The Films of Federico Fellini provides an introductory overview of the Italian director's life and work, with particular focus upon five important films: La strada, La dolce vita, 8½, Amarcord, and Intervista. The first four works were incredibly successful, both critically and commercially, winning numerous awards and establishing Fellini's international reputation as Italy's most important film director. The last work, Fellini's penultimate film, provides a summary of Fellini's cinematic universe and analyzes the nature of cinema itself.

The series in which this book appears – Cambridge Film Classics, under the general editorship of Ray Carney – aims at providing “a forum for revisionist studies of the classic works of the cinematic canon from the perspective of the ‘new auteurism,’ which recognizes that films emerge from a complex interaction” of various forces and are not only the result of a director's genius. I accept and even embrace the correctives supplied to auteur criticism, which underline the importance of economic, political, cultural, bureaucratic, and technical factors in addition to the influence of the creative director. However, in the case of Federico Fellini, we have the archetypal case of the “art film” director. Indeed, the very name Fellini has come to stand for the art film itself and for the kind of creative genius that produced this phenomenon, so crucial a part of the film culture of the 1960s and 1970s. Inevitably, the critical pendulum would swing in the opposite direction, since auteur critics celebrated the director as superstar, concentrating upon such figures as Antonioni, Bergman, Buñuel, Fellini, Hitchcock, and Welles.