BFI Top 50: 8 ½, Released in 1963, Directed by Frederico Fellini

 What I know going in

That the film is about a disillusioned director who futzes about as he tries to gather up the enthusiasm to complete his next film. Along the way, he has encounters with the various women in his life.

 

Immediate reaction

There was a lot preventing me from fully engaging with 8 ½ on my first viewing. First and foremost is the fact that the film, like Tarkovsky’s The Mirror, shifts very easily, and with little warning, between a present reality, fantasies, and dreamy half-memories. While that makes for an interesting film, it simultaneously made the film a bit hard for me to connect to. I had trouble sussing out what was happening at various points in the film. For example, I’m not sure what happened to Guido at the end. Did he commit suicide? Did he just stop production of the film? Did he reconcile with his wife? The various sequences at the end could be dreams, memory, reality, or some mixture of the three. On paper, that sounds fantastic, and I have praised other films for walking the line between those three realms, but I’m not entirely sure if my confusion was intentional on the part of the film or my own fault. Secondly, the film is steeped in Catholic imagery, many parts of the film feature images and iconography of religious figures and there are Guido interacts with members of the church at several points in the film. These images and relations did not mean much to me because I have never been a particularly religious person. That being said, I don’t think their meaning is that complicated and would be probably be easily decipherable by even a casual practitioner of Catholicism. I expect I will gain a greater understanding of the religious aspect of the film as I go through the extras on the disc and read more about it. I am also interested in learning exactly how autobiographical the film is. I know very little about Fellini’s life and the other film of his I’ve seen is La Dolce Vita. That being said, there are clearly some Meta elements in the film. The consultant character’s comments about Guido’s film are exact criticisms of 8 ½ and I wouldn’t be surprised to find some early, negative reviews saying pretty much the same thing. I hesitate to go as far as saying Guido is Fellini and the various women he meets all have real-life counterparts. One, I find that type of analysis too presumptive, and, two, I don’t know enough about Fellini’s life to make such a claim.

 

Overall, though, I enjoyed 8 ½. Guido provided a good center for the film that it made it simpler to follow during the more abstract segments, and, unlike in The Mirror, I was able to just soak in the film’s imagery. A good portion of 8 ½ consist of fantasies, and dream-like memories, all of which are quite striking. However, even the sequences taking place in the real world have a certain “off” quality to them. For example, in the second half of the film, after Guido’s wife shows up, he, his wife, and his assistant are all sitting in an outdoor café. His wife tries to have a serious conversation about the status of their relationship. Guido tries shrug off her complaints, at which point his mistress arrives and sits down at another table. That description makes the scene sound mundane, but the space it takes place is just so odd. It’s basically rows and rows of blindingly white chairs and tables, with the ground and sky having a similar color. The only thing breaking the scene up is the clothing of the characters, which tend to be pure black or white. There is also this casual chaos to the scenes involving multiple characters. At certain points, it’s amazing that Fellini was able to orchestrate the camera, the sets, and the movements of a bunch of people to be so in sync with each other. During an early scene set at an outdoor soiree, everyone shuffles, humorously, along with some intense classical music, their outfits perfectly contrasting, or perfectly blending them into, their backgrounds. And during the bathhouse, the camera seems to impossibly float through huge lines of people, clouds of steam, and even into a secret room containing an important Catholic priest. It’ little touches like that that make 8 ½ such an engaging experience even when it’s veering off into multiple tangents.

 

Further thoughts

I learned two important facts about Fellini and 8 ½ during my extracurricular reading. The first is that Fellini was a cartoonist, and the second is that he get slammed by, a minority of, critics for betraying his neorealist roots. The cartoon thing comes into play mainly during the dream sequences. The fantasies are so visually expressive that you could almost imagine them being throwaway comic strips. Although, even the real-life segments involve a certain amount of hilarious “stretching” as one of the people in the DVD commentary puts it. Fellini’s background in comics also explains the little onomatopoeia-like phrases some of the characters say. Carla, Guido’s mistress, catchphrase is “sgulp!” and, at one point, Guido refers to himself as “snaporazi.” These were apparently actual phrases Fellini would use in conversation, something that leeched in from the “POW!” and “BAM!” bubbles so common in comics. I initially had no idea what these phrases were on my first watch, but, upon reflection, they just further add to the fantastical tone of the film.

 

Now, on to the issue of neo-realism.After WWII there seems to have been this worldwide decree that movies should be more realistic, which can be seen in the fact that the governments of a large number of countries adopted social realism as the only sanctioned mode for filmmaking. Now, by the 80’s, I’d say that tendency had been thoroughly denounced. However, the desire for realism seems to have made an odd comeback recently, as can be seen in the “gritty reboot” phenomenon and the post The Dark Knight-aesthetic every blockbuster seemingly wants to emulate, which often results in brain-frying clash between a film’s aesthetics and its subject. Personally, I don’t care if a film is realistic. What I want more than anything else is for the world a film builds up to be convincing. If a film wants to be fantastical, that’s totally okay, as long as it has a thought-out vision.

 

With my own thoughts regarding realism out of the way, lets dissect 8 ½ ‘srelation to one of the biggest movements in film history. By the time Fellini had made his crazy vision of director’s block, he had pretty much abandoned neo-realism altogether. His previous film, La Dolce Vita, focused almost exclusively on the lives of the upper class and whose cast was populated almost entirely with internationally-famous actors. In addition, Italian cinema in general was slowly drifting away from type of cinema that had made it so famous after WWII. Rossellini had already moved on to a more internal style of filmmaking with Journey to Italy and newcomer Antonioni alienating, environment-focused films had already begun making waves. However, none of those films are purely fantasy-driven the way 8 ½ is and if you squint a little they could be called realistic in a very loose sense. I’m sure there were films before 8 ½ that attempted to portray a highly subjective view of the world, but never to the same, committed, highly-personal extent of 8 ½. Fellini’s film really does feel new, even today, when you can see its fingerprints on everything ranging from Taxi Driver to Holy Motors. It’s like Fellini’s head, pressurized from having to follow the strict guidelines of neo-realism, finally split and his crazy visions got splashed all over celluloid for the entire world to see.

 

Why is the film on this list?

Fellini’s subjective masterpiece is not only a beautifully-shot, head-spinning film about the making of itself, but also the final shot that freed film from any concerns of realism or objectivity.