Criterion to Release Box Set of Federico Fellini Films

Tyler Hersko
·2 min read

Classic movie buffs with $200 to burn, take note: The Criterion Collection has announced “Essential Fellini,” a box set of 14 films from legendary film director Federico Fellini.

The Blu-Ray set, which will release on November 24,will include several features, including 4K restorations of 11 of the films, as well as uncompressed monaural soundtracks for each title. Most of the director’s most celebrated films will be included in the box set. The 14 films are: “Variety Lights” (1950), “The White Sheik” (1952), “I Vitelloni” (1953), “La Strada” (1954), “Il Bidone” (1955), “Nights of Cabiria” (1957), “La Dolce Vita” (1960), “8½” (1963), “Juliet of the Spirits” (1965), “Fellini Satyricon” (1969), “Roma” (1972), “Amarcord” (1973), “And the Ship Sails On” (1983), and “Intervista” (1987).

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Here’s Criterion’s announcement of the news:

One hundred years after his birth, Federico Fellini still stands apart as a giant of the cinema. The Italian maestro is defined by his dualities: the sacred and the profane, the masculine and the feminine, the provincial and the urbane. He began his career working in the slice-of-life poetry of neorealism, and though he soon spun off on his own freewheeling creative axis, he never lost that grounding, evoking his dreams, memories, and obsessions on increasingly grand scales in increasingly grand productions teeming with carnivalesque imagery and flights of phantasmagoric surrealism while maintaining an earthy, embodied connection to humanity. Bringing together fourteen of the director’s greatest spectacles, all beautifully restored, this centenary box set is a monument to an artist who conjured a cinematic universe all his own: a vision of the world as a three-ring circus in which his innermost infatuations, fears, and fantasies take center stage.

The collection’s other special features include new digital restorations of the short film “Toby Dammit” (1968) and television film “Fellini: A Director’s Notebook” (1969), which will also boast uncompressed monaural soundtracks. Feature documentaries “Fellini: I’m a Born Liar” (2002) and “Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember” (1997), the latter presented in its 193-minute version, will also be included, as well a two-hour, four-part 1960 interview with director Federico Fellini by filmmaker André Delvaux for Belgian television. A handful of other documentaries, archival interviews, and other media will be included with the set.

More information about the upcoming release is available on Criterion’s website.

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