Online Reading: The following is suggest as background reading material related to the directors being discussed.

• Federico Fellini by Antonia Shanahan
• Federico Fellini - Biography from Baseline's Encyclopedia of Film
• La Strada - Wikipedia overview of plot, casting, and other film background information.
• La Dolce Vita - Wikipedia overview
• 81/2 - Wikipedia overview

Learning Outcomes: This seminar will provide participants with an overview of the contribution Federico Fellini made to the post-war Italy film industry.

Instructors Comments by Thomas Blank

Federico Fellini is generally acknowledged to be one of the two (with Bergman) most important directors of the mid-Twentieth Century.  He bridges the gap between neorealism and what some would call "postmodernism," a self-conscious examination of filmmaking itself.

In the 1950's, when I was studying film in college, I became aware of a groundswell of interest in European movies.  These "art films" played in small houses in the larger cities, and I was going to school in Chicago, so, with some effort I could get to almost anything.  The release of Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" was the event that convinced me that "movies" could be something beyond Hollywood diversions; they could offer ideas, ideas that could occupy my thoughts for weeks and months after a single viewing.

Of course, the people who actually bought tickets to black and white movies with sub-titles seemed like an isolated community, a sub-set of intellectuals, an aristocracy of feeling, thinking beings.  To go to "art" films made one a kind of an artist.

Then in 1959, with the release of "La Dolce Vita", something changed.

"La Dolce Vita" opened, not in some out-of-the-way, smelly art house cinema, it opened in downtown Chicago on the big screen at the Cinerama theatre.   It opened big and it had legs.  It may have been a black-and-white Italian art movie with subtitles, but everyone, it seemed, went to see it.  American audiences, as we might expect, were a little puzzled by this movie and by its success.  

Like many of Fellini's films, the description of the plot tells us very little.  "Marcello", a tabloid reporter is both seduced and repulsed by the "Sweet Life" of the rich and famous along the Via Veneto.  That's the story, but it contains entire worlds.  It's images were indelible.  Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg playied in the Roman fountain on neighborhood screens everywhere, at least for short runs.  The words, "papparazzi" and "Felliniesque" entered the English language, and "La Dolce Vita" became one of the  most influential films of all time.  

Then a few years later, I was stunned by "8 1/2".  

I saw it in Portland on a winter night, and when I came out of the theater, despite the freezing snow, I had to walk around the block to let off some of the energy the film had left with me.

"8 1/2" is one of the great movies about the male ego, the creative process and film-making itself.   Mastroianni is an obvious stand-in for Fellini himself in this "story" that defies description.  Pressed to describe it, one could say that an Italian film director, suffering from writer's block and stale relationships,  visits a health spa to recharge his creative powers, but that description would be a major disservice to this fantastic blend of ideas, dreams and fantasies that, simply, must be experienced.  

About The Instructor:

Thomas Blank was an Equity actor in Chicago in 1961 before going into the Navy for six years.  His last job in the service was as a public affairs officer in the Hollywood office where he provided Navy cooperation to film and television projects with Navy backgrounds. He was in that office from the premiere of "In Harm's Way" until the preliminary scouting for "Tora, Tora, Tora."  His favorite duty was teaching Elvis Presley to salute on "Easy Come, Easy Go." 

Leaving the Navy, he stayed in Hollywood and worked as a story analyst for Columbia Pictures, before entering the Directors Guild-Producer Training Plan, and eventual Directors Guild membership.

Blank worked on various projects at Warner Brothers and Universal as an assistant director (working occasionally but briefly with Dick Donner, George Seaton, Robert Wise, Elia Kazan, and Alfred Hitchcock) until he started to receive directing assignments of his own. He directed second units for "Switch" and "Quincy" before getting his first show on the air on "Bionic Woman."  

He remained on a seven-year contract with Universal studios and directed several "Airwolf" episodes and TV series, like "Harris and Company" and "The American Girls" as well as an ABC After School Special.  

His directing after that was for Alan Landsburg Productions on syndicated, half-hour dramas for "True Confessions." 

Thomas Blank's television production resume goes back to "The FBI" with Efrem Zimbalist Jr., and includes: "The Name of the Game"; "The Sixth Sense"; "The Bold Ones"; "The Hulk"; "The Misfits of Science"; and several movies of the week, as well as the aforementioned "Bionic Woman"; "Ironside"; "and "Switch."  

Feature films include: "One More Train to Rob"; "Showdown"; "The Don is Dead"; "The Phynx" (never released); "The Stepfather III", and "High Roller." 

As a member of the Directors Guild, Blank headed the committees on runaway production and age discrimination.  

While in semi-retirement (working on a cable series called "Resurrection Boulevard") he went back to graduate school and got a Masters Degree in screenwriting from California State University in Los Angeles.  

Thomas Blank, now retired and living in Eugene, currently is the instructor for the DIVA Film Director Seminar Series and teaches screen writing at the series. He is on the boards of directors for the Boys and Girls Club of Emerald Valley and is a Media Arts Committee liaison with the DIVA Board.     

ALL SEMINARS AT DIVA CENTER
110 W. BROADWAY - EUGENE