The dreams that shaped Italian movie great Federico Fellini's masterpieces will be presented for the first time at the second edition of Rome's Film Festival next year.
Mario Sesti, a member of the Fellini Foundation and one of the directors of the new Rome fest, said Thursday the Foundation had managed to acquire the two books of dream sketches for an undisclosed sum.
He said the Foundation will probably make copies of the doodles and larger drawings which the great director made every morning, "so that the two books are not torn apart".
According to Sesti, the dreams come "complete with Fellini's annotations in the margins which explain or interpret his dreams".
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 Sesti says the 400 drawings are "brightly coloured, fully formed and often quite explicit".
He said many highlighted the erotic and playful side that ran through Fellini's screen work.
Enthusiastic movie buffs hope the books will 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".
Only about twenty of the drawings have been seen before so the array of dreams - 400 in all - could prove one of the biggest attractions at next year's Rome fest, reviving claims that the upstart is seeking to steal the show from the world's oldest movie festival in Venice.
Rome has denied it wants to tread on Venice's toes as Italy's premier film-industry event.
It insists it is a more popular, less high-brow event that does not impinge on the classier showcase on the Lido.
But a row broke out this year because of the proximity of the two fests and a Venice organiser's apparent suggestion that Rome was getting Venice's left-overs.
The fuss eventually died down but the Italian culture ministry is insisting the events should take place farther apart.
So far Rome is sticking to its dates of October 18-26 while Venice will as usual run through the first ten days of September.
