8 1/2
- Director: Federico Fellini
- Released: 1963
- Screenplay: Federico Fellini, Tullino Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano, Brunello Rondi
- Featured Actors: Marcello Mastroanni, Anouk Aimee, Claudia Cardinale
Themes & Ideas & Such
- Universal & Personal brought together
- Examines Fellini’s own creative blocks
- Women = mother/angel/whore
- Becoming a better man & still an artist
- The role of the critic
- Crisis to Acceptance
- Confusion to Shape
- Artists need to make mistakes to create art
- This film, like the film within the film, had no real direction – Fellini’s own crisis becomes the film
Structure
Double Mirror construction
- Film about the making of a film & the making of the film within a 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 gehold, 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
Mixing Dreams & Reality
- Many of Guido’s recollections are from Fellini’s life
- Saraghina, the Catholic Boarding School – though they are not used as conventional flashbacks – they are portrayed simply as memory
- Highly stylized, overloaded with symbolism, satirical, with unconventional technical and filmic devices
Modernist literature
- Borrowing from (Woolf, Stein, Faulkner, Joyce)
- Story told as if from the analyst’s couch
- Fellini was depressed and was counseled by Jungian analysts
- Film lays bare the cultural & psychological that inhibit the artist’s mind
- Draws attention to filmmaking, like other modernist works draw attention to process
A Few Scenes
Scene — Traffic
- Camera is a major character
- Guido is suffocating in his car
- He escapes, reborn across the sky, like the Christ in La Dolce Vita
- The hall of mirrors begins as the machinery of filmmaking brings Guido back from his dream
Scene – Waking from the dream
- Again mixing dreams & reality
- Light floods in from off-camera in the bathroom
- Note the relationship between critic and art (this will continue throughout the film)
- Artists need to make mistakes to create art
Scene – Saraghina
- Triggered by consultation with a Catholic cardinal
- Cardinal directs Guido’s attention to the cry of a bird, his attention captivated by a heavy set woman – recalls the memory of Saraghina
- Young Guido dances with the prostitute – interrupted by priests
- Returned wearing dunce cap of shame
- Note: Luigi – a saint known for abhorrence of women
- Commentary: Fellini’s own views, mirrored in the film, of the Catholic Boarding school he experienced – “the sort of thing that might cause serious mental problems, serious complexes…the feeling of guilt I drag around with me, which I can’t place, probably derives from the fact that I spent 4 years in that school.”
Scene – In bed discussing marriage w/ Luisa
- Luisa challenges Guido’s honesty
- Not the spatial relationship
- Guido cannot answer her questions, just as his questions go unanswered
Scene – Screen tests
- A film; A film in a film; the reality of the film behind the film
- The film of the film is the film
- Fellini = Guido / Giulietta Masina = Luisa / Luisa watching screen tests for her character – the hall of mirrors
Scene – Guido with Claudia in car
- Reflects a confessional, with Guido confessing (note light across eyes, reminiscent of a confessional booth)
- Guido is isolated in car
- Reflecting upon “giving everything up” – questions for Claudia, but likely for himself
- Brought back by industry (like opening scene)
Scene – Press Conference
- Note the mirrored table (reflections prevail)
- Guido cannot accept his weaknesses, taking bad advice from the intellectual
- The magician presents other options
- A moment of transformation
- Living with problems, not perfection, accepting self
- Suicide a moment of clarity, transformation
- Not to escape (spaceship) but to embrace life, problems and conflicts…all dressed in white
- The clowns enter, and the young Guido leads them
- Older Guido joins the circle, part of the scene, directing