Federico Fellini, Projections, and City of Women

"Man has always been unsure of women. A woman for a man is the part that he doesn’t know about himself, so he’s always afraid of her. He feels weak and vulnerable with her, because she may cause him to lose his identity. Just by projecting the part of himself that he doesn’t know on a woman, he loses a lot of himself. (...)



And then, for centuries, man took advantage of women to avenge himself for what he had suffered for thousands of years. Now women want to be considered as persons, not as mere projections, and their attempt to escape the image to which man has confined them frightens man. But finally he understands that he won’t be free until women are free as well. I tried to show all that in City of Women."
Federico Fellini, 1986

- - - - - -
photograph of Federico Fellini, Marcello Mastroianni and Jean Shrimpton taken for Vogue by David Bailey in 1963 via