Fellini’s Films and Commercials

Federico Fellini’s distinct style delighted generations of film viewers and inspired filmmakers and artists around the world. In Fellini’s Films and Commercials: From Postwar to Postmodern, renowned Fellini scholar Frank Burke presents a film-by-film analysis of the famed director’s cinematic output from a theoretical perspective. The book explores Fellini’s movement from relatively classic filmmaking to modernist reflexivity and then to ‘postmodern reproduction’. Burke moves from analysis of stories told from a relatively ‘objective’ standpoint, to increased concentration on Fellini-as-author and on the cinematic apparatus, to Fellini’s dismantling of authorship and cinematic apparatus, to his postmodern signifying strategies. Grounded in poststructuralist approaches to texts and signification, Burke shows that Fellini is profoundly readable, if extremely complex.

Revisiting Burke’s 1996 Fellini’s Films: From Postwar to Postmodern, this new edition includes revised material from the original, plus a new preface and new chapter on the filmmaker’s work on commercials. Elegantly written and thoroughly researched, this book is essential reading for Fellini fans and scholars.