“Nothing is known, everything is imagined”
Fellini’s last film, La voce della luna, is one of his most mysterious and opaque works. Steeped in poetic language and reveries, it also fiercely criticized contemporary society and the media which were epitomized by the figure of Silvio Berlusconi. In many ways, La voce della luna echoes the concerns Fellini first expressed in La dolce vita, a film that admonished about the dangers of leading a rudderless and shallow existence. The group of objects in this section of the exhibition underscore the relationship between these two films, and include original costumes from La voce della luna by Maurizio Millenotti, as well as the clapperboard, the shooting script, and a sketch of the moon—in the film, earth’s satellite is captured and interviewed on live television. Also on view are a mask from La dolce vita, and the script for “the most famous films never made”, according to Vincenzo Mollica: Il viaggio di G. Mastorna. Fellini was haunted by this project throughout his life, as he discusses in the 1969 documentary Fellini: A Director’s Notebook. Sadly, Mastorna never became a movie classic, but Fellini managed to turn it into a comic book by collaborating with legendary artist Milo Manara. However, even the comic book, which was based on Fellini’s own storybook, remained incomplete. Fellini worked on other projects that were never made: on view in the exhibition are a page where he annotated ideas about a film set in Venice, as well as a typescript with his personal selection from Italo Calvino’s collection of Fiabe italiane (Italian Fables, 1952).
