$15 ($12 Belcourt members)*

Presented by Iggy Cortez, assistant professor of Cinema and Media Arts at Vanderbilt University

Presented in conjunction with a partial retrospective of the Italian director’s films, this seminar will explore the director’s enduring legacy. Few filmmakers have consolidated the notion that cinema is a personal vision as much as Federico Fellini, whose career spanned the twilight of vaudeville, the development of Italian neorealism, and the emergence of postmodern cinema. Through a discussion of scenes from his most important films, this seminar will investigate how Fellini’s aesthetic and thematic concerns developed alongside radical changes to the postwar Italian economy as well as national and international film industries. Bringing together cosmopolitan glamor and provincial grit, dreamlike reverie and unblinking social commentary, Fellini’s films have made a singular contribution to the language of cinema through his tightly calibrated spectacles of excess, as well as his capacity to evoke the essence of both cities and faces. In this seminar, we will explore the director’s existential concerns with personal and cultural memory, the aging and desiring body, the irretrievable nature of the past, and the very notion of this funny thing we call a “self.”

This seminar is presented in conjunction with Essential Fellini (Jun 25-Jul 15). Seminar tickets are sold separately from film tickets. Those who purchase a full pass to Essential Fellini will receive a complimentary seminar pass.

About the speaker:
Born and raised in Rome, Italy, Iggy Cortez now lives in Nashville, where he is an assistant professor of Cinema and Media Arts at Vanderbilt University. His research and teaching interests include world cinema, queer aesthetics, the history of the senses, and questions of screen performance and embodiment.  His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies as well as Camera Obscura. He is currently at work on a book on nighttime in world cinema.