Federico Fellini’s effect in Argentine cinema: The case of Leonardo Favio

Abstract

A self-taught artist initially trained alongside Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, and considered today by both his country’s critics and his peers as one of the most important Argentinean directors, if not the most important, Leonardo Favio (1938–2012) often expressed his views on Italian cinema and Federico Fellini’s films without openly acknowledging their effect on his films. Despite this positioning, I intend to illustrate in this article how Favio’s cinematic universe has been traversed and shaped by Italian cinema, as by a red thread. More precisely, I aim to highlight how Favio, after incorporating several themes, characters and approaches of neorealist cinema in his only short and in his first film, included dialogues with Fellini’s cinematic universe in almost all his subsequent releases. The encounter with the cinema of Italian Maestro, without ever diminishing the originality and specificity of Favio’s films, turns them into a sort of resonance box for Fellinian echoes.