Known for his dreamlike, picaresque, and baroque style, full of satire and melancholy, Fellini is considered one of the most influential Italian filmmakers since the second half of the twentieth century, at once capable of transcending national boundaries. Born during the Fascist era in Italy, Fellini begun to work in the 1930s as a cartoonist, journalist, and scriptwriter for neorealist directors such as Roberto Rossellini. Filming in 1950, his first full-length feature (Luci del varietà), Fellini progressively abandoned the Italian neorealist framework to develop his own visionary poetics and cinematic theory, thus consecrating a four decades-long career as a filmmaker.