FELLINIANA Seattle's International Celebration of Fellini's Cultural Legacy

The University of Washington's Henry Art Gallery will present "The Gladiator Nun: Fellini's Women," focusing on Fellini's representations of women, women's relationships with men and the erotic element of his films as a liberating, anti-fascist alternative. This exhibition, co-curated by Assistant Curator Pamela Meredith and Associate Curator Robin Held, with the assistance of distinguished art historian Ricardo de Mambro Santos from the University of Rome, is planned as a multi-media installation, including a video projection of some of the most memorable scenes from Fellini's films. The exhibition will represent Fellini's reflections about women and his meditation about what men can or cannot talk about or comprehend about women. It will thus offer an insight into what Fellini might have meant when he defined the woman as "The Gladiator Nun," a hybrid oxymoron that tests the very limits of figurative structures of representation.

The drawings, now belonging to the Fondazione Federico Fellini at Rimini, are for the most part still unpublished and just a few of them have been exhibited before. They offer an incomparable collection able, on the one hand, to document Fellini's special graphic style, and on the other hand, to emphasize the centrality of bodies of men and women in his figurative creations, with their unexpected relationships and metamorphosis. The exhibit will be divided into two complementary parts: the first, composed only by Fellini's drawings; the second, organized around continuous projections of some of the most striking sequences taken from Fellini's films, directly connected to the main theme of the exhibit: Fellini's Women.

With the masterpiece of La Dolce Vita already among his works, in 1963 Federico Fellini completed one of his most important and appreciated films: 8½. Labyrinthian in its narrative composition and unforgettable in the depiction of its main characters, 8½ presents Fellini's reflections on his own art through his alter ego, Guido Anselmi, a director in the middle of a creative crisis, obsessed by his dreams, nostalgic remembrances and desires.

During the filming of 8½, a famous Italian photographer-Tazio Secchiaroli, best known as "Paparazzo"-was present on the set and took a series of wonderful photographs, now preserved in the Secchiaroli Archive at Rome and curated by his son David. On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of this magnificent film, Felliniana has assembled and exhibition of 50 of these photographs, most of them never exhibited or published before. They offer the viewer an intimate look at the process of creating a film whose very subject is the creation of a film: a labyrinth within a labyrinth, or, in Fellini's own words, "a beautiful confusion."