As a child, Federico Fellini would look forward to bed so that he could wander among his dreams, and a new book reveals how he recorded his dreams and the influence they had on his work
Anyone familiar with the films of Federico Fellini knows that he gave importance to dreams. But the extent of his devotion has only now become fully evident with the publication of a 400-page annotated sketchbook which recorded them. The annotations of Il Libro dei Sogni (The Book of Dreams), in Fellini's handwriting, are not always legible but they are printed in an appendix. The sketches, mostly done with variously coloured felt-tip pens, are a reminder that Fellini came to Rome in 1939 to study law but instead spent two years as a cartoonist for a satirical fortnightly.
A Jungian psychologist frequently encouraged Fellini to record his "nightwork", his dreams, as he did assiduously from 1960-68 and again from 1973-82. A few sketches date from the intervening period, leading to speculation that somewhere there is a more complete record of these years, and there are occasional sketches up to early 1990.
The psychologist's suggestion fell on fertile ground. As a child Fellini could not wait for bedtime when he would close his eyes and see absorbing spectacles. He had named the four corners of his bed after four cinemas in Rimini, his Adriatic coast birthplace. True to his childhood self, he would later regard his films as dreams on celluloid.
His sketchbook was partly a record of possible film ideas. One sketch has the worried annotation "Have I just let a film idea escape while engaged in my usual neurotic masturbatory fantasies?" The sketchbook, similar in format to the large comic books which he said were crucial in his education, reflects his fears and his activities in the film world. It is also a celebrity portrait gallery.
Many of the dreams are nightmares: he woke in fright after sensing his father's corpse beside him, seeing himself sealed in a runaway train or in a brakeless car careening along a dangerous mountainside road.
He felt himself menaced by the atomic bomb, by the approach of a hurricane or being shot at by German soldiers. He drew himself with Michelangelo Antonioni witnessing the calamitous explosion at the end of Antonioni's Zabriskie Point. Sometimes he saw himself condemned to be hanged, killed by a firing squad, imprisoned, haunted by a ghost, locked in a lift and besieged by sharks. One sketch has him arriving at his office letter box to find it labelled "The Most Lost of the Lost".
Many of his females are menacing viragos with luxuriant pubic hair and, even more characteristically, bloated breasts. Fellini's reaction to such lewd witches and Rubensesque trollops seems an adolescent mixture of attraction and apprehension. Several scenes in which they feature are set on the Adriatic beaches of his adolescence.
There are a few references to actresses, such as a sketch of his dream of making love to Anita Ekberg. A significant sketch is set in a Chinese castle where he dreamt of being "a prisoner of skilled prostitutes - sadistic in the extreme" who "set on him like hungry wolves". A friend warns him to flee to avoid being eaten alive but, instead, he goes on "duelling" with his assailants. Several sketches are scatological.
The Book of Dreamshas more than a hundred caricatures of celebrities, from Henry Kissinger to Fellini's beloved Pope John XXIII, from Ingmar Bergman to Orson Welles, from Salvador Dalí to Sophia Loren. Some were not even acquaintances, such as Jimmy Carter, portrayed saying "Jesus". Fellini succeeded in making several caricatures both recognisable and a commentary on the subject.
The dreams exist in a timeless zone: one recounts a visit to the poet Pier Paolo Pasolini in which Fellini sits in a chair beside Pasolini until told that it is the dog's chair. Fellini rises and the dog immediately jumps on to the chair. The date, 1977, shows this took place two years after Pasolini's death. Other dreams are premonitory: in a large, memorable sketch in black, grey and blue, Fellini is seen from behind walking with Pasolini and one of his friends in the outskirts of Rome on a rainy night. There are long shadows from trees where perch large, winged rats which spy on the trio. This brings to mind Pasolini's murder on the outskirts of Rome but the sketch dates from months before the killing.
IN HIS DREAMS, Fellini usually saw himself from behind as slim with abundant hair and wearing a suit, but in one sketch, beside the slim young man, he placed himself as he had become, bulkier, even shorter with a long scarf dangling down his overcoat. He has scant hair, one of the banes of his later years, which he tried to combat with costly but ineffective treatments. As a young man, thin as a nail, he was dubbed "Gandhi although Fefe, derived from the first two letters of his names, later replaced it as a nickname.
In an introduction to The Book of Dreams, Fellini's biographer Tullio Kezich reports that Federico was an exuberant, happy young man in his early Roman years. Fellini said his arrival in Rome was his real birth date. He graduated from cartooning and writing for a satirical magazine to turning out radio and burlesque sketches and, later, film scripts for Roberto Rossellini.
In the 1950s, after working as an assistant producer, he began making his own films, which went beyond the prevailing neo-realism, achieving success with his second about growing up in the provinces ( I Vitelloni) and winning the first of five Oscars with his third, La Strada(1954). The slim young man of his dream image was riding a wave of success. But the balding and bulkier Fellini was often plagued by fears, even when his success continued with films such as La Dolce Vita(1960), Amarcord(1973) and Orchestra Rehearsal(1978). A 1974 annotation refers to his depression, guilt, inertia and self-loathing.
To his fears he added that of the future because it would bring him to the threshold of death. He dreamed of being legless in a mobile cart or using a wheelchair, as occurred eventually. In 1982 he dreamed of himself in bed being brought the morning papers which gloatingly announced his death: "Fellini finally succumbs." He feared the death of his imagination when his dreams, a reassurance of creative vitality, dried up, as they did finally. According to Kezich, Fellini's melancholy and dissatisfaction grew apace in his last, dreamless years in which producers were not prepared to back his film projects.
It is somewhat sad that his last work was a brief, three-episode publicity film for the Bank of Rome. It showed a middle-aged man afflicted by nightmares: in one episode, he drives his car into a tunnel which collapses; in another, he has to fend off a lion in a basement; in the third, he is anchored between railway lines as a train bears down on him. In each case, when he wakes he rushes to a psychologist who suggests he will have less anxiety if he becomes a client of the friendly Bank of Rome. At least Fellini was true to dreams to the last.
He was always protective of them, which could explain his annoyance with sophisticated interpretations of his films, his elusiveness, the smoke screen of inventions or lies ("I'm a great liar - my truth is invented") with which he confused those who wanted to write about him.
Fellini relished chaos and confusion as he filmed. He assembled an entourage of bit players who were like caricatures come to life.
Instead of precisely scripted scenes, he encouraged happenings in which the actors improvised but found that they served his purposes. He made all the world a circus. He loved the transient and tenuous, the tattered and whimsical poetry in which the disinherited, the marginalised and humble glimpsed beatitudes. He appreciated the circus's attempt to grasp the ungraspable. Natalia Ginzburg's comment on the marriage banquet in Amarcordcan also be applied to Fellini personally: "Life's answers are . . . ambiguous, sybilline and full of suspended questions." For a brief period in the early 1960s, in a related attempt to go beyond the visible, he resorted to spiritism. For a longer period, he used I Ching to read the future.
What kept him going despite his freight of fears? His wife, Giulietta Masina, seems to have been a major factor. He was a big man, more than six feet tall, with a formidable head which emerged more as he lost the battle for his hair. As he walked through the Piazza di Spagna area where he lived, he could evoke the image of the liner Rexin Amarcordsailing serenely. In contrast, petite Masina seemed vulnerable but proved resilient and sagacious. Fellini can be identified with the strong man of La Stradaand Masina with Gelsomina, the innocent waif who gives her life for him, but in the film she also proved the stronger. She was also the Ginger of Ginger and Fred, more judicious and mature than fragile Fred, Fellini's alter ego Marcello Mastroianni.
In these films, Fellini tried to understand a woman rather than seeing women adolescently as sex objects or harridans. His sketches repeatedly showed his fear of losing Masina by sickness or death. In one, he depicts her as the fairy of Pinocchio, but dead. He is crying as he looks down at her. But the real Masina stayed on: he died on October 31st, 1993, the day after their 50th wedding anniversary, and she the following year.
His other major resources were his fertile imagination and his sense of wonder. A large, mainly blue sketch of August 20th, 1984 shows him, during a pause in shooting a film, reclining on the grass in Rome and gesturing to the starry sky. In this midsummer night's dream, Fellini says to a colleague reclining beside him: "We can only recognise that we're part of the inscrutable mystery which is creation. We obey its unknowable laws, its rhythms, its changes. We're mysteries among mysteries." Shakespeare, Lope de Vega and others had reached the same conclusion before Fellini but it stood him in good stead until his awakening on October 31st, 1993.
Il Libro dei Sogni (The Book of Dreams) is published by Rizzoli, in two formats, which cost €95 and €300 for an anastatic edition. www.rizzoliusa.com
Desmond 0'Grady's most recent book is a novel about a Sydney journalist,Dinny Going Down (Arcadia, Melbourne; 2007 )
