Dream Projects in Theatre, Novels and Films

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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. 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. 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. 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.).