Editing Federico Fellini (section)

===Nostalgia, sexuality, and politics (1970–1980)===
To help promote ''[[Fellini Satyricon|Satyricon]]'' in the United States, Fellini flew to Los Angeles in January 1970 for interviews with [[Dick Cavett]] and [[David Frost]]. He also met with film director [[Paul Mazursky]] who wanted to cast him in a starring role alongside [[Donald Sutherland]] in his new film, ''[[Alex in Wonderland]]''.{{sfn|Kezich|2006|p=410}} In February, Fellini scouted locations in Paris for ''[[The Clowns (film)|The Clowns]]'', a [[docufiction]] both for cinema and television, based on his childhood memories of the circus and a "coherent theory of clowning."{{sfn|Bondanella|1992|p=192}} As he saw it, the clown "was always the caricature of a well-established, ordered, peaceful society. But today all is temporary, disordered, grotesque. Who can still laugh at clowns?... All the world plays a clown now."{{sfn|Alpert|1988|p=224}}

In March 1971, Fellini began production on ''[[Roma (1972 film)|Roma]]'', a seemingly random collection of episodes informed by the director's memories and impressions of Rome. The "diverse sequences," writes Fellini scholar [[Peter Bondanella]], "are held together only by the fact that they all ultimately originate from the director's fertile imagination."{{sfn|Bondanella|1992|p=193}} The film's opening scene anticipates ''Amarcord'' while its most surreal sequence involves an ecclesiastical fashion show in which nuns and priests roller skate past shipwrecks of cobwebbed skeletons.

Over a period of six months between January and June 1973, Fellini shot the [[Academy Award|Oscar]]-winning ''[[Amarcord]]''. Loosely based on the director's 1968 autobiographical essay ''My Rimini'',{{sfn|Alpert|1988|p=239}} the film depicts the adolescent Titta and his friends working out their sexual frustrations against the religious and Fascist backdrop of a provincial town in Italy during the 1930s. Produced by [[Franco Cristaldi]], the [[seriocomic]] movie became Fellini's second biggest commercial success after ''La Dolce Vita''.{{sfn|Bondanella|1992|p=265}} Circular in form, ''Amarcord'' avoids plot and linear narrative in a way similar to ''The Clowns'' and ''Roma''.{{sfn|Alpert|1988|p=242}} The director's overriding concern with developing a poetic form of cinema was first outlined in a 1965 interview he gave to ''[[The New Yorker]]'' journalist [[Lillian Ross (journalist)|Lillian Ross]]: "I am trying to free my work from certain constrictions – a story with a beginning, a development, an ending. It should be more like a poem with metre and cadence."{{sfn|Bondanella|1978|p=104}}