8½ (1963)
Directed by Federico Fellini

Film Review

The one film that deserves the epithet “Fellini-esque” more than any other is surely 8½ .  In this extravagant, self-indulgent, creatively exuberant fantasy, the showmaster of Italian cinema, Federico Fellini, takes us on a bizarre exploration of his art and his life.  Freudian symbolism and Dali-esque imagery abound in a work that is simultaneously mesmerising and unfathomable, a surreal masterpiece which plays on our consciousness like a familiar dream that is both comical and haunting, yet leaves us helplessly confused.

As well as being the Fellini's most blatantly abstract film, it is also the one which most closely mirrors his own life.  When he came to make it, he was (like the main character in 8½) experiencing a creative block after the unexpected international success of his previous film, La Dolce vita (1960).  He had earned celebrity, wealth and critical acclaim, but where could he go next?  If a director in his position had nothing more to say, was it still possible to make a film?   8½ provided the answer.

The film's title is perhaps its biggest self-indulgence, and is more indicative of its director's acute sense of irony than his lack of imagination.  Prior to this film, Fellini had made 7 full-length films (one as a co-director) and two short films - which tots up to around seven and half films.  Therefore, using simple mathematical logic (always a helpmate when all else fails), his next film would be number eight and a half.  How better could Fellini show his creative bankruptcy than by naming his 8½th film “8½”..?   Enigmatic, simple and - most crucially - entirely accurate.

The film's title is the biggest clue to what the film is about.  It portrays an artist who - as Fellini may have been at the time - is caught in the grip of a mental block.  The experience is devastating, since the artist does not know whether he will ever again be able to produce a work of merit, and this causes him to question whether he had any talent in the first place.  As the mental turmoil intensifies, made worse by the selfish demands of the people around him, the artist starts to lose his grip on reality, and the boundaries between imagination, memory and reality start to disappear.

What the film is showing us is not the end result of the creative process - a polished work with a rational narrative - but rather the creative process as to happens.    Of course, this could easily all have ended up a jumbled mess, an excuse for a very sloppy piece of cinema - numerous half-baked ideas edited together with the same cunning pretence that is employed in at least 95% of modern art.  Remarkably, 8½ is anything but that and, if anything, it is has something of an indefinable coherence about it which makes it thoroughly compelling and unambiguously worth of merit.  The film may merge reality and imagination to the point that we end up not being able to tell one from the other, but it remains one of cinema's most satisfying and artistically accomplished works.

How does Fellini manage to pull off this seemingly impossible feat, of making a masterpiece from something which is so evidently lacking in content and coherence, a seemingly muddled hotchpotch of loosely connected ideas?  Well, isn't this just the skill of the artist, in whichever area of art he or she chooses to expresses himself?  The raw materials are assembled and before our eyes the artist creates something through the power of his imagination and his adeptness at using the materials at his disposal.  This is what Fellini does in 8½, much as Pablo Picasso did in Clouzot's 1956 film Le Mystère Picasso - both show the artist in the process of creating a piece of art; in both cases, the end result is pretty well immaterial.  What matters is that we gain some insight into the creative process itself.

Fellini is well-served by his cinematographer, Gianni Di Venanzo, someone who evidently shares the director's love for the surreal and operatic and knew how to make his cinematic dreams become reality.  He is as responsible for much of the film's bold iconography as Fellini - the grand surreal flourishes, the seemless transition from dreams to reality and back again, and the extraordinary set pieces.  Nino Rota's music, supplemented by well-chosen pieces of classical music, adds greatly to the film's drama, its sense of mystery, and, more crucially, its sense of irony.

In spite of what we may think initially, 8½ is anything but a flight of fancy.  When the film's main character, Guido Anselmi (Fellini's alter ego, played to perfection by Marcello Mastroianni ), says he does not have a story to tell, he is wrong-footing us.  Unlike Anselmi, Fellini does have a story to tell - but it is not one he would like to make too visible.  Some reviewers have written the film off as a vanity exercise, one in which Fellini tries to 'con' his audience with a work which manifestly has nothing to say.  Whilst it is true that the film does have an auto-biographical component to it, it is equally plausible that Fellini had another purpose in mind.  It is possible to read into 8½ a pretty hostile reaction against the film industry, against its relentless preoccupation with budget, star names, grand sets, glamour and box office receipts.  In this one film Fellini seems to accomplish what French director Jean-Luc Godard made a career of doing: delivering a pretty fierce body blow to the very industry that brought him success.

The association of Fellini with mainstream cinema would seem, in retrospect, to be an unlikely one, an improbable partnership of free spirited artistic genius and hard-nosed commercial reality.  Yet, somehow, it worked (although probably more through parasitic symbiosis than mutual respect).  The proof was that 8½ was a commercial success, it won the Oscar for the Best Foreign Language film, and it is still almost universally regarded as one of the greatest films in cinema history.  Not bad going for a film which - ostensibly - has nothing to say.

Film Synopsis

Guido Anselmi is a film director who is up against the biggest crisis of his career.  His last film was a huge success and his producer is expecting its successor to be an even greater hit.  Millions have been poured into building sets, actors and actresses have been signed up, the scriptwriter is ready to start work…  But Guido hasn't the remotest idea what his next film is going to be about.  With his producer haranguing him, he is tormented by the women in his life - his mistress, his wife Luisa, and his lead actresses.   As his life starts to fall apart, Guido retreats to the world of his imagination, hoping that his dreams and past experiences will serve as a source of inspiration...