MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti commentator Sergei...
He never gathered thousands of extras to re-create battles that had changed the world. You never see star wars or blood-curdling shipwrecks in his films. Yet the man who would be celebrating his 90th birthday on January 20 if he lived to this day won five Oscars, the Golden Palm at Cannes, the Golden Lion at Venice, the Grand Prix and the Golden Prize at Moscow, the Golden Globe and the Honorary British Film Academy Awards.
What was his magic, then? I think it was his unique style - a subtle blend of comedy and drama, the grotesque and the poignant truth, the sublime and the trivial, all underlain with benign irony. All his films were semi-autobiographic tales. Again and again, he revisited the carefree world of his childhood, infecting the viewer with the spontaneity of his perceptions.
Amarcord, the name of one of his best-known films, translates from the Romagnol dialect as "I remember." It is the story of a boy growing up in Rimini, Fellini"s hometown, under Nazis.