Federico Fellini: The Book of Dreams - Digest

Reading • Federico Fellini: The Book of Dreams

As the title indicates, this 500-plus-page tome is taken from the notebooks that cinema titan Fellini kept by his bedside for more than 30 years. The director of classics La Dolce Vita, Amarcord, 8 1/2, La Strada, Juliet of the Spirits, Satyricon, and I Vitelloni, Fellini, who died in 1993, very much believed in the importance of dream life. Annotating the book are more than 400 sketches that chronicle the maestro’s “nightwork.” Though the cover price breaks the century mark, a glimpse of Fellini’s creative process is, as the credit-card ad intones, “priceless.” —Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 7, 2008