“People said they were opposites, but they were twins, though they never knew it. “Fellini and Michelangelo were two sides of the same coin,” Enrica, the widow of Antonioni, told me. Their films were only rarely in competition, most memorably at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, when L’Avventura and La Dolce Vita contended for best picture. Fellini, whose fame caught on earlier, made, among other major works, La Strada (1954), Nights of Cabiria (1957), La Dolce Vita (1960), 8 1/2 (1963), Juliet of the Spirits (1965), Fellini Satyricon (1969), and Amarcord (1973). Both directors created masterpieces in black-and-white as well as in color. Fellini’s 1952 film The White Sheik was based on a story by Antonioni, and when Fellini was filming And the Ship Sails On, in 1982, Antonioni visited him on the Cinecittà set. Though they never became close friends, the two men were very respectful of each other’s work. Both were encouraged by Roberto Rossellini, the genius of Italian neo-realist cinema, who was a mentor at the start of their careers. Young Antonioni sketched architecture young Fellini drew cartoons.
They began their careers as journalists, and both were skilled artists. I wrote a book about one of them- I, Fellini (1995)-and I hope to write a book about the other, who died in 2007. I was a friend of both of these remarkable artists and their wives for many years. Cinema buffs still sometimes ask, “Are you a Fellini person or an Antonioni person?,” much as they would ask you to make that other necessary creative choice: Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky? Somehow Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini, the two greatest film directors to emerge in Italy after World War II, sparked a rivalry in the public’s imagination that didn’t really exist for either of them.