Celluloid Dreams

"Giulietta has put Villalonga's corpse in one of our suitcases. We are in a large hotel, they're giving us a different room, I'm afraid that the young bellhop lingering next to the big suitcase with the dead body might suspect something." This is the kickoff to Federico Fellini's account of a dream he had on Oct. 13, 1966, one of hundreds of entries in a journal kept by the great Italian director from the 1960s to the '90s, perhaps the most complete record of a major artist's dreams ever compiled. (The corpse-stower, by the way, was Giulietta Masina, Fellini's wife and the star of several of his films, including "La Strada" and "Juliet of the Spirits.") Dreams, daydreams, dreamlike visions and nightmares break out all over the place in Fellini's movies; "8 ½" in particular seems to dare the viewer to figure out which parts of it are real and which are dreams. In addition to writing down what he could remember of his dreams the morning after, Fellini also made drawings, and no one familiar with his movies will be surprised to see that big-breasted women paid his dreaming self repeated visits: You might say he had an Ekberg Complex.

The text and the drawings are both reproduced in the whopping The Book of Dreams, edited by Tullio Kezich and Vittorio Boarini (Rizzoli, $125), with English translations of the journal entries grouped at the back of the book. In his introduction, Kezich suggests that Fellini's dreams might have been a source of both inspiration and frustration: Though Fellini had a great gift for bringing his fantasies to the screen, "the image-maker's omnipotence was sometimes held back by technical limitations; and . . . our director's thoughts ran faster and towards more distant destinations than what are nevertheless his extraordinary films."

-- Dennis Drabelle