Dream Projects in Theatre, Novels and Films: The Works of Paul Claudel, Jean Genet, and Federico Fellini

Every artist has a “dream project” – an enterprise that he or she has continuously taken up but never completed. Via archived notes and drafts, a retrospective reconstitution of such projects can serve as a key for better understanding the author’s artistic corpus. The present study reaches out to the authorship of Paul Claudel, Jean Genet, and Federico Fellini. Claudel deferred and never completed the fourth segment of his Trilogie des Coufontaine. The only indication of the existence of this prospective fourth part of the theatre sequence is a brief entry in his Journal. In 1949, he began writing a third version of his first great work Tete d’Or. Like the unfinished fourth section that was to be added to the trilogy, the draft of the third version of Tete d’Or reveals a dialogue between the Old and New Testaments – a theme that appears to be central to Claudel’s entire corpus. Genet labored over La Mort for many years. At the conclusion of Saint Genet, comedien et martyr (1952), Sartre mentions this final work of Genet. Genet discussed his progress on La Mort in correspondence and even published “Fragments” of La Mort in the literary magazine Les Temps Modernes. While the project never came to fruition, it nevertheless remains an important means through which to understand Genet’s work. The aborted production of Fellini’s Voyage de G. Mastorna has become a legend. After 8½ and Giulietta degli spiriti, Fellini wrote a screenplay that he began to film but subsequently abandoned, much to the chagrin of producer Dino de Laurentiis who had already invested in sets and costumes. Fellini would often revisit this project, but never completed it. This book also examines additional “dream projects” taken from different art forms: poetry (Mallarme’s Le Livre); literature (Vigny’s Daphne); painting (Monet’s Nympheas); music (Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron); and various films (Clouzot’s L’Enfer, Visconti’s La Recherche, Kubrick’s Napoleon, etc.).