Criterion announces Essential Fellini, a fifteen-Blu-ray box set

Joining in the international celebration of Federico Fellini’s 100th birthday, Criterion has announced Essential Fellini, a fifteen-Blu-ray box set that brings together fourteen of the director’s most imaginative and uncompromising works for the first time. Alongside new restorations of the theatrical features, the set also includes short and full-length documentaries about Fellini’s life and work, archival interviews with his friends and collaborators, commentaries on six of the films, video essays, the director’s 1968 short Toby Dammit, and much more.

The edition is accompanied by two lavishly illustrated books with hundreds of pages of notes and essays on the films by writers and filmmakers, as well as dozens of images of Fellini memorabilia. Essential Fellini is a fitting tribute to the maestro of Italian cinema!​

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 films in the set are Variety Lights, The White Sheik, I vitelloni, La Strada, Il bidone, Nights of Cabiria, La dolce vita, 8½, Juliet of the Spirits, Fellini Satyricon, Roma, Amarcord, And the Ship Sails On, Intervista.

FIFTEEN-BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION COLLECTOR’S SET FEATURES

• New 4K restorations of 11 theatrical features, with uncompressed monaural soundtracks for all films
• New digital restorations of the short film Toby Dammit (1968) and the television film Fellini: A Director’s Notebook (1969), with 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 • Two-hour, four-part 1960 interview with director Federico Fellini by filmmaker André Delvaux for Belgian television
• Four behind-the-scenes documentaries: Reporter’s Diary: “Zoom on Fellini” (1965), Ciao, Federico! (1969), The Secret Diary of “Amarcord” (1974), and Fellini racconta: On the Set of “And the Ship Sails On” (1983)
• Fellini racconta: Passegiatte nella memoria, a 2000 documentary featuring interviews with a late-in-life Fellini
• Giulietta Masina: The Power of a Smile, a 2004 documentary about Fellini’s wife and frequent collaborator
• Once Upon a Time: “La dolce vita,” a French television documentary about the film
• Audio commentaries on six of the films
• Program from 2003 on Fellini’s 1980s television advertising work
• Archival interviews with Fellini stars and collaborators, including Mastroianni, Sandra Milo, Anouk Aimée, and Magali Noël
• Archival audio interviews by film critic Gideon Bachmann with Fellini, Mastroianni, and Fellini’s friends and family
• Video essays, trailers, and more
• PLUS: Deluxe packaging, including two lavishly illustrated books with hundreds of pages of content: notes on the films by scholar David Forgacs, essays by filmmakers Michael Almereyda, Kogonada, and Carol Morley; film critics Bilge Ebiri and Stephanie Zacharek; and novelist Colm Tóibín, and dozens of images spotlighting Don Young’s renowned collection of Fellini memorabilia