, tale that Fellini was born on a moving train (an obvious fib, which Kezich easily dismantles). Kezich then sets the tone for much of what is to come by noting that Fellini tended to fictionalize his own life story to make it more cinematic, a move common to film directors, who are, after all, in the myth-making business. Notorious fabricator Billy Wilder has similarly flummoxed generations of biographers.

But Kezich doesn’t have enough distance from his subject. Even his poetic diction (at least as conveyed by the translation) gives the game away: He regularly refers to Fellini as “our protagonist,” “our hero,” etc. This may simply be a cultural difference in phrasing, but it sets the mood for what is basically a loving biography written by a close friend. In Kezich’s account, every film Fellini made is great or at least good, a claim that should put any cinephile on notice that something is a bit off here—Fellini made some truly bad films, and even a good friend should be able to say so.

Ironically, Kezich’s closeness to his subject creates a biography that yields few insights about Fellini the man or Fellini the artist. For that, start with Peter Bondanella’s The Cinema of Federico Fellini. Kezich is perhaps chattier and more entertaining, but he’s just as suspect a myth maker as Fellini himself.—Hank Sartin