Back to the drawing board

Lee Marshall reports from Rome on a major new exhibition of Fellini's a rt

A static exhibition celebrating a master of the moving image sounds like a potentially disastrous paradox. But Federico Fellini is special. His life work makes for an endless source of fascinating museum pieces.

There are the extravagant movie props - the camp neon cardinals' robes from Roma, the gigantic female heads from The City of Women, the flying statue of Christ from the opening sequence of La Dolce Vita, and, of course, that dress - as worn by Anita Ekberg in the Trevi Fountain in the same film.

All perfect auction fodder for such dedicated fans as Steven Spielberg, who wrote a touchingly gawky letter to Fellini two months before he died: "Dear Mr Fellini, as you read this, I hope you are feeling better, I have been a fan of yours ever since I could see..."

These, and much more, are on view in a major new exhibition which opened in Rome last Friday - the day Italy's most famous director would have turned 75. It has been set up in two adjacent venues in the suburb of EUR, Mussolini's model city. The contrastbetween Fascist bombast and Fellini-esque deflation is apt. Fellini once had a huge cartoon head of the dictator made out of roses for a key scene in Amarcord; in the same spirit, the organisers of this show have superimposed a huge, plywood ocean liner(another Amarcord reference) on to the facade of the Palazzo della Civilta del Lavoro.

Here the sketches, cartoons and other biographical evidence are on display; in the nearby Salone delle Fontane, where material relating to the films themselves has been gathered, visitors are greeted by an inclined plane of 27 tilting televisions silently spewing clips from each of the master's 27 films. But the organisers' trump card is a collection of drawings, cartoons, dream sketches and film storyboards never seen before, at least not outside of long-forgotten magazines and limited-edition p ublishing ventures.

Fellini started his career as a cartoonist. In 1936, at the age of 16, he was already sketching caricatures of film stars to pay his way into his local cinema in Rimini. The compulsion to draw never left him: "In the planning stages of a film, most of mytime is taken up doodling tits and bums on a blank sheet of paper."

Tits and bums: Fellini dreamt about them too. That is clear from the dream sketchbook he kept on the advice of his Austrian analyst for over 20 years, between 1960 and the early Eighties, when sleeping pills drastically reduced his nocturnal production rate. A typical example: four red women with huge behinds, each a smaller copy of her neighbour, sit like Russian dolls on the wing of an aeroplane, screeching in unison. "If we're stowaways, it's all the captain's fault!"

With eight others, he opened the "Funny Face" shop in Rome's Via Nazionale in June 1944; then 24, he sketched the advertisements himself. "Have yourself drawn as Nero, playing your lyre while Rome is burning!' reads one caption. The shop did a busy tradeamong American GIs looking for an original present for the folks back home.

Back home: a small card sent out to friends and family on March 22, 1945, announces the birth of a son to Federico and Giulietta Fellini (this must have been one of the few times Federico dared to peg his surname on to his wife, the actress Giulietta Masina). Even as he sketched the two proud parent-chickens in the hen coop, Fellini must have been worried. Federichino was a sick baby and he survived only two weeks. He was the couple's only child.

The opening of the exhibition was preceded by a three-day conference, in which colleagues and fans from John Landis to the actor-director Roberto Benigni celebrated the maestro. Among them was Anthony Quinn, the brash but morally cowardly street entertainer Zampano in La Strada, the film that won Fellini his first Oscar. Quinn paid tribute to the director who stuck him and the rest of the troupe in a hotel without hot water and made him put his make-up on in the street. "I didn't speak any Italian then," he said, "and he didn't speak any English. So I talked to him in Spanish and he talked to me in Italian, with an American accent."

One of the projects Fellini was working on in his final years was entitled "L'inferno": it was to be a vision of the hell lived through by a famous director (reduced to a life-size puppet) who is constantly being bombarded by requests from American and Japanese producers for him to make a film of Dante's classic poem. Among them is a lawyer chewing a fat cigar who tells Fellini: "You can't refuse! You're Italian, Dante was Italian! The Americans love you! Though between you and me I must admit I didn't understand some of your films." Hollywood moguls may have been baffled, but this impressive exhibition is a reminder that Fellini could also be highly accessible, unpretentious and entertaining.