One word: paparazzi. One scene: Anita Ekberg having a bath in the Trevi Fountain. One phrase: “Marcello, come here!”. One music: the Circus’ march of “8 y ½”. All those are stills with an own life; they are collective memory’s icons, that return again to live in the most different contests, in the whole generations’ mind, in the most daring screen versions.

All those are the creations of a genius: Federico Fellini. The Italian cinema’s director and his “Circo de las ilusiones” (Dreams’ Circus) are the main characters of the Caixa Forum’ exhibition till the next 26th of December.

Walking around the exhibition is a very great pleasure for who has watched the director’s entire movies and also for who just has heard talking about him.

We’re going to know the Fellini cartoonist of the beginning when he worked for the magazines “420”, “Il travaso” or “Marc’Aurelio”. The “felliniano” universe’s grotesque being that are present in every author’s work started to live in those pages.

Maybe the tobacconist with enormous bosom of “Amarcord” and the prostitute with imposing bottom of “City of women” were born in the Fellini’s mind during those years. Besides, the director tells us his obsession for the women with “generous figures” trough those characters.

Cinema’s poster, ancient magazines, filming’s photographies, movies’ and casting’s passages tell us another Fellini’s love: the circus . Who doesn’t remember the big and lighting eyes of Gelsomina clown? She’s a character of “La Strada” and she was magnificently interpreted by Giulietta Masina , the director’s partner.

Masina interprets a girl attracted by the circus’ World, who is loyal to her chief, although he’s violent and aggressive. The Italian director portraits very well the poverty of Rome’s outskirts during the fifties and the people’s frustrations in that movie and also in the “Nights of Cabiria”, where the actress interprets a prostitute.

We stay in Rome, the sixties’ bourgeois one, trough “Dolce Vita”. The gossip’s lure came to the cinema for the first time and it isn’t daring saying that the Fellini’s work conditioned the phenomenon’s recent exaggerated characteristics . Seeing anxious paparazzi that would to make a picture of the celebrities’ last flirts was something very common at Via Veneto during that époque. After Fellini all that was a new to place in the magazines’ first pages of the entire world.

Rimini, the director’s native town is another love of Fellini. He dedicates to it two of his masterpieces: “I vitelloni” and “Amarcord”. In that movie the Italian director critics the fascist regime, the church, the education, the pedants, the arrogant people, but he does it trough the irony. The Aurelio’s passionate and tacit resistance to the regime explains genially the fascist Italy’s contradictions.

Oniric fantasies, reality, the unconscious and the memory are other recurrent arguments in the Fellini’s movies, like “8 y ½”. The director’s reflections about those arguments compose an important part of the exhibition, also trough notes and draws.

At the final of this chronologic route we’ll find some last creations. Fellini interprets himself, using the cinema to tell it and to tell the world, in “Director’s notes”, “The clowns” and “Interview”.

We wish you a happy vision of the Fellini’s World. He was an incomparable popular culture’s narrator, many of us wanted that he lived for ever to continue portraying our society.