Professor discusses Italian director

Several hundred people gathered in the Whittenberger Auditorium Wednesday to hear Peter Bondanella give this year's Distinguished Faculty Research Lecture about his studies and critiques the work of acclaimed Italian director Federico Fellini. Bondanella is a distinguished professor of comparative literature and Italian at IU. \nBondanella has drastically changed scholarship on Italian cinema, according to a press release announcing the lecture. \n"His publications on Fellini alone represent a most important body of criticism dedicated to this pivotal figure," the release said.\nFellini has never been well-known outside of his native country, Bondanella said, yet the dream-like worlds he put on film have had a strong influence on highly regarded filmmakers such as Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen and Terry Gilliam.\n"The reproduction of wonder is something Fellini always aims for," Bondanella said. "He tries to make you see something as if you never had."\nFellini, who began his career as a cartoonist and columnist for Italian magazines, was different from many other filmmakers of the 1960s and '70s in that he took much of his inspiration from popular culture, paintings and his own dreams.\n"A journalist friend once asked him what his 50 favorite films were," Bondanella said. "He laughed and said he had never seen so many films in his whole life."\nIn his opening remarks, IU Interim Provost Michael McRobbie said he wished the study of directors such as Fellini, as well as advances in technology, would spark a renaissance in art house film in Bloomington.\n"It is my hope to one day see Bloomington art house cinema revived with a digital twist," McRobbie said. "Art houses are to cinema what art museums are to sculpture."\nMuch of Bondanella's presentation featured the magic marker drawings Fellini often made in his dream book and influenced some of his most memorable scenes.\nMany originals of these drawings, similar in style to the early 20th-century comic strip "Little Nemo in Slumberland" can be seen at the Lilly Library on campus.\nBondanella showed how these drawings took on a more erotic twist near the end of Fellini's life.\nShortly before his death in 1993, Fellini presented his mistress with about a dozen magic marker sketches of her posing in the nude with several comically large penises.\n"That certainly tells us what he was thinking about before he died," Bondanella joked.\nPer tradition, McRobbie revealed that next year's Distinguished Faculty Research Lecture will be given by psychology professor Meredith West.