FELLINI SPIRITSStage Spotlights Smoke
Friday, 16 February 2024, from midnight to 4 am
Federico Fellini draws and notes the characters of his films by photographing them in his dreams, which is the first step and the most important part of his creative process. He puts them on paper as if they were a photo call of his oniric life. Studioli collected a selection of drawings, sketches and working photographs was used to visually explain his ideas to the make-up artists who worked for him throughout his life. The antique faces from Satyricon, the make-up for The Clowns, the grotesque figures from La Città delle Donne and Amarcord are timeless characters and valuable documents of Italian culture from the 60s to the 80s.
Rapid Eye Movement
A dream interview with Federico Fellini by Alessandro Cicoria
Alessandro Cicoria: What is existence?
Federico Fellini: The presence of mankind on Earth and the way they inhabit it is a mystery that I would like to present as a grotesque, carnivalesque fact. That's why the dimension of the dream is the one that best suits my language, which has no fixed codes.
AC: What is your relationship to the dream?
FF: What is the REM state (Rapid Eye Movement, the rapid fluttering of the eyelids at the height of dream depth) if not the flashing of a 35-millimetre film running across the viewer's eyes? We experience the dreamlike in the act of dreaming and in the memory of it when we are conscious in the real world. My films are a chronicle of dreams and not an attempt to portray them. Dreams are recorded using the latest technology of live recording. As far as I know, I am the only one who has filmed them so far.
AC: This is what it looks like to us when we see your films.
FF: These filmed dreams are already present in the viewer's mind before they see them. It's as if they were seeing something for the first time that is already anchored in their body.
AC: But how is that possible?
FF: the dreams end up in a universal scenic archive in which I shoot my films, and scenes or figures from ordinary dreams often appear there.
AC: Makes me think of Koreeda's After life, where solo sort of dream agency gives you the opportunity to relive your favorite dream.
FF: Its’s a bit like Studioli, an evocation with light and smoke of documents, photos and drawings of my ghosts, a funeral for dreams, a cemetery of dreamers.