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Chapter 11 documents Bradbury’s 1978 trip to Europe and his participation in the 150th birthday anniversary celebrations for Jules Verne. He was an honored guest in Paris and continued with his wife to visit Italian film director Federico Fellini at his studio in Rome. The chapter also surveys the back story to Bradbury’s visit with Fellini, and Fellini’s sense that they were spiritual twins, sharing a love of fantasy and a distain of authoritarianism. The success of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the high regard he found for science fiction and fantasy films in Europe, led Bradbury to change film agents back in Los Angeles.

The summer of 1990 found Bradbury slowly revisiting his screenplay for a new Fahrenheit 451 adaptation, and the successful run of a new musical production of The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit created by the popular composer and singer Jose Feliciano. Chapter 28 continues with Bradbury’s collection of essays on various creative topics collected as Yestermorrow, where he explored the nature of metaphor and the value of child-like reverie to his creative process. The chapter describes Bradbury’s role as a judge in the controversial Turner Tomorrow Award in June 1991, where he took issue with the views of fellow judges William Styron and Peter Matthiessen and earned the gratitude of prize founder Ted Turner. A final visit with Federico Fellini in Rome concludes the chapter.

Chapter 32 begins with Bradbury’s reaction to news of Federico Fellini’s death on Halloween, 1993, and explores Bradbury’s sense of Halloween as a time of “fervor and excitement,” but not a time of happiness. Bradbury’s reflections on the later Fellini films gives way to the more positive process of bringing The Halloween Tree back to its original concept as an animated film with Hanna-Barbera and the Turner Broadcasting System. The chapter concludes with Bradbury’s work on two unrealized science fiction film projects, a proposed remake of the 1950s classic Forbidden Planet and short-lived plans for a sequel to The Day the Earth Stood Still. The chapter concludes with an examination of “Beyond Giverny,” Bradbury’s speculative American Way essay on life in the cosmos.

By 1962, modern cinema became a widely accepted movement throughout Europe. This was the period in which a cool aesthetic self-reflection of filmmaking as the trendiest intellectual and artistic occupation appeared, and when modernism's self-reflexivity became increasingly important. And this was the period also when the first important achievements of modern Eastern European cinema appeared. By 1963, modernism conquered almost all segments of European art cinema. It was not until Tony Richardson's third film, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, made in 1962, that conscious recognition of the modernist turn by a British film registers. Modernism in Richardson's film mostly amounts to the tribute it pays to the French new wave, and most specifically, to François Truffaut's The 400 Blows. Another important film that had a remarkable influence on the development of modern cinema was Federico Fellini's 8 1/2. This chapter, which discusses established modernism in European modern cinema from 1962 to 1966, examines grotesque realism in films from Czechoslovakia and considers ornamental style in the works of Miklós Jancsó.

It is not easy to make a distinction in the 1970s between films belonging to political modernism's mythical trend and those already transcending the modernist paradigm. It is easier to see the difference between the two categories through films that are distant enough in time from one another, but political modernism in the mid-1970s was just the transitional period where many elements of the postmodern were already present. This is true especially in some films of new cinema in Germany, including Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Angst Eats the Soul and Werner Herzog's Heart of Glass. Two basic principles of modernism are homogeneity of style and a sense of “objective reality,” both of which are closely related with the central role attributed to the “auteur.” This chapter examines the disappearance of the auteur in European modern cinema, including Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev and films made by Jean-Luc Godard and Federico Fellini. It also discusses Tarkovsky's use of serial composition in Andrei Rublev and the disappearance of nothingness in films such as Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract (1982).

The book treats Stardust Memories as a sort of Rosetta stone of Allen’s filmography, because this autobiographical text incorporates so many thematic elements recurring in his oeuvre. Protagonist Sandy Bates allows Allen to dramatize his ambivalence about producing comic films when his own emotional weather tends toward drama, his conviction that art accomplishes nothing, and his ambiguous feelings toward his own celebrity. These issues get complicated in Stardust Memories as the recurrent shifts from Sandy Bates’s life to his films begin blurring, landing the viewer in the closing scene perplexed about whether s/he is watching the actresses in Bates’s film or in Allen’s discussing Bates’s/Allen’s kissing techniques and the effectiveness of his movie. Through this entangling of art and life, the influence of 8½ is pervasive in Stardust Memories, but the movie is very much Allen’s own in its projection of his very personal ambivalences about the film art he obsessively produces. In this film, “the movie medium itself is implicated in the confusions that make answering ultimate existential questions so impossible.”

It examines the rhetoric of male crisis in a group of Italian films that were made in response to the recent advancement of feminism in Italian society, including The Last Woman (1976), Bye Bye Monkey (1978) and City of Women (1980). The chapter focuses in particular on the apocalyptic imagery of these films. It examines the way this apocalyptic imagery is constructed, the desires and aspirations that it conceals, and the expression of specific male anxieties in accommodating social change.

It examines a trend of popular genre films directly influenced by the sexual politics of the 1970s, including The Seduction of Mimì (1972), La patata bollente (1979) and A Special Day. In examining how these films were trying to dismantle a set of normative assumptions about masculinity, the chapter shows how these films manage to negotiate their popular forms of address with their aspiration to political commitment and social protest. The chapter demonstrates the extent to which masculinity becomes a crucial concern for resolving this negotiation.

This chapter analyzes the film, Fellini Satyricon, arguing that we can learn much from the film if we see it as a consubstantial nexus of translation, refragmentation, oneiric imagining, and pure creative fantasy. Fellini Satyricon has considerable value as a kind of allegory of reception — beyond the simple fact that it is itself an instance of reception, one that captures quite well something of the late 1960s’ cultural upheavals. It represents a clear case of aggressive fantasy freed up by engaging the fragments of the ancient past in their opacity and irreparable loss as much as in their vital retention.

A look at the historical and theoretical underpinnings of art cinema, examining how viewers are conditioned to recognize an author’s presence in fictional cinematic narrative. Discussion of autobiographical impulses in fictional films by the directors of this study, introduction of the term “self-projection.” Brief discussion of cinematic self-projection and gender.

Analysis of the appearance of cinematic authors within their own fictional narratives and how this relates to self-projection. Theories of embodied spectatorship related to a discussion of embodied authorship. Particular focus on Woody Allen and self-caricature, François Truffaut’s roles, Ingmar Bergman’s voice, Pedro Almodóvar’s interest in gendered embodiment.

Examination of directorial self-representation in two related genres: documentaries on the making of films and narrative films about directing, in which the director plays a fictional film director. Discussion of how these practices figure into the larger notion of self-projection, with the director performing self-consciously as author or artist.

The director’s relationship to his actors, and how that collaboration works within the framework of self-projection. Attention is paid to personal relationships between actors and directors (familial, sexual, hostile), with a special focus on the striking frequency with which art cinema authors employ their mothers as actors in their films. This section works toward a new theory of film acting.

Here the appearance of various attributes of the cinematic apparatus (projector, screen, photographic film frames) are linked to various parts of the filmmaker’s body and sensory apparatus, making the point, as early filmmakers do, that cinema creates a new kind of body (partly organic, partly technological) and thus a new way to conceive selfhood.

A brief conclusion that goes back over the major points of the study’s discussions and thinks about the implications of digital filmmaking. In the end, the imagined relationship between the spectator and the director is brought to the fore as the most significant moment in self-projection.

Two consecutive projects confirmed Tommy Tune’s vision and versatility. In 1981, Tune directed the American premiere of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9, his first non-musical. This “comedy of multiple orgasms,” as it was billed, featured a first act set in colonial Africa in 1880 and a second act in contemporary London a century later. Tune staged the first act with sketch-comedy speed and vaudeville humor, as the characters played out their sexual frustrations and transgressed boundaries of race and class. Once again, he used performance tropes of earlier eras to communicate a contemporary viewpoint. His direction of the second act was more somber and thoughtful as the characters, liberated from patriarchal oppression and allowed to express their sexuality freely, search for meaningful connections. While Cloud 9 was enjoying a long and successful run off-Broadway, Tune embarked on Nine, based on Federico Fellini’s film 8½, about a celebrated but creatively stalled Italian filmmaker. Tune insisted that the show be peopled by an all-female cast surrounding the filmmaker. On a stunning white-tiled spa setting made up of stationary boxes, the women—each dressed in black—were summoned from his mind and memories to comment upon and take part in the action. With Nine, Tune established a pattern of staging an entire show around a stationary obstacle (in this case, the boxes)––an obstacle he consistently overcame through imagination and daring. Nine was a stunning directorial achievement that solidified Tune’s stature as a creative mastermind of the Broadway musical.

From mainstream Hollywood studios to the pornographic outputs of backyard production houses, cinema has continually been tantalized by the homoerotic possibilities of ancient Rome. From some of the earliest productions, we can see cinema providing much for the enjoyment of queer viewers, as male bodies are positioned and displayed for voyeuristic pleasure; this chapter interrogates the queer viewing experience. Over time, a cinematic narrative about Roman homosexuality has developed, in films such as Ben-Hur, Spartacus, Fellini Satyricon, and Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane, as well as in pornographic films. It is one in which hierarchically structured relationships centred on scenarios of domination and submission predominate. The eroticization of slavery represents one of cinema’s most distinctive contributions to the representation of Roman homosexuality and it is a feature that only a few film-makers have been prepared to subvert.