Watching Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963) is like reading a well-articulated diary. Through a diary, all of a person’s innermost secrets, fantasies, lies, desires, ambitions, fears and insecurities come flooding at you in a disarming manner, and it’s never quite what you expect. (I remember starting The Diary of Anne Frank when I was a kid but not being able to finish it because it was so graphically personal. Of course, my sister also kept a diary….) 8½, so-named because Fellini had made 8 films himself and had one collaboration before this one, is overtly intended to be viewed as autobiographical. Fellini holds nothing back, and in doing so, creates a masterpiece in which he not only blurs the line between fantasy and reality, he obliterates it entirely.
One scene early on which demonstrates Fellini’s intent is during a dinner party when a psychic and her assistant attempt to entertain the crowd by reading their thoughts. The diners are startled by her accuracy, and eventually only Guido, the movie director in the movie, will agree to have his mind read. Simultaneously in this one scene, Fellini makes us aware of several things: that this movie is about his innermost sacred thoughts, memories and emotions; that letting your thoughts be made public is a very daring deed; that a movie director is omniscient and omnipotent in regard to his creation but not his real life; that movies steal from reality (we immediately find out the psychic has been based on Guido’s sister) and that in a movie you can do things that cannot be done in real life.
Similarly to David Lynch’s Inland Empire, but in a much less aggressive way, 8½ is a multi-layered movie-within-a-movie. You might find yourself asking “Is this the movie or the movie in the movie?” In 8½, the answer is always “Yes” (whereas in Inland Empire the answer is always “No”). These two movies also fluidly intermix dream, hallucinatory and believable sequences.
Fellini humorously includes several scenes wherein a part of the movie is being discussed (usually criticized) and then shows us that part of the movie later on. 8½ looks at its characters under a microscope and finds them all simultaneously complexly multi-dimensional and predictably one-dimensional. We are shocked when we finally meet Guido’s wife and find her charming and attractive, only to be shocked again when she suddenly turns cold and distant. One could say that there is really no action in the movie, and yet Fellini is somehow always able to keep us on our toes and guessing.
Some might be inclined to compare this movie with Truffaut’s entrancing Day For Night (1973), but while both are fantastic movies, they are actually much easier to contrast. Truffaut focuses more on the lives of the actors in the movie, whereas Fellini focuses on the director. Truffaut’s director is the stable anchor who remains focused, confident and in control despite the chaos around him (he’s literally and figuratively deaf to it); nothing like Fellini’s angst-ridden director. The death of the lead prematurely ends Truffaut’s film, while Fellini’s director never even chooses one. While Truffaut seems to suggest that life is stranger than fiction, Fellini seems to suggest life is fiction, fiction is fiction, fiction is life, and life is life- and it’s all pretty strange. The fascinating opening sequence of Day For Night establishes that that movie is what we now call a mockumentary. The terrifying opening sequence of 8½ establishes that that movie is a publication of the nightmares that the movie director calls his life.
Fellini wrote his screenplays after he filmed and edited the movies. Therefore, all the lines are overdubbed and none of them match the lips of the actors, who Fellini had speak jibberish while filming. (There’s a reference to this in Day For Night, by the way.) This is a bit disconcerting, but since I don’t know Italian and have to read the subtitles anyway, I don’t notice it as much as I should.
It seems Fellini had reached a mid-life crisis and used this movie to explore the question nagging within him, “What the fuck have I been doing with my life?” If you haven’t seen 8½, I would be apt to ask the same question of you.
3 comments:
you're right about the overdubs; this was common in films from the era; Neorealism and beyond. Good grief, I last saw 8 1/2 in 1978, in Campbell Hall at UCSB. Those were the days! We had a lot of prints from Janus films, way back when.
Mrs. Fellini -- Giulietta Masina -- was a highly accomplished actress who appeared in La Strada, Notti di Cabiria, and other memorable films. There was a early 80s appearance with Mastroianni in Ginger & Fred; after that, I lost track of her. In any event, her acting style was sublime; every bit as distinctive and personal as Anna Magnani.
thanks for your insights. i'll be the first admit i don't know that much about italian cinema. i didn't even bother to look up the actors' names when I wrote this post.
i did notice the two women you mention both star in Nella citta l'inferno, but i don't think you can get it with english subtitles...
Glad to share. I haven't seen Nella citta l'inferno, however. Anna was a marvelous actress, and defined the acting style of neorealist films. You might be interested in Roberto Rossellini's Roma, città aperta. It seems to me that Michelangelo Antonioni was profoundly influenced by these early works, in his emphasis on social realities. Antonioni was from Ferrara in the Po valley, which is a recurrent theme in his films. He was a great genius.
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