Wexner Center's Fellini series to take film buffs on a cinematic journey through Italy

This summer, the Wexner Center for the Arts will invite audiences on a trip of sorts. The route will run through Italy, but the destination cannot be found on any map — except cinematic ones.

Starting Thursday and continuing through Aug. 18, the arts center on the campus of Ohio State University will host “Retrospective: Federico Fellini,” a 12-film tip of the hat to the iconic Italian filmmaker whose 100th birthday would have been celebrated in 2020. (That year, the Wexner Center had planned a centennial tribute, but the screenings were delayed two years due to the pandemic.)

Fellini, who died in 1993, crafted films that captured the beauty of the country of his birth, but he transformed the terrain into something that could only have sprung from his inimitable imagination. The acclaimed filmmaker suffused his stories with surrealism: dreamlike digressions, unbelievable images and unusual actors.

In preparation for the Wexner Center retrospective, let us be your tour guide as you navigate Italy by way of Fellini. Here are our picks for four Fellini masterpieces you won’t want to miss.

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A trail-blazing Oscar winner

• “La Strada,” 7 p.m. Thursday: Fellini’s 1954 film — starring Anthony Quinn as a circus strongman and the filmmaker’s wife, Giulietta Masina, as his ingenuous assistant — won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film during the first Oscar ceremony at which the winner was chosen from multiple nominees.

More of Masina

• “Nights of Cabiria,” 7 p.m. Friday: Mrs. Fellini — that is, Masina — was a fixture in many of her husband’s best-remembered films, and the actress tugged on the heartstrings in the title role of this 1957 masterpiece (also a Best Foreign Language Film winner at the Oscars). Masina brought grace and grit to her performance as the prostitute Cabiria, described by former New York Times film critic Janet Maslin as “a tiny, scrappy survivor who drifts almost magically among the film’s varied realms.”

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A director reflects

• “8 ½,” 7 p.m. July 14: If you’ve already gotten a flavor of Fellini from earlier films in the retrospective, you’ll be primed to experience this self-referential fantasia that the director made in 1963. The story centers on a moviemaker experiencing professional anxiety and romantic confusion, and though the character is called Guido — and he’s played by the great Marcello Mastroianni — who can doubt that Fellini had himself in mind? The film was Fellini’s third Oscar winner.

Portrait of Rome

• “Roma,” 7 p.m. Aug. 11: Fellini, who was born in the town of Rimini but later moved to Rome, takes the Italian capital as his subject in this hard-to-define film, which is equal parts autobiography, fantasy and history — in other words, like much of Fellini’s brilliant, utterly unique work.

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At a glance

“Retrospective: Federico Fellini” will run Thursday through Aug. 18 at the Wexner Center for the Arts, 1871 N. High St. on the OSU campus. For tickets, additional showtimes and more information, visit https://www.wexarts.org/.

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Wexner Center for the Arts to show series of 12 Federico Fellini films