By Yehuda Moraly
Many
narratives, novels, dramas and films depict an artist at the mercy of a work he
is unable to complete. Constantly deferred and failed attempts bring him to the
verge of death or madness. In the celebrated Fellini’s Otto e mezzo (aka
8 ½) (1963), the film director Guido Anselmi dreams to realize a film he
is unable to create. Just as in Marcel Proust’s In search of the lost Time (that
may be the model of the script), we have to wait until the end of the
film for the creator to find a way of realizing his work, which is, of course,
the one we have just been watching.
In
real life, too, artistic creation often entails battling with a work dreamed of
but which remains forever unrealized. The aim of my book is to show that in
regards to this dream project, that the creator longs to produce and always
abandons, is at the center of his creative adventure. It constitutes the key to
his oeuvre.
How
did I arrive at such a thesis? Many years ago, I discovered in Jean Genet’s
manuscripts (sent by Jean Genet to his American translator and agent, Bernard
Frechtman), a draft of a project named La Mort (Death) on which he
worked almost twenty years. Genet did not finish writing this text. But by analyzing the drafts that remained of this great
project, I realized that it provided the key to understanding Genet’s creative
work as a whole. The meaning of ambiguous plays by Genet like The Balcony,
The Blacks or The Screens as well
of his theoretical and political works is put in light by the aims that Genet had set himself in La Mort.
In
Fellini’s case, the twists and turns in the long-delayed shooting of the Viaggio
di G. Mastorna (The Journey of G. Mastorna) have passed into legend. In Otto
e mezzo (1963), Fellini depicted a film director who was unable to make a
film whose actors were already signed up and huge sets already built.
A
few years later real life imitated fiction. Fellini collaborated with Dino
Buzzati and Brunello Rondi on a screenplay about the realm of the Dead (Il
viaggio di G. Mastorna). Just as in the imaginary scenario in Otto e
mezzo, the preparations for shooting are very well advanced. The enormous
sets are ready. Thousands of costumes have been made. The actors’ contracts are
signed. And then to the despair of producer Dino De Laurentiis, Fellini
abandoned the project. Fellini was to return often to the Viaggio di G.
Mastorna without ever succeeding in finishing it. He rewrote the screenplay
with other screenwriters, Bernadino Zapponi and Tonino Guerra. The American
film director Mike Nichols offered him a million dollars for the screen rights.
Fellini refused because he still believed he would one day be able to make it
himself. In the last months of his life, he even agreed to its becoming a
graphic novel by Milo Manara. Only a few days before his death in September
1993, confined to his hospital bed, Fellini was still drawing Mastorna’s
mysterious outline. It was his last self-portrait.
The
Journey of G. Mastorna was intended by Fellini to be a
“Metaphysical James Bond film”. Understanding this dream project sheds new
light on Fellini’s films. Spaghetti, women with enormous breasts,
dreams: Fellini’s stock in trade is all too well known. It ends up obscuring
the true meaning of an oeuvre which is quasi prophetic, a voice raging against
the materialism of the modern world, an ongoing quest for the sacred. The large
number of books on spiritualism in Fellini’s library show how interested he was
in these subjects. Mastorna was intended as an investigation into what
happens after Death because Fellini was certain that something after Death
existed. Fellini- like Genet- is
a mystic whose quest takes place far from religious institutions.
My
book evokes also other cinematographic dream projects: the adaptation of Marcel
Proust’s In search of the lost Time by Luchino Visconti, L’Enfer
(Hell) by Georges Clouzot and the Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon on which
the film director spent years gathering prodigious amounts of documentation.
For
each of the main dream projects depicted in the book, my approach was the same.
First, I reconstructed the different stages of the unfinished work. Then, I
established a link between the abandoned project, and the overall work of this
artist, thereby shedding new light on the totality of his oeuvre.
Yehuda Moraly
Hebrew University
Yehuda.moraly@mail.huji.ac.il
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