8 1/2

A picture that goes beyond what men think about - because no man ever thought about it in quite this way!

Director: Federico Fellini
Writer: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano (story); Ennio Flaiano, Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli, Brunello Rondi (screenplay)
Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimee, Sandra Milo, Rossella Falk, Barbara Steele

IMDB

It’s dark and claustrophobic. The silence reeks of inexplicable discomfort below the underpass. An array of vehicles stranded languidly, with no intent of awaiting the road to be cleared. Passengers are poker faced with lustful eyes and sadistic glee of being audience to a man’s end. The man encircled by a sea of vehicles, passengers with strange expressions, wipes the steam off his car’s windshield. The steam creeps around the bourgeois glass shields, slowly filling up the entire car. He struggles to escape but is imprisoned. Sardonically, the images gently move to the passengers showing no apathy to the man’s asphyxiation, devouring every slam of the wrist on those steamy windshields, as though it is some kind of fetish. He suddenly levitates free from the car, and glides across the bevy of vehicles. He escapes in to the air out from the underpass into light, brushing past the clouds and experiences momentary bliss of weightlessness watching a huge unconstructed edifice. A caped man on a horse stops across the beach to announce “Counselor, I’ve got him”. The tormentors hold the reins of the rope that is tied across the ankles of the flying man, as though holding back a kite from touching the sky. He snaps the rope and has a free fall from the sky and plummets into the lashing sea. In a flash we see his hand raised for help, snapping out of his nightmare in to the realm of reality. The opening scene of Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ is a grandiose depiction of the Jungian integration of unconscious with the waking consciousness. It marks the subtext of the film from here on, the decent of man in to hopelessness, fighting from his bourgeois life of being a stagnated director and finding solace in his dreams.

8 ½ is a film about film-making stricken by artistic crisis of Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni), who is about to make his next big film. Its title refers to the fact that, up to then, Fellini had made seven features and two episodes in composite films that added up to about a half. 8 ½ is clearly about Fellini and is autobiographical in Nature. Fellini was born in a middle class family in an Italian town called Rimini. He had a conventional catholic upbringing and later moved to Rome. The film which is being made is also partly about the Catholicism in post war Italy. Guido is struggling to complete the film for which he has lost all inspiration and motivation. The entire film looks like a subject intoxicated on a psychoanalysis couch, answering questions about his life to a psychic shrink. Reality is interspersed with dreams about his past; his wine bathed pristine childhood, his sexual awakening by a prostitute called Saraghina, his inabilities in school, his fascination with women, the longing for family. All form archetypal constructs of his dream space, the “collective unconscious” as how Jung puts it. He is haunted by his past and is suffering from psychological repression. In the midst of all this he has to finish the film which he envisages to be a portal, “ a simple film that would bury everything that is inside of us… no lies whatsoever” but strangely, he loses the intellectual inspiration for the film. The producer of the film has also invested on a giant edifice constructed to be a launching pad for a spaceship that would save humanity. He announces a press conference to make Guido serious about completion of the film as he watches him gradually disowning it. At the gathering, Guido is swarmed by predatory journalists asking him questions about the film, his life, his beliefs and his inadequacies. Unable to bear this torture he hides under the table and shoots himself.

The Popular Double Mirror construct: The double mirror sounds like a cinematographic constructbut it is actually about an art form in an art form. Like a photograph of a girl holding a photograph. 8 ½ is not just a film about filmmaking but it is also a film about a film that reflects upon cinema. Guido is almost the alter ego of Federico Fellini. Fellini recalls his travails during the film.

The glasses were emptied, everybody applauded, and I felt overwhelmed by shame. I felt myself the least of men, the captain who abandons his crew. . . . I told myself I was in a no exit situation. I was a director who wanted to make a film he no longer remembers. And lo and behold, at that very moment everything fell into place. I got straight to the heart of the film. I would narrate everything that had been happening to me. I would make a film telling the story of a director who no longer knows what film he wanted to make

Fellini used Guido to liberate himself from his cinematic contraptions by putting up his own life on celluloid. It was in a way what was happening on screen was in fact his own redemption from his absurdity. There are particular sequences which are dramatized but most of them were part of Fellini’s childhood. These sequences are not shown as they would have occurred, but more in light of Fellini’s cinematic expression of his childhood. The Saraghina sequence is exemplary in making us understand this. In his childhood, Guido ran around the streets wearing black cape along with his school friends. The kids once go to the beach to watch Saraghina, the prostitute perform a rumba for them. She looks evil with dark circled eyes, buxom, bare footed and her dress torn form sides. These smaller details of Saraghina are captured with extreme close-ups. The church priests catch him on the beach, shown in a comic chaplinesque fashion. Guido is punished in school for this “heinous” act. He seeks the answers for his deeds from god. A subtle depiction of irony: Guido bows down to mother Mary just after the church dignitary told him that Saraghina is the devil and the subsequent scene we see a shot of Mother Mary slowly fading, almost juxtaposing in to Saraghina’s desolate home. The point is that even his childhood dream sequences are glorified and self referencing with cinematic emphasis , a double mirror of sorts

The Carl Jung Construct of Guido’s dream world: Carl Jung who was Freud’s student disagreed with the stereotyping of the unconscious. He maintained that the unconscious, which is the unperceivable contour of humans, is not merely a reference point for various projections of dreams. He argued that the unconscious is in fact a sum of the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. Fellini was very much inspired by Jung’s philosophy on dreams. His childhood memories and his association with women are all part of his personal unconscious, now resurfacing through his personal crisis. The glamorized childhood, the harem that has him coexisting with his wife and all his love interests is a depiction of that collective unconscious constructed through the medium of cinema. One cannot be looked at as a disjoint entity from the other; both “compliment” each other’s existence.



The spacio-temporal alchemy: 8 ½ was a far cry from the narration of sequences in contiguous form. Some critics pointed out that the spacio-temporal space in 8 ½ was difficult to discern, whether it is a dream sequence or if it is indeed reality that was shown. However, it is far from it. Deft cinematography by Gianni Di Venanzo and the director’s precision makes it easy to differentiate. The dream state is faded into the reality with masterful wizardry. For instance, the initial dream sequence of Guido falling down the sky is beautifully faded into his hand raised as a call for reality. Fellini gives considerable attention not to give visual friction of his mis-en-scene. Guido is sleeping beside his mistress in the room. We see Guido’s mother waving at the solid wall of the room. She appears out of nowhere but the viewer is aware of the real space and also the dream space at this point. Slowly the wall turns translucent and then finally turns into glass. As she moves away the glass wall, the scene is different and shifts to an abandoned area. We are gradually taken from the dream space to the real.

Another form of editing used is the use of visual irony. The dream sequence at the abandoned area where he meets his wife along with his parents ends with a long shot of vast open area in white color and his wife Luisa is standing in the centre. Immediately the scene is cut to Guido walking along a closed corridor with no doors open and the predominant dark color heightens the irony and thereby differentiating the two worlds. Many dream sequences in the film appear disjoint and forcefully altered to give an effect of confusion borne out of troubled childhood. Case in point is the altering of space and time in many of the shots in the Sarghina sequence.

Nina Rota’s music aids the narrative in creating layers of sound and music. Be it the operatic feel while showing the “existential inmates” of the fashionable spa or the nondiegtic sound in the background to which Saraghina dances which is contrasted by the understated diegtic hymn that she sings on the beach. Sometimes the sound is completely digetic to heighten the effect of horror; the opening dream sequence only makes us hear the moaning, the sound of hands wiping the glass or the sound of air beneath the clouds.

Guido, the Sisyphus of Fellini: Outwardly, 8 ½ may be a film about a film that is waiting to be deconstructed, bit by bit by the protagonist’s philosophical blockage but the undercurrent is clearly about the absurdity of life. Guido is surrounded by the people who hold no meaning for him anymore. Fellini shows how every character is trying to exploit him of his intellectual attention. Fledgling actors quote rehearsed lines of being a thinking actor to impress him: “I need to coexist with my character for a while before shooting” or the pseudo intellectual conversations around Italian Catholicism, Marxism vs Catholicism, left or right centric political affiliations, about the greatest writer being Fitzgerald(“ and then his writing became all about pragmatism or brutal realism”)and “Americans thinking too much about cholesterol”. All this bourgeois conversation is intersected by Guido’s question to the fledgling actress “Is your ice-cream good? This sequence beautifully highlights his alienation from all the chaotic idealism around him. He finds liberation in his dreams from his stagnation, the pointlessness of everything. His futile labor of lies and procrastination is only leading him to his peril. His longing for a sweet family, or how his sister’s possessiveness hurts him, his wife walking out on him, all of these only take him to a point of realizing the absurdity of life.



The climax is quite worthy of a debate. Guido reaches his peak of frustration and the scavenging journalists hit the last nail in the coffin. He hides under the table and shoots himself. Fellini’s oeuvre gains meaning in what happens after this shot. Even the suicide shot is left as a puzzle in the viewers mind between reality and dream. Did he actually die or was it one more figment of his imagination. We see him leaving the premise while his collaborator is talking about how it was best not to have continued with the film anymore, which would have been a creative and financial disaster ( alluding that Guido had in fact called off on the film at the press meeting). He is then shown in the final dream sequence where he is the “ring master” and all the characters of the film and his dreams, circle around in white clothes, holding hands. He confesses to his wife that he has indeed changed. His creative crisis magically resolved. He picks up a megaphone and begins to direct everyone around the circle. He directs himself as a child (the source of his poetic inspiration as an adult) now dressed in a white cape as opposed to his earlier dreams where he was wearing a black cape, signifying the metamorphosis. The magnanimous launching pad, created for the spaceship that would save humanity, was actually a metaphor for Guido’s escape from internal conflicts through fantasy, into an evolved state of attaining togetherness with his “collective unconscious”.

Review by Neeraj Ghaywan
Passion for Cinema

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