Dream Projects in Theatre, Novels and Films: The Works of Paul Claudel, Jean Genet, and Federico Fellini by Yehuda Moraly (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Dream Projects in Theatre, Novels and Films: The Works of Paul Claudel, Jean Genet, and Federico Fellini by Yehuda Moraly
• Clare Finburgh Delijani

DREAM PROJECTS IN THEATRE, NOVELS AND FILMS: THE WORKS OF PAUL CLAUDEL, JEAN GENET, AND FEDERICO FELLINI. By Yehuda Moraly, translated by Melanie Florence. Brighton, Chicago, Toronto: Sussex Academic Press, 2021; pp. 171.

Dream Projects is about works of which artists can only dream. Works that remain forever unrealized. Works that are abandoned or destroyed. Yehuda Moraly’s premise, rooted in the work of three of the great artists of the twentieth century—Paul Claudel, Jean Genet, and Federico Fellini—is that while these dream works in and of themselves remain eternally inexpressible, they make possible the remainder of the artist’s oeuvre, for which they become the key.

By consulting authors’ notes, drafts, and letters, and examining the testimonies of those with whom they collaborated, Moraly painstakingly reconstructs the abandoned projects “from the birth of the idea through its ripening to the different versions of the project and then to its abandonment, or sometimes its abandonments since the author may come back to the project from a different angle before leaving it once more” (6). Significantly, Moraly deploys the uncompleted works as a prism through which to reevaluate each artist’s entire oeuvre, meaning that his study is of interest to specialists and non-specialists engaging with any aspect of the three artists’ works.

Chapter 1 examines the fourth part that Claudel intended to add to his Coûfontaine trilogy, which was to be a dialogue between a Jewish mother Pensée, her daughter Sarah, and the Pope’s nephew, Orian. Perhaps the fact that Claudel never resolved [End Page 580] this dialogue between Judaism and Christianity, between the Old and New Testaments central to his larger oeuvre, reflects his inability to transcend their contrasts, suggests Moraly.

In chapter 2, Moraly seeks to piece together the work, which was to be entitled La Mort (Death), that occupied almost two decades of Genet’s life and which he abandoned several times. The ultimate work of art which, according to his correspondences with interlocutors including Jean Cocteau and his American translator Bernard Frechtman, was to mirror the world, encapsulating all possible images. Genet imagined that La Mort would found a new aesthetic and morality by taking difference and alterity to extremes. The cycle would feature seven plays, each of which would be independent, but would gain true value in relation to the overall group. Only Genet’s posthumously published and fittingly entitled Fragments survive from what was to be his greatest project, which would have crystallized the themes and aesthetics that dominated his oeuvre, notably the performance of identity, betrayal, death, and the creatively disjointed, contrapuntal juxtaposition of textual fragments.

Finally, chapter 3 is dedicated to Viaggio di G. Mastorna (The Journey of G. Mastorna), a “metaphysical James Bond film,” which Fellini never managed to make despite the fact that the actors were cast, screenplay written, sets built, and costumes made. Moraly carefully examines the various synopses, scripts, and correspondences to reconstruct a chronological account of the thirty-year crisis that prevented Fellini from completing the film. Moraly teases out the salient scenes, images, and themes, which he then discerns across Fellini’s back catalogue, for instance in Toby Dammit (1968), Ginger e Fred (1985) and La Voce della Luna (1990). He proposes that the search for the sacred and quest for ultimate meaning beyond the tangible reality of life in Mastorna is a guide to understanding the critique of capitalist excess across Fellini’s cinema.

In addition to Claudel, Genet, and Fellini, Moraly’s introduction and conclusion contain a profusion of additional examples: the poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s unfinished “total book,” Alfred de Vigny’s aborted La Seconde consultation du Docteur Noir in the late nineteenth century, Claude Monet’s obsessively repeated attempts to paint waterlilies in the early twentieth century, composer Arnold Schoenberg’s “impossible opera” from the 1930s, and theatre critic Bernard Dort’s unachievable biography of the spectator in the latter part of the twentieth century. Nor is Moraly’s premise applicable exclusively to music, painting, theatre, and cinema, as his...