In his colossal biography, Tullio Kezich tells how Fellini, dejected by the tepid response to City of Women (1980), decided to discreetly visit cinemas in Rome to gauge audiences’ reactions for himself. He discovered that ‘the audience had changed planet, it no longer existed’.30 This mournful assessment helps us understand the valedictory yet defiant tone of his last period.

After the success of Amarcord, the public lost interest in Fellini, even though the baroque excesses of the Felliniesque aesthetic had entered the mainstream. The media reduced him to his own caricature while his films were greeted with incom¬ prehension, controversy or even indifference. In the period between Fellini’s Casanova (1976) and La voce della luna (1990) Italian cinema went through a major creative crisis, mainly triggered by the emergence of ‘neo-television’. The appearance of private TV channels — and that of Silvio Berlusconi’s financial and political empire — led to a banalization of the image. This phenomenon was accompanied by a dearth of exemplars in Italian cinema: some directors were working abroad (Bertolucci and Antonioni), the old masters were dead (Rossellini, Pasolini, Visconti) and audiences were deserting cinemas that had failed to keep up with the times. Ensconced within the studios of Cinecitta, Fellini would continue to create startling, visionary images, while resisting a society of spectacle that embraced television to the detriment of any artistic or intellectual standards.