A book in which Italian movie great Federico Fellini sketched his dreams was presented to the public for the first time Thursday. Fellini, a former cartoonist whose visually striking masterpieces typically combine memory, dream and fantasy, once dismissed the sketches as "ugly strokes - hurried and ungrammatical notes".
But the 400 drawings were said to be "brightly coloured, fully formed and quite explicit."
The Fellini Foundation, which has just acquired the book, said they often showed the erotic and playful side that ran through Fellini's screen work. The foundation said it hoped to publish the book soon. Enthusiastic movie buffs who attended the presentation at Cinecitta's Fellini Studio said the book would show, for the first time the "germs" of a great film-maker's creations.
Fellini, the maker of classics like La Dolce Vita, Eight and a Half and Amarcord, started drawing his dreams after meeting a Junghian psychoanalyst in 1960. He kept up the habit until 1990, three years before his death.
In 1984, Fellini said: "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 images. And in the real cinema,
every object and every light means something, as in a dream".
