Federico Fellini

Earth takes four of the ten planets, fire three, air two and a single one water, and five of the ten sit in cardinal signs. The element that would register what a thing cost is down to one planet. The record says Fellini turned neorealism into something closer to a dream, and gave the language the word Felliniesque for the result.

The Sun sits on the final degree of Capricorn with the Moon at twenty and Mercury at nineteen, so both lights and the speech planet all sit in the sign built on competence and on having actually done the thing. Uranus sits on the last eight minutes of Aquarius, which puts it under a degree from that Sun across a sign boundary, and the contact reads as independence without a fight: unusual, and untroubled by being so. For a director who made dreams out of a realist tradition, a Capricorn group under a boundary Uranus is the structure to keep.

Saturn sits in quiet contact with Neptune at half a degree, adjacent signs and the mildest link available, and it reads as imagination made durable: artists who finish things, and faith that survives being examined. In a filmmaker that is the contact the whole career rests on. Mars sits in mild friction with that same Saturn at just over half a degree, drive meeting refusal. Mercury sits in quiet contact with Venus at just over half, charm in the way things get said. Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Pluto were the four retrograde planets.

Fellini died in Rome on 31 October 1993, at seventy three. Five separate bodies stood on that natal Mercury the day it happened: Neptune conjunct it at nine hundredths of a degree, Uranus conjunct it at sixteen hundredths, the Moon in easy contact at a quarter, Venus square it at two thirds and the transiting Mercury sixty degrees from it at just over one and a half. The Moon was full and ninety nine per cent lit, the phase that sees a thing clearly and usually through other people. Imagination made durable, in a career spent making the unreal look shot from life, is the fact worth keeping from this one.