Three grotesques, two all-seeing eyes, a drunken genius, and a prophecy

More Fellini sketches from another Fellini publication, L’Arc issue 45, Fellini, a collection of essays in French. Bottom right is Poe.

Back to Inspiring Fellini by Federico Pacchioni.

Pacchioni tells us that this drawing represents a dream Fellini had eight months before the murder of his former collaborator Pier Paolo Pasolini. ‘In this dream the two artists, in the company of one of Pasolini’s “amichetti” (young and reprehensible friends) are walking down a muddy dirt road on the far edges of the city where the countryside begins.’ [On the road to Ostia, where Cabiria lives and where PPP would die?] ‘The atmosphere is gloomy and sinister; a storm has left the road filled with puddles, the sky is murky with “large, ragged and ugly clouds,” and a phantasmagorical yellow moonlight is spreading through the clouds and reflecting its ill glow on the surroundings. Around Pasolini and Fellini are a number of monstrous bat-rats sneering and looming as if preparing to attack, and behind the scene stands the unsettling eye of a camera spying on the men’s every move. Furthermore, the actions and words of the men are described as artificial in the dream, “as part of a script,” in connection with their mutual experience of the pressure placed on them by the media.’

As a great believer in dreams, Fellini would understandably have connected this eerie and menacing nightmare with Pasolini’s later death.