FELLINI’S DREAMS
The Master Filmmaker's Fantasies Illustrated
Federico Fellini, one of the most revered filmmakers of the 20th century, won four Oscars for best foreign-language film by the time of his death in 1993. His deep connections into the world of dreams have contributed to his cinematic creations, including La Dolce Vita, 8 ½, Juliet of the Spirits, Roma and Amarcord. The recently released Federico Fellini: The Book of Dreams (Rizzoli) is a combination of memory, fantasy and desire. It’s an illustrated personal diary of Fellini’s visions and nighttime fantasies. In the book’s introduction, the editors note, “If Fellini’s films are, to cite Shakespeare, often the stuff of dreams, then this book proves that his dreams are the stuff his films are made of.” Fellini’s sketches represent his nocturnal visions or, as he described them, “scribbles, rushed and ungrammatical notes.”
In early 1960 Fellini met Jungian psychoanalyst Dr. Ernst Bernhard. Bernhard turned Fellini onto Jung’s autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections. He also experimented with LSD and started a dream diary. It was a turning point in the director’s work from neorealism filmmaking to distinctly oneiric.
Fellini would write down memories of his dreams as soon as he awoke. Many of his drawings contain sketches of voluptuous naked women with over-sized breasts, mostly prostitutes and actresses and referred to by initials. Other illustrations revealed his fear of death and failure. He saw himself condemned or hanged, imprisoned and killed by a firing squad. The sketches drifted between comedy and tragedy and became more detailed in the later years. His sketchbooks were an outline for possible film ideas. One of his drawings has the annotation, “Have I just let a film idea escape while engaged in my usual neurotic masturbatory fantasies?”
His dream sketches were mainly created with colored markers and pens and his ability to transform his dreams into drawings is a reminder that Fellini left home for Rome in 1939 not to pursue filmmaking, but to study law. Instead, he spent two years working as a writer and cartoonist for a satirical magazine. He wrote radio sketches and gags for films and worked as a screenwriter and assistant director for director Roberto Rossellini.
In a 1984 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Fellini spoke about dreams, “It’s true that talking about dreams is like talking about movies since the cinema uses the language of dreams: Years can pass in a second, and you can hop from one place to another. It’s a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.”
The Book of Dreams was published in 2008. This new edition is meant to coincide and celebrate Federico Fellini’s 100th birthday, which includes a traveling exhibition throughout Italy.
