8 1/2
Fellini’s 8 ½ has been done justice. Criterion Collection has released a DVD package that includes a pristine transfer and a pirate’s booty of extra-features: interviews, production stills, commentary, and even the documentary of Fellini’s failed attempt to make Il Viaggio di G. Mastorna. Now, we no longer need to experience it as a foggy recollection, but as it was meant to be—alive with vivid imagery and clear sound.
8 ½ might not be Fellini’s most touching film (I think of La Strada or Nights of Cabiria), but it was extremely important for his art. The title refers explicitly to his career as a director: it comes after seven full-length films and two shorts. It is the film that carried him out of his creative doldrums. In an interview in February of 1963, Fellini said that “8 ½ [was] a liberating work.”
It centers on a director experiencing “director’s block.” In the film, we see Fellini writing himself into the story to show how he eventually liberated his artistry and was able to create a film. From here on out Fellini’s films are more self-reflexive and fantastical than before. As the scene with the Magician at the spa portrays, Fellini could only overcome his creative block by looking inward and trusting his fantasies and desires as the viable marrow of his films.
Not surprisingly, Fellini chose Marcello Mastroianni, Fellini’s cinematic double, to play Guido, the director in the film. Building upon the Guido-Fellini association, Fellini chose his real-life mistress, Sandra Milo, to play Carla, Guido’s mistress. No wonder we see Guido (Fellini) biting his nails when the Magician at the spa attempts to read Carla’s mind, i.e. to reveal their affair to entertain the audience.
8 ½ is part evasion and part revelation, and it is only when Guido realizes that his fantasies do not detract from his ideas but enrich them that the making of the film is ensured. The Magician at the spa helps him realize this. In fact, he represents Guido’s creative side. Thus, Guido knows him, asks him “how he does it,” and observes that it has been a long time since they have seen each other.
The Magician is a mind reader. Figuratively, he is also a director with a camera. At one point in his performance at the spa, we see him approaching his audience looking for a victim (since few people want their secrets publicly displayed) whose mind he can read. He twirls his cane around the edges of the screen in a circle that signifies the camera’s lens right before he focuses on a subject. After he reads a mind, the thoughts “transmit,” as he puts it, to Maya, his assistant on stage, who then announces aloud these very thoughts. When it comes to Guido’s turn, Maya will not only announce his thoughts, she will also write them on the chalkboard, which makes her a symbol of the movie screen. The Magician and Maya work together to represent Guido’s craft and to help him with it.
8 ½ is about the frustrated desires involved in creative block; the reason why Guido, like so many other artists, says, “I have nothing to say, but I want to say it anyway.” Guido is motivated to make a film, but cannot find the appropriate form or material outside his self. The Magician looks inside him and finds the phrase “ASA NISI MASA.” Peter Bondanella, a Fellini scholar, observes that “the magic words come from a children’s word game much like our own ‘pig Latin’ that transforms the Italian word anima, meaning soul, spirit, conscience, even “consciousness.” The Magician shows Guido that he can project his very self onto the movie screen, and what follows is a scene from Guido’s childhood. What follows 8 1/2 in Fellini’s oeuvre is a cinema joyously, sometimes manically, overrun by the director’s fantasy as he points his camera inward or projects himself outward to make other stories, such as Casanova and The Satyricon, his own. As Fellini once stated, “you only put yourself in front of the camera lens.”
After the spa scene, we do not see the Magician again until the end. As the film’s production site is being torn down, Guido sits in his car with Daumier, who represents Guido’s disheartening intellect. Listening to Daumier’s tribute to “the blank page”—the salting of Guido’s fertile dreamscape—Guido is abandoning all hope when the Magician arrives, as if out of Guido’s subconscious, to tell him everything is ready. Following his intuition, something he has been fighting the whole time, Guido envisions all the film’s characters in white. Barefoot, they step toward the beyond as they say their goodbyes with meaningful glances. Only the wind can be heard and it becomes clear that Guido doesn’t want to say goodbye, that the whole time he has longed to re-present these people and moments from his life. It is here that Guido decides to make the film we have been watching and that Fellini presents his abandonment of traditional story structures for more personal and fantasy-driven ones, ones more suited to a conjuring magician than an overly cerebral intellectual.
8 ½ is important for what it stands for in Fellini’s career, but it is also important because it is “Felliniesque.” It is a dazzling paragon of the “art film.” The most “black and white” film I have ever seen and a testament to the style and genius of an auteur. Now, thanks to Criterion, it can be enjoyed in all its vivid “Felliniesqueness.”
Story: A
Acting: A
Visuals: A+
Originality: A
Enjoyability: A
Overall: A
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