He created a personal style of cinema that mysteriously and miraculously felt universal, making our planet seem somehow smaller and more intimate. He took us (and still continues to take us) to destinations beyond the English-speaking world – destinations we’d never imagined in our wildest fantasies. “The freedom, the sense of innovation, the underlying rigour and the deep core of longing, the bewitching, physical pull of the camera movements and the compositions.” As testimonials go, that’s a hard one to top.Īs for the rest of us, the ones who pay to sit in darkened theatres and gaze up at the screen in the hopes of being enchanted and transported, it’s no exaggeration to say that Fellini turned movie-goers on to an entirely new way of seeing. “8 1/2 has always been a touchstone for me, in so many ways,” he said. Martin Scorsese, for one, recently admitted that he re-watches Fellini’s 1963 masterpiece 8 1/2 every year. Have women been 'excluded' from film history? Foreign-language masterpieces you may not know The full list of critics who participated – and how they voted What the critics had to say about the top 25

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After all, not only was the maestro’s vision so singular and hypnotic that it introduced its own carnival-like adjective into the cinéaste vernacular (‘Felliniesque’), his movies also showed generations of film-makers the way forward – how to experiment and take risks by marrying confessional storytelling with bizarre flights of imagery. But 25 years after he died, the long shadow of his legacy reaches far beyond awards and accolades (although, if you keep reading, you’ll see he’s just earned another one here). By the time of his death in 1993, Federico Fellini had won four best foreign language film Oscars, tying him with his countryman Vittorio De Sica for the most wins by any director.

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