The White Sheik also marked the start of Fellini’s lasting collaboration with composer Nino Rota and most notably featured his wife, actress Giulietta Masina, in a brief cameo as a prostitute named Cabiria.
Already visible is Fellini’s focus on the media’s influence on people’s private fantasies, a theme that informed La Dolce Vita and 8 ½. After collaborating with Alberto Lattuada on Variety Lights, Fellini directed his first solo feature, The White Sheik. He contributed to the dialogue of neorealist classics such as Rome, Open City, Paisan and also worked as an actor alongside Anna Magnani in the controversial short Il Miracolo. It was only after he came into contact with the circle of Ettore Scola, Cesare Zavattini, Aldo Fabrizi and Roberto Rossellini, that he would seriously consider the cinema as a medium of expression.įellini’s collaboration with Rossellini would prove important to both men. His favourite films were American comedies by Chaplin, Keaton, Harry Langdon and the Marx Brothers. His childhood fascination with the circus and the Grand Guignol also governed his cinephilia in these early years. And we should all be grateful for those dreams.” He initially arrived in Rome as a law student but his career as a satirical cartoonist and gag writer was already well established by then. In fact, Orson Welles once described Fellini as “a small-town boy who’s never really come to Rome. The lack of available options to young men in provincial towns is an important theme in some of his films, most notably I Vitelloni and Amarcord. Federico Fellini was born in 1920 to a provincial middle-class family in Rimini, a small town on the coast of the Adriatic Sea.
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