Billy's Lines Of Gibberish

I thought I had something so simple to say. Something useful to everybody. A film that could help bury forever all those dead things we carry within ourselves. Instead, I'm the one without the courage to bury anything at all. When did I go wrong? I really have nothing to say, but I want to say it all the same. Guido, in 8½ by F. Fellini)

The movie depicts the crisis of a creative mind, the despondency of an artist who doesn't succeed in creating any more.

[BbN #8.5]

Guido, played by Marcello Mastroianni — and a transparent alter ego of Fellini himself — has lost inspiration. He is overwhelmed by an uncontrolled flood of dreams, fantasies, and hallucinations.
From this movie on, Federico Fellini took up a style of Realistic Fantasy, where extravagance is more real than reality, filled up with humanity, fantasizing and imagination.

Codex Seraphinianus (Click to enlarge)

The book opposite is called Codex Seraphinianus, after Luigi Serafini, an Italian architect and graphic designer, who wrote and illuminated it in the 1970s. It is an encyclopedia guide that depicts and explains a totally fantastic world, where lovers transform into crocodiles and rainbows can be bow tied.
The Codex is well structured, as any encyclopedia would be. It is divided into eleven chapters with many brightly coloured illustrations. The first chapter deals with the flora of the alien world, the second one with its fauna, and so on.
As a whole, it is a coherent, constantly creative work. Writing is present throughout the book, in the paragraphs, tables of contents, captions of pictures. Only... you cannot read one word, because Serafini used a fluid cursive writing he has invented and nobody has been able to decipher.
We don't know in fact if the pretty curly squiggle we see all over the book is actually a writing, or... just squiggle. We only know that the number system in which page numbers are written does have a meaning: it has been cracked as being  base-21.
Every chapter of the Codex Seraphinianus is amazing but I love the eighth one especially. It depicts the history of the alien writing system used in the book, with the help of a Rosetta Stone... that is of little help because the languages displayed on the stone are not languages that we know, but a mysterious glyph language... and the 'usual' Codex language!
While I was skimming through the plates the other day, I felt as if I was going through a museum dedicated to some unknown civilisation.
Also, I was like a kid who cannot read yet: I had to rely on the pictures to understand the rules of such a foreign world and imagine what the text might tell. It made me think that babies may well feel about the same when they discover the incomprehensible world they have been suddenly thrown into.

Destino — White telephone and ruins (1946, Oil on plywood, 60.6× 47.9 cm)

Although it is hard to imagine two more widely separated artists, Salvador Dalí and Walt Disney admired one another.

Dalí made no secret of his interest in Disney: as soon as in 1937 he wrote to his friend, the French Surrealist André Breton: I have come to Hollywood and am in touch with the three great American surrealists — the Marx Brothers, Cecil B. DeMille and Walt Disney.

On his side, Disney loved to have contemporary artists involved in his films, although relationship with them was sometimes stormy.

More than sixty years ago then, the idea was born of a short film collaboration between Salvador Dalí and Walt Disney. Disney probably made the suggestion to Dalí when the latter was in Hollywood in 1945, working on Alfred Hitchcock's film Spellbound. Dalí worked on the storyboard in the Disney Studios from February to April 1946. The film was originally planned to combine real footage and animation and tell the story of the ill-starred love of a ballerina and a baseball player. It was called Destino, after a ballad by the Mexican Armando Domínguez which was to accompany it. However, Disney Studios could not complete the film for financial reasons... at least during the lifetime of the two men.

More than a hundred paintings and drawings had survived though. This material enabled the Disney Studios, in 2003, to make a six minute film directed by Walt's nephew Roy Disney and the French artist Dominique Monfery. I watched it several months ago — several times in a row — in the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais in Paris, at an exhibition entitled Il était une fois Walt Disney (Once upon the time, Walt Disney), that surprisingly connected Disney's original drawings to occidental artworks that inspired them, from Gothic Middle-Age to Surrealism. The whole film is not online, but here is an excerpt found on YouTube:

The six-minute short movie is a digest of Dali's imagery, without much of a spot to speak of, but deserts, telephones and ruins, melting clocks and ants, all morphing from one to the other. It is like a last message from Dalí, long after he passed through the looking glass himself.