By my reckoning, at least, the early 1960s marked a high point in the achievements of Italian cinema that will probably not be resumed or even approached ever again. Freed up from the more restrictive confines of neorealism, Italian directors and actors were able to flex their creative talents in new ways, leading to the development of lucrative genre innovations in adventure, horror, western and comedy films that still wield influence more than half a century later. And those directors who had been most closely identified with neorealism, as that movements pioneers and visionaries, continued to develop their distinctive voices: Vittorio di Sica alternated between acting (where his patrician dignity made him a compelling screen presence in films like Il Generale Della Rovere) and directing (with Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow and Marriage Italian-Style earning Academy Award Foreign Film considerations); Alberto Lattuada basically created the modern day organized crime subgenre with Mafioso; Luchino Visconti created his magnum opus The Leopard (soon to be reviewed here); and even Roberto Rossellini's renunciation of big-screen cinema in favor of rigidly pared down historical reenactments made for television eventually led to the creation of unique works that hold up as examples of an intriguing (though relatively unexplored) application of contemporary filmmaking technology.
Meanwhile, new talents were emerging as Michaelangelo Antonioni (L'avventura, La notte, L'eclisse), Bernardo Bertolucci (La commare secca), Pier Paolo Pasolini (Accatone and Mamma Roma), Francesco Rosi (Salvatore Giuliano), Ernesto Olmi (Il posto, I fidanzati) and Pietro Germi (Divorce Italian-Style) all released films that found a well-balanced reception of critical acclaim, financial success and lasting importance in the regard of cinephiles who took their work to heart.
But even among such an illustrious array of all-star directors, one name stands out and above them all: Federico Fellini, Italian auteur sui generis, somewhat analogous (again, in my reckoning) to how the Beatles stack up in comparison to their rivals among the great bands of that same Sixties era. It's not like either they or Fellini had a corner on the market when it came to originality, expressive vision, technical chops or raw charisma. What made both of these artistic forces unique is just the way they each seemed to epitomize their respective roles as creators of massively popular entertainment that was warmly humane and accessible to the masses, but also boldly provocative in creating new outlets of expression for the intelligentsia across different forms of media. My earliest exposure to Fellini as a director came from reading John Lennon's praise of his work in some of his post-Beatles interviews (his admiration of Satyricon - and living his own version of its gaudy carnal spectacle - specifically sticks in my memory.) I have no idea at this point if Fellini mirrored Lennon's admiration, but I will study up on it as my immersion into his 1963 masterpiece 8 1/2 gets underway over the next several days.
Which brings me to explain what I plan to do differently in this entry than I have in any of the film reviews that have preceded it over the past 4 1/4 years I've been writing this blog. (See what I did there?) Rather than plowing through the film and all the Criterion supplements and then sitting down to write a more-or-less comprehensive review of a film that everyone reading this column must have already seen (seriously, if you haven't watched 8 1/2 yet, just stop reading this right now and go get a copy to view without further delay) - I'm going to make this article much more bloggy, with multiple installments, updates, perhaps some editorial revisions and condensations too before I finally leave off and move on to my next film, La Ricotta (a short by Pasolini that's included as a bonus feature on Mamma Roma.) It may be a week or so's worth of various edits that go into this column, we'll see how deep I feel like getting into it.
But as I reflect on what I could possibly say about a film that's been so closely analyzed, admired and adored, it seems like 8 1/2 calls for some kind of unique treatment from me. It's indisputably one of the great audacious salvage jobs in cinematic history, a film about a man wrestling with creative blockage and artistic confusion, made by a man wrestling with his own artistic blockage and creative confusion, whose vision and scope had progressively enlarged with each new cinematic triumph, to the point where expectations had morphed into assumptions that the brilliance and magic would just flow unceasingly each time the Maestro called his cast and crew together.
Of course, 8 1/2 famously draws us behind the curtain of that gruesome process by which the movies so many of us love somehow emerge from the clash of egos, relentless criticisms and pressures, and chaotic lunges from one crisis to another in the personal lives of the flawed and vulnerable humans who labor to get something tangible up on the screen. The film is a dazzling display of 20th century modernism, so self-reflexive and aware of itself as a phenomenon that it opens the doors of our perception to all the latent narcissism and willfully indulgent obscurity that eventually came to be labeled postmodernism. And it's also a beautiful portrait (as all of Fellini's films are, at least those I've seen) of ordinary people muddling their way through the plight of their lives with wit, confusion, dread and delight. There's a lot going on here: in this film, in the mind of Fellini as he made it, and in my own life as I watch 8 1/2 again and incorporate it into my personal experience 50 years after it debuted. And today I'm just beginning the process of grappling with it all.
3/11/13: I'm watching 8 1/2 again right after getting out of work for the first day back after a week-long vacation in March to Portland OR and the nearby Mt. Hood area, enjoying once again the cumulative amusement that builds as I settle in to once again enjoy my peek into Guido's experience of life. It occurs to me as I watch the great collage of faces staring back at Guido, or directly into the camera when we're clearly seeing the world through his eyes, that Fellini was distilling moments of his own life, filing away little glimpses of weary weather-beaten old stragglers and wide-eyed flattering strivers whose faces had burned themselves into his memory, each visage communicating in a sweeping pass of the camera some hints of the travails they'd experienced in getting to that point in their journey.
8 1/2's brilliance fully emerges as we take in the fluid transitions between Guido's daily absurd balancing act of his mounting career pressures that lead to the plot's driving premise of a creative crisis and the underlying churn of lust, guilt and conflicted motives that thrust him forward in the unspooling drama of his life. That emotional quagmire is portrayed through numerous dream sequences, full fledged scenarios that suspend the normal rules of space and time in brilliant cinematographic realizations of the free-floating nocturnal state, identities effortlessly trading off with no logical sequence or cohesion deemed necessary to orient the audience or lend a sense of continuity. Fellini's reputation had grown by this time to the point that viewers were comfortable in their anticipation of whatever new visual twists the Maestro would throw their way, and was just beginning to show hints of the lurid, extravagant carnivalesque over-saturation that would occasionally bog down many of his later films, turning into lavish but indulgent, at times insufferable cartoons. I mean, if you don't appreciate that kind of flamboyant showmanship in the first place, 8 1/2 won't impress you as a more constrained or prudently reserved expression of Fellini's talents - he's still eager to show off his knack for constructing the active, garish tableau - but his pacing, his ability to alternate between situations based in the physical world and the chaotic connections forged in the boiler rooms of our subconscious is functioning at a sublime peak here, shortly before he went on to become something of a parody of himself.
3/12/13: I finished watching 8 1/2 again all the way through last night for the first time in a couple years or so... My most recent visits to the film were just for selected scenes, sampling the new blu-ray back when I first got it, rewatching the opening dream sequence, Guido's "harem" scene with him cracking the whip at the women tormenting his psyche, the closing carnival dance, just experiencing a few of those highlights for various reasons that escape me now, here and there over the past year or two. I also had it playing on background throughout the afternoon on Sunday but I spent most of that time interacting with my family as we had just returned from our trip to Oregon and had stories to tell. So last night was pretty wonderful, seeing the whole story laid out in one uninterrupted viewing again, in beautiful hi-def images and sound. I had intended to write more than I did last night, and I'm still not even sure how firmly I believe what I wrote in the previous paragraph, but I'll let it stay there for now. My plans to blog through the film got shelved as I found myself drawn to pay closer attention to the details, realizing that there's still a lot about this film that I have yet to understand, and even last night's close viewing just scratched the surface, so I recognized my disrespectful attitude toward the movie, presuming that I knew it well enough to weigh in with commentary even though significant passages remain impenetrable mysteries to me even now. And I have to sit through at least one more rewatch with the commentary before I'm done blogging here. Not to mention the supplements, though I have watched a few of those already. And I have yet to really dig into what Fellini and crew were saying in 8 1/2, and I haven't said much about how I appropriate Guido's story into my own life, and I wonder how much I ought to disclose along that line...
So instead of watching the movie again tonight (it's been a long day, and it's a bit late), I'm going to offer a few choice quotes from an interview that Fellini gave in 1964, from a book titled Federico Fellini Interviews that I picked up this past New Year's Day during a super-discount book sale. I also found I'm A Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon at that same sale, maybe I'll offer more quotes from that book some other time, though it seems to focus more on his later films.
(A critic who speaks badly about my films) is really dangerous to me. He is my most mortal enemy. I feel almost imprisoned by his application to my work or myself or judgments based on standards established independently of me. Because that is what the standard intellectual spends his time doing: storing life away in carefully labeled plastic drawers. They talk of "understanding" life or art, but they are really only comparing expressions. You end up being "like Proust" or "influenced by Bergman." I think that is because they can't originate real thoughts, because they don't have their own inner moral compass. Through their series of labels, definitions and conceptions, they close themselves off from a true comprehension of life. What is there to "understand"? How can they ever understand? That figure of the intellectual is a nightmare for me, a ghost, walking in his death. In reality, he is afraid of life, and he wants to tag everything, like a compulsive baggage attendant at a railway station, so that he can feel he is still at the center of everything. It is at the moment he labels life that he renounces it: his principles become the bars of his jail...My response to that: Lord help me to never be that kind of intellectual or critic!
I don't think that I create heroes in my films in the conventional romantic or poetic sense. But there is always someone, like Guido in 8 1/2, who fights against the monsters, against neuroticism and fear, against the real dangers. His story can be told in many ways, but it is always the same story... Take 8 1/2. It could have been a fairy story. The Saraghina could really have been a dragon that spat fire, Guido's wife could have been an inquisitor who condemned him, and the cardinal could have been another monster from the flames of darkness... I simply told it as I did because for me this was the most congenial manner. It reaches people better; I think it's the more modern way. But the hero is really there: he is the one who in all the fairy tales succeeds in possessing the feeling of his own life, after cleaning up all the monsters that want to devour him.Throughout most of my viewing of 8 1/2, I didn't really see Guido as a heroic figure, in that his actions seem to be almost entirely self-serving even though he's obviously conferring advantages upon others as he goes about making his film. But as Fellini puts it, and as the film concludes on a positive, reconciliatory note, I'm willing to concede that his description of Guido's heroism fits in that Guido serves, despite his flaws, his placid amusement at his own deceptions and narcissistic flattery, as an example of one who's able to withstand the outside pressures seeking to domesticate his lusty creative energies and remain in possession of "the feeling of his own life." Obviously, keeping that sensation within his grasp was an important value, a driving force, for Fellini, and we see it operating in Guido, as he repeatedly sets himself up for conflict and strife as he violates taboos within his marital, adulterous, religious, social and professional relationships, in order to reinforce his belief that he's living authentically. There's some wisdom in that, but I'm not ready to follow Federico all the way down the path of relational chaos that he so merrily animates in his films. That course causes real damage to people, and I'm not sure that pure self-fulfillment can justify all the decisions made in the pursuit.
I feel that an artist always talks about himself, and that the simple, daily things that go into a film should bear witness to being the fruits of the artist's anguish and concern. I don't want to sound as though I know the final answer. I keep seeking. Actually, that's all I want to show: that I am seeking.
I don't want to make pictures so that they can be "understood." This whole business about clarity seems to me to be be some kind of an aristocratic game, like heirs gossiping at a funeral. All I want in my pictures is a real man, who lives a real life, who worries about money, about his wife, about the Church and about his work. You know what I don't understand? I don't understand when people say they don't understand. You watch the story of a man who tells you about his work, his mistresses, his troubles, his relationship to God. There is nothing to understand. There is just listening and feeling whether the problems of this man are your own problems. That's all.Fellini does a nice job of demystifying his films, though the dazzling creative essence that pervades them, and his intelligence in crafting his films so uniquely as to stand out like they did back in his prime and leave such an indelible mark tends to perpetuate the Fellini mythos. I think he's speaking sincerely in all this but he still says it in such a way that it fueled the legend of his own life that he was busily (perhaps unavoidably) constructing with each public statement.
He goes on in this interview to say some fascinating things about the film industry that I think still have relevance nearly 50 years later. I'll add a few more quotes later. (Actually, no I won't but you can read the interview for yourself by following this link.)
3/13/13: Before I go any further with today's addition to this article about 8 1/2, I want to put in a plug for my online friend and fellow CriterionCast.com writer Scott Nye's excellent review of City of Women, Fellini's undeclared sequel to 8 1/2 that was released, and apparently bombed, in 1980. That film is just being released in the UK by Masters of Cinema, which means I probably won't see it for awhile since I'm still locked into the Region A format and don't have plans to upgrade my blu-ray player anytime soon. (Plus I'm afraid of what might happen if I start collecting MoC discs...) Scott's comments on City of Women really stoke my interest in the film, and now would be a great time to take it in, as it seems to complete the arc of inevitable moral and erotic decline that (perhaps) Fellini and Mastroianni knew was in store for them when they filmed 8 1/2 but they willfully, cheerfully blocked out anyway when they were at the absolute peak of their game.
Link this pair of films with 8 1/2's predecessor La dolce vita (also starring Mastroianni, of course) and we have a semi-autobiographical trilogy of sorts, though not officially recognized as such as far as I know. Please take a few minutes to read Scott's review, it's very intriguing to anyone who'd bother to read this deep into my own meanderings about Fellini! I only wish he'd thought to return the favor of including links to this blog and my earlier CriterionCast review of La dolce vita in his own article, haha, but not everybody thinks this stuff through the same way I do.
(later) Watching 8 1/2 with the commentary track, reveling in the pleasure of listening to "experts" point out the subtler details of a great film. Now that I'm watching the film on my big (as compared to my "medium") TV, I'm better able to fully relish the luscious quality of the 1080p image on this wonderful blu-ray edition. Here are some comments I entered as I was watching...
The three levels on which our minds live... the past, present and (not the future) the conditional). Valkyries to Barber of Seville and the ecstatic vision of Claudia Cardinale... oh so ripe, so voluptuous, so eternally satisfying... the answer to everything! pant pant pant...! :)
No, sorry, back to work, back to the hairy, grinding, abstract, materialistic intellectualism of those "in the know" philosopho-critix seriousos who keep the art house avant-garde intellectualists in check.
Hey, check out this half-my-age firm and tight plaything for whom I've ditched my wife and stepped out on the ledge.
Train stepping in hard, full-frame, flashback to the original Lumiere...
"Big fat ass, white skin, small head. Typical Italian middle-class woman." - That's Fellini talking, not me, referring to Carla (Sandra Milo).
LOLOLOLOLOL at the woman who dissects the interaction between Guido and Carla at plain raw face value. Truth.
SNAP. CRACK. CLICK.
Sandra Milo, gotta love her! Eyebrows beyond pencil-thin... more like scalpel scrapes.
When you meet people, there's always a surface, but Fellini had a way of looking through that, then dropping them... 2 films. You can use them that many times, then you discard them. Fellini loved people, only to a certain degree.
Off we go to Guido's dream land!
Vittorio DiSica's wife plays Guido's (Fellini's) mom! Wow!
I can't help but think about the new pope as I watch Guido's elevator ride with the priests. This thought is destined to return.
A film about making this film... a beautiful confusion... a monument unto itself.
I know a guy (online) who knows the guy who played the American Journalist who asked Guido about his allegiance to Marxism or Catholicism. (Hey, what about that new pope, anyway?!?)
Fellini... a traitor to neorealism?
ASA NISI MASA. ROSEBUD. Anima projections. :)
I'm supposed to dance like Monica Vitti in L'eclisse but I can't, he's supposed to play the piano but he doesn't know how...
"Love... sex... friendship... marriage... four things that have nothing to do with each other!" - a Fellini quote.
Claudia Cardinale... wants to come and stay and never leave?... wants to CLEAN? wants to bring ORDER?!?! Sign me up, Signorina Generalissimo... I ENLIST!!!
3/14/13: Instead of laying down and cuddling up to Claudia Cardinale, the young Guido flashes back to a youthful encounter with Seraghina, that leads to his suffering at the hands of a latter-day Inquisition (indicating perhaps that female priests would be no less merciful if invested with such barbaric authority.)
His interrogation over, he returns, unchastened, to the Seraghina who sings her irresistible siren song.
Back to the film within a film, Fellini shows that he's on to the critic's game and can play it just as well as they can, for a lark, before he returns his attention the mirthfully serious business of expressing his original creative vision, without which the critics are left with nothing to chew on.
Steam, towels, fake steam, white robed monks gasping in their whitewashed catacomb, a suburb of hell, wherein sits a naked old man known as the Cardinal who mutters his doctrine with serene authority, before releasing Guido back to the modern world, sponsored by the Ford Motor Company and Coca-Cola.
Where he meets up again with his wife Luisa, his business partners, casual acquaintances and starstruck fans, back to being the powerful and charismatic man of the world.
Off to visit the space ship, initially planned to just be a prop in the film's publicity, but destined to become the staging ground for its culminating scene. It was constructed on the same site where a dozen or so years later, Pier Paolo Pasolini would be mutilated and killed after the release of his final film Salo.
While the studio execs, invited guests and assorted hangers on climb the scaffolding to gawk at this marvelous "new Noah's Ark," we get to hear my favorite spoken passage in 8 1/2, where we hear Guido open up a bit to let us understand his artistic aims:
I thought my ideas were so clear. I wanted to make an honest film. No lies whatsoever. I thought I had something so simple to say. Something useful to everybody. A film to help bury forever all the dead things we carry around inside. Instead, it's me who lacks the courage to bury anything at all.These words are spoken in painful, plaintive tones by an unrepentant liar (as we shall soon see in his dialogue with Luisa, and later, when the two of them grind through a chance encounter on the piazza with his mistress Carla), who hides his trembling face under his broad-brimmed hat. He nevertheless harbors these sincere intentions to say something that would somehow transform our lives through the power of his unleashed imagination.
As it turns out, there is plenty to liberate and illuminate "everybody," if they care to join in with Fellini's madcap parade, even if the substance of this film isn't quite enough to completely bury those dead things after all. Not a problem, some of those dead things will decompose faster when they're exposed to the air and the light. Instead of suppressing and repressing those mortified and redundant aspects of ourselves, Guido's fertile interior life manifests itself in a series of charming skits: first, a happily realized idealization of many men's fantasies wherein their lovers (past, present and desired) find reconciliation in friendship that settles any lingering rivalries; then, after that harmonious scene is played out, Guido finds it safe and pleasing to let all his women out of their cages, so to speak, to romp freely around the villa of his psyche where he cracks the whip and assigns them their rightful places at the table (or simply tucked away upstairs)... and the harp is played, the floor is scrubbed and the laundry gets done.
Though the psycho-sexual chaos and wacky symbolism of that scene, and the grand finale circle dance around the base of the spaceship may linger longer in the memory of 8 1/2's viewers, the pivotal linchpin that ties this wild masterpiece together, and reveals the intricate genius of its construction, is the screening room encounter in which his deceptions to wife, actors, producers, crew and the incidental women in his life are all laid bare. It's a delirious, multi-layered sequence that defies easy description and summary, and I'm too loose and blown away (yet again) to do it analytical justice, but just when it looks like all of his sketchy sleight-of-hand is about to collapse down upon him like so much loose scaffolding, he slips through all the traps he's laid for himself, finding himself alone in a car with the meltingly beautiful Claudia, whose warm expression and tender, luminous wisdom elevates her to the level of a goddess, divine femininity. Their encounter opens our hearts to reflect briefly upon Love, before the movie business intrudes on the scene, dragging Guido (and us) back into the earthy realms of publicity appearances, news conferences and drumming up the kind of curiosity that will lead to boffo box office returns. A frantic crawling escape from this pressure, these obligations, leads to a hyperdramatic suicidal outburst that paradoxically ushers him into a kind of heaven, where all the important people of his life, garbed in luminous white, surround him in a circular dance that redeems his extravagance, sanctifies his beautiful confusion and brings the whole unwieldy mess to a joyously gaudy, life-affirming conclusion.
3/15/13: It's time for me to wrap up this treatment of 8 1/2, settled in the knowledge that despite all the words I've allowed to trickle into this box, I've far from exhausted my subject. Still, I have to move things along, and I'll do so somewhat briefly, just reflecting a bit more personally on the reasons that I find this film so compelling, so enjoyable, so satisfying.
As Fellini states in the interview quoted above, his ambition, aside from whatever desire for self-aggrandizement may have mixed itself into his motives, was to create films that ordinary people could relate to and find within them some echo of their own experience. Now Fellini was a great artist, in the finest Italian tradition. He took a full-bore, grab it by the throat approach to life that more or less consumed countless numbers of people around him, professionally for sure and sometimes emotionally as well - he was more prodigious, reckless and uninhibited than most of us have allowed ourselves to become. And yet, despite that robust appetite and over-sized ego, he genuinely never seemed to become too full of himself, or to create art that adopted a superior, condescending attitude toward us common folk. Indeed, he always sought to remain common - he prized his provincial roots, he recognized the inherent absurdity of his larger than life reputation and genuinely had fun with it, resisting the temptation to take himself or his films too seriously, even when expressly invited by the critics to do so. Fellini recognized that cinema as a way of life opened opportunities for him to express his inner feelings and convey experience to his contemporaries that would immediately impact their lives and subsequently outlive all of them.
8 1/2 is his riskiest, most vulnerable disclosure, in image and in sound, of what it was like for him to live at the center of all these converging forces; therefore, it's the most precious and lastingly valuable of his works, at least for those of us who fancy ourselves as artists of a more anonymous, even pedestrian sort. I haven't seen all of Fellini's films by any means, but I'm practically certain that there is not a character to be found in any of them with whom I will identify more closely than I do with Guido. That's despite the fact that I'm nowhere near the womanizer or liar that he is, nor do I possess that kind of consummate talent or gutsy ability to juggle so many potentially explosive conflicts while placidly going about my business. But I can clearly understand the urges he felt that placed him in each of those predicaments! And I gladly share his tendency to find at least a brief solace in the imagining of scenarios in which everything that's at odds with each other gets resolved so nicely, or even in the mere escapism of a pleasant dream in which the memories, the faces, the symbols and the strangeness all get mixed up together to provide something even more raw, more vital, more revelatory than the most well-crafted work of cinema can ever be. But film does have its advantages - a physical record, a shared consensual experience, the possibility of repeated examination and closer inspection in the light of day. 8 1/2 is a dream captured, a marvelously complex specimen laid out under glass, a 20th century spaceship time capsule, a testament in celluloid that I believe will speak evocatively to the delight and enlightenment of generations to come.
Sgulp!
Next: La Ricotta