Federico Fellini Toulouse-Lautrec

Marking ten years since the death of Federico Fellini we have an original comparison between the great Italian film-maker and the celebrated French master that reveals some analogies and some parallel situations.
Toulouse-Lautrec and Fellini: two great figures in two different cities (Paris and Rome) separated by a period of about seventy years. Paris in the eighteen-eighties was still very much concentrated on the recovery of its image as a capital city, ten years after the defeat at Sedan and the Paris Commune; Fellini's post war Rome needed to forget harsh and painful pages of its history.
The desire to dive headlong into this new return to life gave birth to phenomena which were to some extent comparable, the Belle-Epoque and the Dolce Vita, synonyms for a common wish to wipe out the suffering in an explosion of life that at times culminated in frenzy.
From this we have aggressive images, a taste for excess and a representation of a world in turmoil that characterise some aspects of both artists' work. Not only can we identify some clear relations between the main themes that characterise their artistic production, for example the circus and women, but there are also analogies in the daily behaviour of both artists, in the attentive and meticulous approach they had to their work and the great love they both had for the two cities where they chose to live from an early age and that played a central role in their lives.