When Martin Scorsese compared Federico Fellini to Bob Dylan
When one thinks of the word “director”, they often follow up with the name “Martin Scorsese”. The truth is that Scorsese has simply delivered masterpiece after masterpiece from his early work, including Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, both starring Robert De Niro, of course, through to the 1990s with GoodFellas and Casino, right on to the 21st Century with Shutter Island and The Wolf of Wall Street.
Back in 2014, Scorsese named his top ten films in a feature for Criterion, picking out some classics from across the world in his top choices, including the works of Kenji Mizoguchi, Andrzej Wajda and Jean-Luc Godard, giving us a glimpse into his deeper inspirations. There are also several Italian directors on Scorsese’s list, such as Michelangelo Antonioni and Roberto Rossellini.
We, of course, also find one of the greatest Italian directors of all time, Federico Fellini and his masterful 1963 surrealist comedy-drama 8 ½. It tells of an Italian film director by the name of Guido Anselmi (played by Marcello Mastroianni) who suffers from a stifled sense of creativity while he is trying to direct an epic sci-fi movie.
In the feature, Scorsese asked the questions that arose after Fellini completed his previous film La dolce vita. He said, “How would he top himself? Would he even want to top himself? Would he shift gears?” Scorsese then answered such questions, “He did something that no one could have anticipated at the time. He took his own artistic and life situation – that of a filmmaker who had eight and a half films to his name, achieved international renown with his last feature and felt enormous pressure when the time came for a follow-up – and he built a movie around it.”
Scorsese then went on to explain his love for Fellini’s masterpiece. “8½ has always been a touchstone for me, in so many ways,” he said, “the freedom, the sense of invention, the underlying rigor and the deep core of longing, the bewitching, physical pull of the camera movements and the compositions, another great black-and-white film, every image gleams like a pearl.”
He added, “But it also offers an uncanny portrait of being the artist of the moment, trying to tune out all the pressure and the criticism and the adulation and the requests and the advice, and find the space and the calm to simply listen to oneself.” The iconic direct then went on to compare Fellini to Bob Dylan in the sense that 8 ½ showed a character drowning in stifled creativity as Dylan had done.
“We’ve seen the dilemma of Guido, the hero played by Marcello Mastroianni, repeated many times over in reality – look at the life of Bob Dylan during the period we covered in No Direction Home, to take just one example.” No Direction Home is Scorsese’s 2005 documentary on Dylan that focuses on his career between arriving in New York in 1961 and retiring from touring in 1966, the trailer of which can be seen below.
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