A window into Fellini's films
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Fellini depicts himself as a puppet master in "Self-Portrait with Ginger and Fred," which he sketched while working on the 1986 film "Ginger and Fred."
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NEW YORK (AP) -- In one sketch, Federico Fellini helplessly slides toward a naked woman who proclaims, "Yes! This is the end of the race." In another, he playfully controls two blissful marionettes.
These drawings help introduce us to the colorful and dramatic characters who populate the legendary Italian filmmaker's movies.
From "The White Sheik" (his first movie) to "The Voice of the Moon" (his last film), Fellini always used caricatures and cartoon sketches -- not story boards -- to develop his characters and fine-tune his sets. He looked at his films as the extensions of his drawings and decided they would take on a life of their own.
That strong visual sense helped propel him to the forefront of international filmmaking in the 1950s and 1960s, along with Roberto Rossellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa and Jean-Luc Godard.
Now, 10 years after his death, the sketches that live on as films are the thrust of a retrospective of Fellini's work at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
"Fellini!" runs through January 14. It features everything from caricatures of actors to graphic novels derived from failed film projects. The drawings, photographs and personal journals help illustrate the director's mastery of developing characters through visual art.
In one sketch, Fellini drew himself as a puppet master while working on "Ginger and Fred," the 1986 movie that portrayed television as a moronic freak show. In another, his mouth is open in surprise and shock as he slides down a winding path toward a naked, smiling woman who awaits him. In his later years, Fellini worried about impotency and often portrayed himself as being overwhelmed by the ravenous desires of Amazonian women.
Waiting for dreams
A sketch from Federico Fellini's "Book of Dreams"
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But aside from his playful interpretations of sexuality, he also sketched actors and sets as well as dreams that were later the inspiration for film projects both successful and doomed.
"I enjoy the quiet of the night, and I am anxious for dreams. Lying there waiting for my dreams is like sitting in the movie theater waiting for the film to begin," he told his friend and biographer, Charlotte Chandler, in "I Fellini," published in 1995.
The director's very autobiographical 1963 movie, "8 1/2," is filled with a filmmaker's attempts to find inspiration for an upcoming movie; he eventually retreats into his dreams to escape and finds the start he needs.
Fellini began drawing as a child. As a boy, he would make sketches of Hollywood movie stars in exchange for tickets to the theater in his seaside hometown of Rimini, Italy. Later, he and a friend started a small company that sold drawings and caricatures.
In 1938, he traveled to Florence to work for "420," a satirical magazine; he produced comic sketches under the name "Fellas." He continued his work as a student in Rome, where he sold stories and cartoons to the satirical weekly Marc'Aurelio. He met the influential Rossellini in 1944 and was hired as an assistant director on Rossellini's "Open City."
A drawing from his first solo project in 1952, "The White Sheik," shows Fellini's sketches of the main character as seen from the front and back. Other drawings focus on makeup, expressions and posture.
"I have best been able to conceptualize the characters for my films by drawing them. ... They reveal their little secrets to me," Fellini told Chandler.
All of Fellini's work led back to his drawing, a skill taught to him in secret by his mother because his father thought only girls sketched.
Feature films, interviews, commercials
And he often leaned on his drawing when producers nixed his projects. In the 1970s, his interpretation of Carlos Castaneda's "Voyage to Tulum," an exploration of Mexican mysticism and drug use, was made into a graphic novel because of money troubles. In 1992, in a collaboration with illustrator Milo Manara, he produced "The Voyage of G. Mastorna," a film idea about death that also was made into a graphic story.
Even extras -- many of whose unnamed photographs are displayed at the exhibit -- were important to Fellini. Those extras often had bolder personalities than the leading characters. There was the dancing fish in "Satyricon," the feathered phantoms in "Juliet of the Spirits" and the motorcycle riders who descended on the town in "Roma."
The retrospective also has all of Fellini's feature films, his short films, hard-to-find interviews, documentaries and even some commercials he made in the 1980s. There are recently discovered scenes that were originally shot for "La Dolce Vita" and "Ginger and Fred."
Fellini won four Academy Awards for best foreign film -- "La Strada," "Nights of Cabiria," "8 1/2" and "Amarcord." "La Dolce Vita," with its famously sexy scene of Anita Ekberg coaxing Marcello Mastroianni into the Trevi fountain, won the Golden Palm at Cannes. Fellini won a lifetime achievement award in film in 1993, shortly before his death.
"I could always draw," he once said. "I haven't had as much time to draw as I would have liked."
Copyright 2003 The
Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
