The Great "8 1/2": The Problem of Praising Fellini
13 October 2005
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You don't need me to tell you that Federico Fellini’s "8 ½" is a great film; one of the best films ever made. The film speaks – shouts, hollers, yawps – for itself, in several discourses, on several levels.
In terms of plot, Fellini’s 1963 masterwork is often labeled the best movie about making a movie; this is an over-simplification. "8 ½" is instead about consumption, assimilation, memory, creativity – both formative creativity and the ever more present and brutal creative stagnation – and then cinema within cinema. The film is more about the destruction of a movie than a movie’s formation. Marcello Mastroianni plays feeble but famous film director Guido Anselmi, recovering from weariness at a medical spring while preparing his next project and battling an endless procession of producers, designers, writers, and women. Unable to make any progress on the film, Guido retreats into his memory and imagination as a safeguard against the impulses demanding he produce. Finally – inevitably and excruciatingly – he cancels the project. In his imagination, he shoots himself. Destruction. Death. Curtain.
But the film’s last scene is not this destruction of the creative dream but rather a cinematic curtain call: the entire cast, directed by Guido, assembles and dances in a circle to the music of a circus band led by a small boy. Guido joins the cast – a player in his own play – and the final resonant image is not from Guido the director, where the film’s point of view had been weighted to this point, but rather from the flute-playing boy, marching off screen right. The film ends with a vision of cinema as child’s play.
Thus, while "8 ½" is about the failure to make a movie, it is equally about the vitality and imperturbability of creation, even at an artist’s lowest point. Though Guido cannot make any gains in his film, his imagination in rife with creative formulations. The film takes us back to Guido as a boy teasing the voluptuous dancing devil Saraghina. Later, in Guido’s mind, we see his ideal world: a harem with all the women he has loved in place, loyal, and ordered.
Moreover, within the film itself, Fellini plays with space, image, and sound to make "8 1/2"s environment seem unreal and carnivalesque; like cinema itself, a fantasy. The audience actually enters the film mid-dream: Guido is stuck in a traffic, his car filling with smoke, before he escapes by floating over the on looking motorists (he ultimately crashes into the sea). Visions like these are childish to Guido – recuperative and certainly sheltering. The music of his world is overly dramatic. The comedy subtle but certainly there. The result? As in all of Fellini’s films, "8 ½" is viewed through a child’s eyes: with a ceaseless awe for the world it creates, with allusions to magic tricks, with an ability to dance and float – for a time, at least – above the crowd. Hope, even in destruction.
Yet, these discussions of plot do not do the film justice. "8 ½" can be discussed in far more insightful terms.
On a biographical level, for example, "8 ½"s protagonist Guido is a thinly-veiled self-portrait. Fellini – having uncharacteristically completed "La Dolce Vida" (1960) with no idea what film to make next – was struck by a director’s block that was only broken when it became the focus of his now most renowned film. Its title is derived from Fellini's life's work: he had directed eight films and one film segment before his 1963 opus. The Italian stalwart was also infamously obsessed with women. Some suggest this is a consistent theme among the Italian filmmakers (and artists?), but "8 ½" is unique because of its placement of Guido in several physical relationships at once (with several unspeakably attractive women) leading to the infamous harem dream-sequence; Guido, as lion-tamer, cracks a whip to restore order amongst his wife, mistresses, and childhood lusts. The scene lays bare and obvious the shortcomings of Fellini himself. What otherwise plays with the grotesque becomes Fellini’s most honest moment.
Honesty begets intellectuality when the film is taken for any of its commentaries on art: cinema’s consumption of everything in an artist’s life – from his sanity to his memory to his ability to walk in a straight line down a hallway – or all the world as a cinema (something to voyeuristically watch), a Shakespearean theme paralleled in the film when the players watch the play (in this case, the screen tests).
And let us not ignore the questions the film’s characters raise about Italy as a dependently Catholic state. The film is riddled with nuns and priests and Guido, both in the present and in his memory, quickly seeks the guidance of the clergy along the way.
This discourse has only hinted at issues of composition – lighting, framing, sound; all immaculate – but, to be more brief than I have been, "8 ½" simply works, on every scale. It is a movie that gets better with age, that never falters, that is poetic and real and invasive and visionary. It stays. It produces vibrations.
Thus, you don’t need me to tell you that "8 ½" is one of the best films ever made. Unless, of course, you do.
The general problem, it seems, is that for those people not seriously studying film, "8 ½" remains largely unknown. One reason: "8 ½" and films like it are an acquired taste (but how are you going to acquire it if you do not know about it?). Also, mainstream America has that certain, broadly defined phenomenon that suggests that foreign films, especially foreign films from years gone by, might as well have never existed.
But even if that were not the case, a public ignorance toward films like "8 ½" is, in the end, unsurprising, given that even among film scholars, "8 ½" does not garner much respect. Looking at the major film organizations’ and magazines’ now requisite "Top 10 Films" lists (if not "Top 100"), the only one to include "8 ½" in any significant placement was the British trade magazine Sight and Sound: number nine in the critics’ list, number three in the list voted on by directors – behind "Citizen Kane" and Godfathers "I" and "II." That the directors voted "8 ½" so high should not go unnoticed.
No doubt directors love "8 ½": Fellini’s film is often called the most accurate portrayal of the director’s creative process. It is also one of the most often quoted films in cinema and even instigated a whole movie with its harem scene, Peter Greenaway’s "8 ½ Women." But when it comes down to claims of praise, if the directors are the only ones raising a voice, the support for the movie pangs of egotism: "look at how hard our job is, look at how much we achieve, look at how well Fellini captured our modes of thought." It would be one thing if the film was honestly no good, or even mediocre: it really would be egotism. But "8 ½" deserves all the praise it gets, so that egotism is just a color that can needs to be removed.
"8 ½" is a brilliant film: in look, in sound, in text, in form. I should not have to tell you that. You should already know for yourself. But, in lieu of directors espousing their own game, no one is there to say "hey, go netflix this one."
Well, I am here now: go see the world through a child’s eyes (if you do not like it the first time, you will like it the second).
Destruction. Death. Hope. Titles. Fine.
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Photo Caption: The Director and his Women. Film director Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) avoids the gaze of his wife, Luisa (Anouk Aimee) in Federico Fellini's "8 ½." Film frame.