Listening to Fellini

by M. Thomas Van Order

"For decades scholarship on Federico Fellini has focused on the figure of the director himself, while formal analysis based on the craft of filmmaking has been largely ignored. Fellini spent countless hours in the studios of Cinecitta recording, mixing, and editing music, voices, and sound effects for his films, but his unique and often revolutionary uses of cinematic sound have never been systematically studied. This book reveals the singularly important role played by music in the construction of meaning in Fellini's black-and-white feature-length films, and presents a substantial re-reading of the seven films made during the most creative period of Fellini's artistic development." "The editing of music in Fellini's first films represents an entirely new approach to cinematic sound. The sophistication and complexity of Fellini's soundtracks far surpasses the neorealist models that are often assumed to form the practical foundation of Fellini's earliest works, and an analysis of the e