8½

After watching the execrable Nine a few weeks ago, it became necessary to revisit the source of that misery, Federico Fellini's 1963 masterpiece 8½, to wash out the bad taste of the musical. In fact, I watched it twice, as I had yet to take a look at my copy of the Criterion Collection DVD, which contains numerous extras, including a commentary. This is at least the third and fourth time I've seen it, and it remains one of my favorite films of all time.

I remember distinctly the first time I saw it. I was in college, a freshman, and had never seen a Fellini film before. I don't think I had seen any kind of "art film" before, because when the film opens with the dream sequence of Marcello Mastroianni stuck in a traffic jam, and then flying on the end of the rope, I thought to myself, "uh oh, this is one of those avant-garde films I've heard tell about, and I'm not going to understand it." But soon, when the actual story gets going, I relaxed and realized I was watching genius at work. I think it was probably during the scene when the spa-goers are walking across the screen, (a collection of unusual faces, that today is known as "Fellini-esque") with Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" playing, that I was hooked for good. By the way, I'd like to give a shout out to the folks who ran Tuesday Night Flicks back in Stony Brook during those days. Over four years I saw almost every foreign-film classic, at twenty-five cents admission.

8½ is a film about a director who is having trouble making a film. That film is the film we are watching. It was inspired by Fellini's own trouble in making a film. The working title, appropriately enough, was The Beautiful Confusion. The resulting title comes from the number of films Fellini had made. Since he had made parts of compilation films, he reasoned that the current one numbered eight and one half. It was a recursive metafilm. He also considered it a comedy, and had a sign taped to the camera that reminded everyone to that effect: "Remember, this is a comedy."

Mastroianni is Guido Anselmi, who is suffering from director's block and is so strung out that he has decamped to a spa resort. He is soon surrounded by his producer, his designers, an actress who has been courted to play a role (and her agents), the press, and his mistress (Sandra Milo), a lollapalooza who seems to offer Guido solace only in the bedroom. In one of many baldly comic scenes, he goes to meet her at the train station, and when it arrives and she doesn't get off, he's secretly relieved. But then the train pulls away and he sees she disembarked on the other side.

Eventually Guido's wife (Anouk Aimee) arrives, and he reaches a crisis. He flashes back to simpler times in his life, such as being bathed in wine as a small boy, or going with his friends to the beach to pay the local whore, La Saraghina, to dance the rumba. He is caught by the priests and forced to undergo their primitive tortures--wearing a dunce cap, kneeling on gravel. He is told Saraghina is the devil, but it doesn't seem to have any effect, as he is consumed by women. Even with a mistress and a wife, he longs for an idealized image of a spa serving girl, played by Claudia Cardinale, who will emerge at the end of the film as his leading actress.

It seems trite to say it, but as with almost all Italian cinema, Catholicism is a key ingredient in 8½, and not just for the sexual guilt. During the commentary I picked up on something one of the experts said about questions in the film. Of course, catechism is the method of learning in Catholicism, and we hear many questions in 8½, but the ones that aren't answered are the most interesting. The very first lines belong to the spa's doctor, who asks Guido if his new film is another one without hope. The writer, Daumier, (Jean Rougeul), asks him if the film is "trying to make us think? Scare us?" (Daumier anticipates the criticism Fellini expected, offering a running critique of the action, as if he were watching from the gallery. At one point Guido indulges himself a little fantasy of seeing the man hanged). The press, both fawning and antagonistic, ask him dumb questions, such as whether pornography is an art form (one American reporter brays, "He has nothing to say!"). But there are three instances where the unanswered questions, or the inability to ask a question, are significant. One is when Aimee, angered by Guido's infidelity and lies, asks him, "Why do you want me here? What good am I to you?" and he doesn't answer. Also, he is given an audience with a Cardinal who is also visiting the spa. He is unable to form a question, simply saying he is not happy, and the Cardinal, in a steamroom that looks like Hell, only replies that "there is no salvation outside of the church."

Finally, when Guido meets his leading actress and vision, he asks her, "Could you leave everything behind and start from zero again? Pick one thing, and one only, and be absolutely devoted to it? Make it the reason for your existence, the thing that contains everything, that becomes everything, because your dedication to it makes it last forever? Could you?" Cardinale does not answer, but turns it on him, and he replies that he could not. She is only able to tell him, three times, that he does not know how to love.

There are two set pieces that seem to me to be the greatest in the film. One is a fantasy sequence in which Guido is in a harem. All of the women of his life, even those he has never known intimately (such as his friend's new girlfriend, played by Barbara Steele) wait on him hand and foot. He has rules--when one of the women ages, she must move upstairs, where she "basks in memory." One of the women, a French showgirl from his youth, rebels, and for a time the women revolt, but he, wearing nothing but a sheet and his trademark hat and glasses, literally cracks a whip to get them back in line. It's a magnificent scene--exquisitely shot by Gianni Di Venanzo--and a puckish parody of male fantasy.

The ending, justly famous, was originally shot as a trailer for the film, and because Fellini liked it so much he used it as the ending. (If you haven't seen the film, and what are you waiting for, you might want to skip this part). On the set of the film-within-the-film, a launching pad for a futuristic rocketship, Guido has decided to call an end to the film. He fantasizes about shooting himself during a press conference, and then, as the structure is dismantled, all of the characters from the film, living and dead, return, led by a procession of clowns playing musical instruments. Fellini loved the circus (he made a documentary called The Clowns), and to the catchy carnival-like theme of Nino Rota, Guido's life dances before him, all of the characters holding hands and traveling in a circle. He, and his wife, join them, and though the notion of life as a circus parade may seem a little pat, it seems accurate to me.