"The tyrant spectator": Intermediality, spectatorship, and subjectivation in Fellini's work

The article argues that Federico Fellini’s films offer a sustained critique of modern spectatorship and media culture, especially in relation to the rise of television in postwar Italy. Through an intermedial analysis of works from Toby Dammit (1968) to La voce della luna (1990), the essay shows how Fellini progressively moved from a playful and enchanted conception of spectacle toward a pessimistic vision of the “tyrant spectator”: a viewer shaped by television, consumer culture, and the collapse of boundaries between performer and audience. Ultimately, the essay contends that Fellini anticipated contemporary media culture by diagnosing the emergence of a society in which spectators increasingly become performers of themselves. His late films therefore constitute not merely nostalgic reflections on cinema, but a political and philosophical inquiry into how media reshape perception, social relations, and modern forms of subjectivity.