Fellini and the Auteurists

This essay traces the reception of Federico Fellini's films and status among auteurist critics in France during the 1950s and in the United States in the 1960s and beyond. It has been commonly held that a decline in critical interest in Fellini is linked to the decline of historical auteurism as a critical practice. What is surprising, however, is that Fellini was broadly held in suspicion and mistrust by the auteurist critics themselves. In France this was due to the preferential prejudices of those critics (who favored Rossellini over Fellini), and in the United States because of Fellini's undermining of the auteur theory as formulated by Andrew Sarris. The essay concludes with an analysis of the instructive auteurism of André Bazin and Gilles Deleuze, who view Fellini as an autenr-thinker engaged in a common project of ontological investigation in an evolving history of ideas as expressed in the cinema.