FELLINI LIBRARY / BIBLIOTHÈQUE

There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie. -Kafka, Blue Octavo Notebooks

Il n'y a que deux choses. La vérité et le mensonge. La vérité est indivisible, donc elle ne peut pas se reconnaître ; celui qui veut la reconnaître doit être un mensonge. -Kafka, Cahiers bleus octavo

Ci sono solo due cose. La verità e la menzogna. La verità è indivisibile, quindi non può riconoscersi; chiunque voglia riconoscerla deve essere una bugia. -Kafka, Quaderni blu in ottavo

I'M A BORN LIAR: A Fellini Lexicon

by Federico Fellini and Damian Pettigrew

Abrams (New York) 2004

The Film Society of Lincoln Center A Film Comment online exclusive (30 April 2004)

Among the past year's overlooked films was Damian Pettigrew's Fellini: I'm a Born Liar, a documentary featuring not just footage from the late director's final interview and revealing insights about his life and work from collaborators such as Italo Calvino, Donald Sutherland, and Terrence Stamp, but also evocative tracking shots through locales made famous in La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2, a simple tactic that renders these environments both reminiscent and more palpable. Haunting imagery and attention to physical presence similarly pervade Pettigrew's book I'm a Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon (not to be confused with Sam Rohdie's seminal, poetic Fellini Lexicon), a sort of companion piece to the film, consisting of the author's interview material, arranged in alphabetical order according to subject, as well as rare, restored photographs capturing moments from the films and the director at work.

Roughly coinciding with the 10th anniversary of Fellini's death on October 31, 1993, the book proves to be one of the great documents of Fellini in his own words, as well as a beautiful photographic journey through his cinema. While Fellini's explications of his filmmaking method and theory never had the impact of Pasolini's or Antonioni's writings, I'm a Born Liar further demonstrates, along with the interviews and statements collected in Essays in Criticism and Fellini on Fellini, that the director was never short on ideas, opinions, reconsiderations, witticisms, and humor. It also testifies to Fellini's complete dedication to cinema as an intuitive visual art that transcends mere illustrative storytelling, an idea he repeats obsessively, as if to stress how rudimentary and yet underappreciated it is: "I think almost exclusively in images, which explains why an actor's face and body are more important to me than plot structure... The key word to understanding my kind of cinema is vitality. What I seek is to live the expression itself."

There are also round-ups of Fellini's thoughts on Jungian psychology, women, artificiality, dreams, clowns, metacinema, and the artistic process. All of this may be nothing new to Fellini aficionados, but the book's organization keeps revealing his well-known philosophies in various guises, from concerned modernist to playful innovator to out-and-out joker. Pettigrew only occasionally allows his questions to remain in the text, creating a discontinuous but fluid flow suggestive of the "open" form of Fellini's middle to late films.

Fellini was such a good interview subject largely because he reveled in creating his own myth, even outside film ("I invented everything, including my birth"), and, in keeping with its title, the book presents a host of wonderful Fellini yarns, including his childhood abduction via wolf, his mysterious encounter with Carlos Castaneda, and several experiences involving magic and paranormal visions. The main curios come from projects that never got off the ground: not only the well-known cursed production Voyage of G. Mastorna (the funereal mood of which pervaded Fellini's films from Satyricon onward), but also a WWII version of Tarzan, written by Marcello Mastroianni; Visions of Italy, a collaboration with Italo Calvino inspired by the latter's Italian Folktales, dealing with "fables as prophetic dreams"; a story concerning a man who metamorphoses into a woman after a heart transplant; and The Voyage to Tulum, a sort of Fellini Que Viva Mexico! documenting the director's search for Castaneda, the infamous "Mescaline Man". Perhaps the greatest surprise, however, comes from Fellini's sincere humility, not only in his role as an artist ("My films are based on fragile, half-digested ideas propped up with contradictory information and infused with nonexistent memories. If I'm lucky, I manage to get a few laughs") and his success ("I do not recognize any particular acts of will on my part that can be described as personal ambition"), but also in his approach to life, in his belief that observation and improvisation, rather than aggresivity and hubris, can foster attentiveness to reality while transforming it at the same time.

This was the brilliance of Fellini's vision - an eye that searches patiently for people and places, essences and oddities. As the maestro himself so elegantly explained it, "To believe is part and parcel of that vague yet fundamental sentiment in which I recognize an essential part of myself - the feeling of waiting for something." The images in Born Liar attest to the boundless creativity and beauty generated during this wait. - MICHAEL ROWIN

Film Comment online

FEDERICO FELLINI The Book of Dreams

by Federico Fellini

Edited by Sergio Toffetti and Felice Laudadio and Gian Luca Farinelli

Rizzoli (New York) 2020

An intimate Technicolor journey into the dreamlife of a master filmmaker, this is a work that added a fundamental element to the study of Federico Fellini and his creative experience. From the late 1960s until 1990, the great director used this diary to represent his nocturnal visions in the form of drawings or, as he himself described them, "scribbles, rushed and ungrammatical notes."

IRScore ★★★★ Earthy and sensual, at times sexually-explicit (which comes as no surprise given the nature of dream diaries), the book is the one indispensable guide to mapping the unfettered imagination of a genius director and its influence on his entire body of work.

I DISEGNI DI Fellini

per Federico Fellini e Pier Marco De Santi

Editori Laterza (Roma) 1982

IL MIO AMICO Pasqualino 1937-1947

per Federico Fellini

A cura di Rossella Caruso, Giuseppe Casetti

Contiene scritti e disegni di Fellini per il Marc’Aurelio e Il travaso, e un'accurata bibliografia di Fellini umorista. Catalogo della mostra omonima organizzata dall’Associazione Federico Fellini a Rimini dall’1 al 16 novembre 1997.

Il museo del Louvre (Roma) 1997

LA STRADA Un film de Federico Fellini

par François-Régis Bastide, Juliette Caputo et Chris Marker

Paris (Seuil) 1955

MANARA-FELLINI Le voyage de G. Mastorna

par Federico Fellini et Milo Manara

Casterman (Paris) 1996

Le voyage de G. Mastorna

par Federico Fellini, Dino Buzzati et Brunello Rondi

Traduit par Françoise Pieri avec une préface de Aldo Tassone

Sonatine (Paris) 2013

Inédit en France, Le Voyage de G. Mastorna, recèle tout le génie du réalisateur et se révèle débordant de surprises et d'inventions : une hypergare avec des trains hauts comme des immeubles, un quartier composé uniquement de centaines de temples de toutes les confessions de la planète, des morts qui, à l'heure du thé, sortent de leurs tombes pour recevoir leurs parents, une fête macabre où les trépassés s'amusent à se jeter d'une terrasse pour fêter la libération de la grande peur, autant d'éléments qui font de ce récit l'incarnation même de la mythologie fellinienne. Avec ce texte exceptionnel, qui évoque Le Procès de Kafka, Fellini se révèle un écrivain formidable à la langue puissante et raffinée. On sort de ce voyage vertigineux au pays des morts abasourdi et rasséréné par cette magnifique réflexion métaphorique sur l'au-delà.

IRScore ★★★★ Avec une excellente traduction de Françoise Pieri et une préface courte mais toujours informative de l'éminent critique de cinéma italien, Aldo Tassone, le livre aurait été mieux servi avec encore quelques photos de Tazio Secchiaroli prises pendant le fiasco de Mastorna en 1966 (voir la couverture avec Fellini et Mastroianni), et surtout une étude approfondie commandée à Tassone (sans doute dus aux contraintes budgétaires). Passons. Il convient de saluer ce qui doit l'être : le chef-d'œuvre du scénario qui a donné naissance à l'expression « le plus grand film que Fellini n'ait jamais fait » est enfin disponible en français grâce à l'éditeur Sonatine.

THE JOURNEY OF G. MASTORNA The Film Fellini Didn't Make

by Federico Fellini

Translation and essay by Marcus Perryman with a preface by Dr Peter Bondanella

In 1965, at the height of his fame after completing 8½ two years before, Fellini launched the most ambitious of all his projects: The Journey of G. Mastorna. The ambitious project, with its brilliant meditation on life after death, was excessively expensive and required special effects that matched and, in some scenes, went beyond the scope of Kubrick's 2001, A Space Odyssey, then in production. Moreover, Fellini never managed to convince himself that Mastroianni, his lead actor since La Dolce Vita, should play the starring role. Known later as “the greatest film never made,” the project soon became the director's greatest regret.

A few traces remain, however: Mastroianni's screen test for the title role, a clutch of photos from the pre-production shoot, and a magnificent script written in collaboration with novelist Dino Buzzati (The Tartar Steppe) and scriptwriter Brunello Rondi (8½, City of Women). It reads like the most exciting of metaphysical thrillers. Fellini presents his fantasy double, a cellist catapulted into a kind of "city in limbo", a delirious dreamlike variant of earthly reality. He offers us a modern odyssey into a secular, immanent and terribly human afterlife, like an inspired response to Dante and his Divine Comedy. Left to his own devices, totally lost, G. Mastorna will have to endure the worst ordeals to free himself from his own misinterpretations of life then go on to find an identity, a destination and, in the end, a kind of peace.

IRScore ★★★★ Perryman offers a supple and rigorous translation together with a thorough, wholly remarkable essay on imagining how Fellini would have created the film while, at the same time, detailing the financial and psychological disaster behind the ill-fated production and its inevitable consequences on the director's later work.

THE CINEMA of Federico Fellini

by Peter Bondanella

Princeton University Press (Princeton) 1992

This major artistic biography of Federico Fellini shows how his exuberant imagination has been shaped by popular culture, literature, and his encounter with the ideas of C. G. Jung, especially Jungian dream interpretation. Covering Fellini’s entire career, the book links his mature accomplishments to his first employment as a cartoonist, gagman, and sketch-artist during the Fascist era and his development as a leading neo-realist scriptwriter.

Peter Bondanella thoroughly explores key Fellinian themes to reveal the director’s growth not only as an artistic master of the visual image but also as an astute interpreter of culture and politics. Throughout the book Bondanella draws on a new archive of several dozen manuscripts, obtained from Fellini and his scriptwriters. These previously unexamined documents allow a comprehensive treatment of Fellini’s important part in the rise of Italian neorealism and the even more decisive role that he played in the evolution of Italian cinema beyond neorealism in the 1950s.

By probing Fellini’s recurring themes, Bondanella reinterprets the visual qualities of the director’s body of work — and also discloses in the films a critical and intellectual vitality often hidden by Fellini’s reputation as a storyteller and entertainer.

IRScore ★★★★ Bondanella’s study, expressed in long, at times convoluted but always meticulously detailed prose, treats all twenty-four films in analytical chapters arranged by topic: Fellini and his growth beyond his neorealist apprenticeship, dreams and metacinema in 81/2, literature and cinema in Toby Dammit (1967) and Satyricon (1969), the rise of the consumer society in La Dolce Vita (1959), political themes in The Ship Sails On (1983) and Orchestra Rehearsal (1979), the image of women and feminism in City of Women (1980), and the cinema of poetry in The Voice of the Moon (1991). Acclaimed on publication as ground-breaking, this virtually forensic analysis of the maestro's themes and creative processes won the 1992 Book Award of the Agnelli Foundation's Conference Group on Italian Politics and Society.

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