Alexis Johnson: Please tell us about your latest book in your own words.
Yehuda Moraly: The idea for writing my book Dream Projects in Theatre Novels and Films: The Works of Paul Claudel, Jean Genet and Federico Fellini (Liverpool University Press, 2021) started with my discovery of the then unpublished letters from Jean Genet to his agent Bernard Frechtman. The letters dealt with “The Death,” a fascinating project that Genet worked on from 1949 to 1964. This unique project, both a novel and a philosophical treatise, was intended to destroy its author, its reader, and itself. Genet never completed his project, but the analysis of the goals he set himself throughout the creative process may give us the key to understanding all his work, particularly his theater. I then realized that this phenomenon of an uncompleted work shedding light on the essence of the artist’s work is a kind of general creative law. Often, an artist dreams of a project, starts working on it, and then abandons it, taking it up again only for his dream project to remain forever out of reach. The purpose of my research presented in this book is to show that it is precisely these uncompleted projects (that one must reconstitute with the help of drafts and descriptions) that constitute the key to the opus. It sheds light on what is essential in the work. For example, at the center of Fellini’s work, there is this extraordinary project, “The Journey of G. Mastorna,” a journey to the Land of the Dead, abandoned during preparations for filming in 1965 but constantly rethought and reworked. In 1993, on his hospital bed, Fellini drew the mysterious figure of Mastorna [Figure 1], this violinist who travels in the Land of the Dead, a story he has not given up to tell. Within this, Mastorna sheds a completely new light on Fellini’s work.
AJ: In what ways do Paul Claudel, Jean Genet, and Federico Fellini share a significance distinguishing them from other notable creatives, including those mentioned in the book’s conclusion?
YM: In order to detect a dream project in a creator’s work, it is necessary to have a profound knowledge of his life and all of his works since, by definition, the dream project did not reach the public. I am fairly familiar with the works of Genet, Claudel, and Fellini. In 1988, I wrote the first biography of Jean Genet (La vie écrite, La Différence). Later, I published an analysis of his brilliant and little-known theoretical texts (Le Maître fou, Nizet, 2009). In La Mort, Genet’s dream project, he set out to find a new morality and aesthetic of discontinuity and death originating in his life experience as a homosexual. His theater works and theoretical texts are intentionally contradictory, reflecting this pursuit. They are works that destroy themselves, as he wanted to do in “La Mort,” his dream project.
I wrote a book on Claudel, Claudel metteur en scène (Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comté, 1998) and published numerous papers on his work. I discovered in his diary an account of a dream project (the fourth part of the Coufontaine trilogy), which he intended to write in the 1920s and which he had not yet given up on in the 1940s. In this dream project, a Catholic nun converses with her Jewish mother. This dialogue between Christianity and Judaism seems to be at the center of the huge opus of Claudel, a prolific playwright, philosopher, and Biblical commentator. In his early years, Claudel was a fanatical anti-Semite, but gradually he became sensitive to the greatness of the Jewish people and had a particularly high esteem for Hasidism. He hailed the creation of the State of Israel as a sign of final redemption.
I have always had great admiration for Fellini’s work. In my opinion, he is the greatest film director of the twentieth century, and each of his films is a masterpiece. Fellini’s dream project, “The Journey of G. Mastorna,” depicts a trip to the Land of the Dead. It expresses Fellini’s deep interest in what is beyond physical reality. Fellini’s popular image links his work with sex and extravagance. However, in films like La Strada [1954], Nights of Cabiria [1957], La Dolce Vita [1960], 8½ [1963], and Juliet of the Spirits [1965], a deep nostalgia for the sacred is revealed—a questioning of what exists beyond what we see.
Therefore, I dedicated most of my book to the dream projects of Fellini, Genet, and Claudel as case studies, due to my acquaintance with their works and lives. I wouldn’t be able to link the dream project to the essence of an artist’s oeuvre with which I don’t have a deep acquaintance. My book is actually a starting point. It would be necessary to form a group of specialists who would link, for example, Water Lilies to the essence of the work of Monet, and the uncompleted opera Moses und Aron to the profound significance of Schoenberg’s music, and Kubrick’s uncompleted film, Napoleon, to the essence of his work, etc.
AJ: Throughout your research, were there any surprising or unexpected discoveries regarding the influence of dream projects on the artists’ overall corpora?
YM: The struggle with the dream project often has tragic consequences on the artist’s life. Monet forbade anyone from exhibiting his Water Lilies, which he found imperfect after thirty years of work. Only his death allowed the public to see them. Claudel was exhausted and close to death after abandoning his great Biblical musical project at the Paris Opera. Genet burned all the drafts of “La Mort” and tried to commit suicide after that. Fellini, during the preparations for “Mastorna,” became ill and was hospitalized. The enraged producer of the abandoned film blocked his bank accounts. The failure of the great project “L’Enfer” (Inferno) by Georges Henri Clouzot marked the end of his career when the main actor, Serge Reggiani, left the project, causing Clouzot to have a heart attack. The beautiful documentary film by Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea, L’Enfer d’Henri Georges Clouzot [2009], tells the story exquisitely by utilizing sequences from the abandoned film and dream project.
But often, after the terrible passage in this dark forest of artistic uncertainty, the artist experiences an awakening, a new period where his creativity returns in a completely different way. Regarding Fellini, after the “Mastorna” crisis, he resumed his work with Toby Dammit [1968] to create perhaps his greatest film and, paradoxically, the least known because it is part of an “omnibus” film, Spirits of the Dead (1968), which consists of two other, less interesting parts, written by Roger Vadim and Louis Malle. Toby Dammit, created by Fellini after abandoning his dream project, clearly echoes “The Journey of G. Mastorna.” The films indeed show an intermediate world between life and death, with scenes taken directly from the abandoned film. Giuseppe Mastorna gradually realizes that he is dead and, likewise, Toby Dammit continues to drive his sports car after his death as if he were alive.
The discovery in Paul Claudel’s archives of a draft of a play, “On Répète Tête d’Or” (Rehearsing Tête d’Or), was a great joy for me. This text, almost unknown even to specialists, confirms the fact that, until the end of his life, Claudel was preoccupied with the theme of the dialogue between Judaism and Christianity. In order to understand the importance of this draft written in 1949 by Claudel, who was then 81 eighty-one years old, we must go back in time. In 1889, at the age of twenty-one, Claudel wrote his first major play, Tête d’Or. A long blond-haired hero (hence his name Golden Head), echoing Richard Wagner’s long blond-haired hero Siegfried, kills a king with a Jewish name, David, and exiles the king’s daughter, the Princess, from the palace. Afterward, the blond hero of the play electrifies an amorphous crowd and becomes victorious in conquering the world. For Paul Claudel, the artist is a prophet. During WWII, however, it became obvious to him that at twenty-one, he had predicted Hitler’s future career, depicting it in an unfortunately admirable way. After the war, in 1949, at the age of eighty-one, he desired to create a text that would amend this earlier perspective, one that had troubled him significantly. This new play takes place in a prison camp populated by French soldiers in Germany. The main character has a Jewish name, Simon Bar Yonas, which translates from Aramaic to “son of the dove,” but also refers to Christ. In the revised version, Simon Bar Yona directs his fellow prisoners, rehearsing the original 1889 Tête d’Or. The play revolves around a central conflict involving Simon and the Princess, portrayed by a Jewish prisoner. The Princess starts as an angelic character (the Church) but takes an unexpected turn, growing progressively more aggressive as the play unfolds (the Synagogue).
Claudel, who tries once again to stage this dialogue between the two Testaments, Old and New, gives up once again and doesn’t finish writing the play– perhaps because it seems to him that the Old Testament will have the upper hand this time.
“On Répète Tête d’Or” is neither known nor published in its entirety. I find it surprisingly strong and full of remarkable scenic inventions, even if it isn’t really finished. For me, it was a great joy to discover and analyze it. For Claudel, it must have been a great sadness to abandon it, but maybe one day, a theater group will want to stage it.
A link to the trailer of Gilles Blanchard’s film
AJ: Is it plausible to argue that no artistic project is ever truly complete, particularly when considering the perspective of the creator?
YM: Absolutely. Your question reminds me of a story that I recalled in the book:
An emperor commissions a painting of a dragon, and the artist sets to work. After some years the emperor is astonished to have heard nothing of the project and so sends the artist a messenger. The artist shows him several sketches in which the dragon is depicted in increasing detail, eventually appearing to leap off the page. Gradually, though, the picture becomes more abstract; details disappear, until finally there is only one line on the blank page. This is the essence of a dragon. Usually the story ends with this single line on the page. What is forgotten, however, is that the painter still has not sent this one line to the emperor; he feels deep down that even this one line is too much. The only true picture of the dragon is the blank page; the finest of symphonies is silence; the finest drama is chaos. In its most perfect form, art returns to nothingness. Might every real work of art be impossible?
At the end of the process of a creation of a work of art, there is always a movement toward emptiness. Of course, the time of creation is limited in theater and cinema; the artist has to manage the time he is given to work on the piece. But in the case of Monet, the painter, or Mallarmé, the poet, the artist has all the time in the world to work on his art. Therefore, the work could always be in the making and eternally unfinished because the artist always wants to perfect it ad infinitum.
All these insights are valid for artists of the nineteenth or twentieth century. Not so much for artists in the century in which we live. Today, the value of an artist is measured by the speed and efficiency of his achievements, what we call these days—a word that I despise—professionalism. The artists I referred to worked endlessly on works of art, infinitely trying to perfect them. Unfortunately, this process is a thing of the past.
A link to 1:35 minutes of Maite Carpio’s Il Misterioso Viaggio di Fellini (2003)
AJ: Have you experienced a project that you consistently revisit but find challenging to complete? If so, how has this personal experience influenced your understanding of self, and how has it contributed to the writing of Dream Projects in Theatre, Novels and Films?
YM: If I really think about it, I myself had a dream project, a play on which I worked for a very long time without being able to be satisfied with it. It is true that this uncompleted project sheds light on several other projects that I have carried out, from an experimental Promenade Theater piece presented at the Palais de Chaillot Theater in 1983 to the Digital Theater project of 2021, Le Grand Tombeau des Beaux-Arts.
But the significance of a dream project comes only if it is an exception. Claudel wrote sixty-eight plays, including the huge Le Soulier de Satin, a performance that takes more than twelve hours. From Luce di Variéta [1950] to Voce della Luna [1990], Fellini created a masterpiece almost every two years. He and Claudel both knew how to complete their projects, and the pace of their production was frenetic.
I don’t have the same creative faculty. The fact that I cannot finish a work is much less significant.
Regarding what has contributed to writing Dream Projects, I would add that the two masterpieces that influenced me the most relate to the struggle with a dream project. The epic novel of Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time is the first. It presents a hero who, throughout the seven volumes of the cycle, tries unsuccessfully to write an immense work. He receives the key to writing the project only in the final pages of Time Regained, the last volume of the work, and it turns out to be precisely the work that we, the readers, have just read.
The second work is Fellini’s 8½ [1963], where Fellini used the same process as Proust. Guido Anselmi, the film’s hero, is a film director who does not know how to realize his work. It is only in the last images of the movie that he finally has the enlightenment that allows him to make this film, which is precisely the one we have just seen.
By the way, the link between Proust and Fellini could very well be attributed to Ennio Flaiano, the screenwriter who collaborated with Fellini. A few years later, Flaiano adapted In Search of Lost Time for another dream project, this time in cooperation with Lucino Visconti. However, Visconti abandoned the project midway through preparations, to the great despair of the producer, Nicole de Rothschild. This ghost film sheds light on the rest of his production: Morte a Venezia [1971], Ludwig [1973], Gruppo di Famiglia in un interno [1974], and L’Innocente [1976].
AJ: How does the idea of death clarify and inspire artists on the brink of it?
YM: Artistic creation cannot be done by someone who is on the brink of Death. Creativity depends on great physical health and strength since, it seems to me, artistic creation is the supreme expression of the joy of living. Prophecy, which for me is a phenomenon very parallel to artistic inspiration, cannot be carried out in a state of sadness. The prophet and the artist must be full of life and joy in order to deliver their message.
That being said, the themes of the three dream projects I focused on relate to death. “The Journey of G. Mastorna” is a journey to the Land of the Dead, described as similar to the Land of the Living and no less absurd. Quite inexplicably, Mastorna, at the end of the film, returns to life and resumes the course of his living existence, that of a cellist. It is not clear how this resurrection happened. Is Fellini’s screenwriter Dino Buzzati suggesting that human existence is a cycle of endless life, death, and return to life? The answer to it is unclear, and this may be the script’s weak point, which Fellini must have probably been sensitive to.
Genet’s dream project was to be called “La Mort (The Death).” Genet’s plan involved creating two distinct works that were intertwined like mirrors reflecting each other, rather than being treated as separate entities: “La Nuit (La Mort I),” a prose piece, and “La Mort II,” a cycle of seven plays, located side by side. This is the way he describes it to his agent Bernard Frechtman:
A series of seven plays form a kind of cycle. A work at once open and closed, in which each play will be complete in itself while at the same time gaining its true value only in relation to the overall group, with characters reappearing from one play to another, responses, and entire fragments recurring wholesale here and there.
The Screens, the only part of the cycle that he completed, ends in the Land of the Dead, accompanied by descriptions of the dead being full of life. Here dead French soldiers and Algerian rebels sit side by side, howling with laughter at the spectacle and madness of the Living. In his intriguing theoretical text “The Strange Word of Urb”… Genet declares that the theater of the future must be built in the center of the cemetery, which must be located in the center of the city. The close contact with the idea of death can help the theatrical phenomenon regain its power. Genet was greatly influenced by Jean Cocteau, an influence he denies but which is very deep. I believe that the universe of death is most poetically shown in the film Orpheus [1950].
As for Claudel, the last play he wrote at the age of eighty-one, “On Répète Tête d’Or,” lies in the shadow of death. The play’s final lines refer to the mourning call of the English army, a piece of music that, according to the play’s main character, Simon Bar Yona, makes people shiver and explains all the world’s absurdity. For Claudel, the bugle is equivalent to the shofar, the trumpet of the resurrection of the Dead. For him, the phenomenon of death is ambivalent. Death is both an end and a sign of a new birth.
AJ: What is next for you?
YM: Among my present research activities, I could mention that the paperback edition of my book Revolution in Paradise: Veiled Jewish Characters in the Cinema of Occupied France have just been published at Liverpool University Press. In the book, I try to show that, contrary to the common opinion of research dealing with the cinema of occupied France, the phenomena of films with a latent political message beyond love stories and adventures are much more extensive than commonly thought. For example, in the period I studied, many Jewish characters were depicted negatively, particularly in the work Les Enfants du Paradis by Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert, which is considered the masterpiece of French cinema. The film was conceived in 1942 at the darkest time of the war, filmed in 1943, and financed by Italian foreign capital. The traitor in the film is called Joshua. He is an old clothes peddler and, as such, he easily evokes the despicable character of the Jew as he appears in the explicit anti-Semitic propaganda in press, radio, and cinema.
For me, this research is just in the beginning phase. The book analyzes only ten films, a small portion of the 220 feature films and 400 short films shot in France from 1940 to 1944. I think it would be important to detect if there are any political latent messages in all these films.
I hope that the publishing of the paperback edition of my book will enable it to reach a wider public.
I would also like to continue my research on creativity. I spent many years analyzing plays and films. It seems that I have managed to identify some general laws, such as the dream project or the dialogue between works of art. In particular, I would like to show the unique status of the artistic work process. This process is often a reflection of previous artistic work (for example Chekhov’s Seagull is an echo of Hamlet), but, at the same time, it has new content and form that may contain insights into future revelations and creations (in Seagull’s play within the play, all the twentieth theater forms are present).
I also have plays that I would like to publish. But who still reads theater?
Dream Projects in Theatre, Novels and Films: The Works of Paul Claudel, Jean Genet, and Federico Fellini by Yehuda Moraly is published by Liverpool University Press and available to purchase here.
Author Biography
Alexis Johnson is a recent Film and International Studies graduate from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She was fascinated by the intersection between cinema and cultural identity throughout her academic journey. However, she also possesses a passion for exploring film movements often overlooked in academia. Alexis hopes to delve further into these interests by one day acquiring a master’s degree.
