With a hat and a red scarf: The construction of Federico Fellini’s public image

There are restaurants called ‘La Dolce Vita’ all over the world. Words like paparazzi have made it into dictionaries. Airports, streets, piazzas and schools are named after Federico Fellini. And yet, as cinema scholars understand, Fellini’s films are not nearly as well-known as one might expect – even if university students will call him ‘Maestro’ without hesitation, when quizzed about the great directors in the history of cinema. There is almost no trace of Fellini on Amazon Prime or Netflix. In the best-case scenario, to most ‘millennials’ and ‘post-millennials’ La Dolce Vita (1960) is not a film, but an image seen on Instagram or YouTube: Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg taking a dip in the Trevi Fountain, two unrivalled ‘influencers’ promoting the Italian brand and economic boom. In other words, far from being part of a ‘shared culture’, Fellini’s films have been reduced, over the course of time, to the clichés and stereotypes that feed the constellation of meanings surrounding the term ‘Felliniesque’, and this often discourages new (and updated) readings of his work....