via Pontina near Dinocittà, the former film studio of producer Dino De Laurentiis. With Dante Ferretti, he constructed a church, a piazza, apartment blocks, shops, and a hairdresser's boutique, all designed in a parody of styles. Although no genuine script was ever completed, Fellini managed to conceive entire scenes each day by observing his actors improvising on the set, rather like puppets in a doll's house. Principal photography started on 22 February 1989. According to biographer Tullio Kezich, the film "will be remembered as one of the most serenely uninhibited of Fellini's sets... At the final dinner in mid-June, the last time that the troupe will convene, Benigni outdoes himself and recites a wonderful poem in ottava rima, recounting everything that had happened and been felt over the last months". Reception Aided by the immense popularity in Italy of comic actors Benigni and Villaggio, the film was one of the highest-grossing Italian films of the year with a gross of $5.1 million. It received enthusiastic reviews from Alberto Moravia, Tullio Kezich, and Aldo Tassone along with a few outright pans. Although it did poor business in France, it was acclaimed in Le Monde and Positif, and was featured on the cover of Les Cahiers du Cinéma which saw it as a winning diatribe on the excesses of Guy Debord's "society of spectacle". The film screened out of competition at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival, where it was panned or ignored by the majority of North American critics. One critic boasted, "Absolutely ravishing. I've never been so bored in my life". References Notes Further reading Degli-Esposti, Cristina (1994). "Voicing the Silence in Federico Fellini's La voce della luna". Cinema Journal Volume 33, n° 2, Winter. Marcus, Millicent Joy (1993). "Fellini's La Voce Della Luna: Resisting Postmodernism". In: Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and literary Adaptation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. — (1992). "Miss Mondina, Miss Sirena, Miss Farina: The Feminized Body-Politic from Bitter Rice to La voce della luna." RLA: Romance Languages Annual, Volume 4, p. 296-300. O'Healy, Aine. "Interview with the Vamp: Deconstructing Femininity in Fellini's Final Films". (Interview, The Voice of the Moon) In: Federico Fellini: Contemporary Perspectives Frank Burke and Marguerite R. Waller (ed.)(2002), Toronto: University of Toronto Press, p. 209-32. Zambelli, Massimo (1997). Campane nel pozzo: 'La voce della luna': il testamento spirituale di Federico Fellini Rimini: Il cerchio. External links 1990 films 1990 comedy-drama films