Featurette of the Week: Toby Dammit

(cribbed from wikipedia)
Histoires extraordinaires (1968) dubbed Spirits of the Dead for English, is a horror anthology film featuring three stories by Edgar Allan Poe directed by European directors Roger Vadim, Louis Malle and Federico Fellini. The film received a mixed critical reception, with the Fellini segment widely regarded as the best of the three.

Toby Dammit, which shares so little with its source in Poe that it could almost be considered an original piece, is notable for its visual and thematic similarities to three earlier Fellini masterworks. The disintegrating protagonist and the hellish celebrity demimonde he inhabits are reminiscent of both La Dolce Vita and 8½, while the interweaving of dreams and hallucinations into the plotline and the use of highly artificial art direction to reflect inner states resemble similar techniques used in 8½ and Juliet of the Spirits.

In 2008, Toby Dammit was separately restored under the personal supervision of its renowned cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno (who, after this short, went on to collaborate with Fellini in seven of his 11 remaining films). A new 35mm print was screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it was widely acclaimed by the press as a lost Fellini masterpiece.



part two
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part five