Asa Nisa Masa: A Critical Review of 8 1/2

“In the case of 8 1/2, something happened to me, but when it did, it was more terrible than I could ever have imagined. I suffered director’s block, like writer’s block. I had a producer, a contract. I was at Cinecitta, and everybody was ready and waiting for me to make a film. What they didn’t know was that the film I was going to make had fled from me. There were sets already up, but I couldn’t find my sentimental feeling.” – Federico Fellini


Fellini recounted on-screen exactly what his feelings were then, in that moment: his fear of not being able to make his movie, his expedients of perpetually postponing the shoot, the inevitable final collapse. He didn’t know how to make his movie, so he decided to make a movie about a director who didn’t know how to make his movie. 8 ½ (Otto e mezzo) is the only movie made by an artist that considers his own problem of not having any ideas expressing himself in his own masterpiece. This way, while confessing his inability to create it, he paradoxically realized his masterpiece.

If the mark of modernism in art is self-reference, 8 ½ surely goes beyond any predecessor in having itself as its subject. Before 1963, Federico Fellini had by his count, made seven and a half films; hence, “8 ½” is life an opus number: this is film # 8 ½ in the Fellini catalog. Self-referential enough, but only the beginning. 8 ½ is a film about making a film, and the film that is being made is 8 ½.

In construct, Fellini tries to portray the three levels on which our minds live: the past, the present, and not the future, but the conditional, the realm of fantasy. If we are living in the life of consciousness, the more that we can go down in our unconsciousness the more we can go up in our consciousness. That is 8 ½; the deeper the film goes into the hero’s memory, his past, the higher it goes into his imagination.

8 ½ is the best film ever made about filmmaking. It is told from the director's point of view, and its hero, Guido (Marcello Mastroianni), is clearly intended to represent Fellini. It begins with a nightmare of asphyxiation, and a memorable image in which Guido floats off into the sky (unlike his previous film, La Dolce Vita, which begins with a statue of the Christ being carried by helicopter above the cityscape), only to be yanked back to earth by a rope pulled by his associates, who are hectoring him to organize his plans for his next movie. Much of the film takes place at a spa near Rome, and at an enormous, towering set Guido has constructed nearby for his next film, a science fiction epic he has lost all interest in.

The critic Alan Stone said of the complexity of 8 ½: "Almost no one knew for sure what they had seen after one viewing." True enough. But true of all great films, while you know for sure what you've seen after one viewing of a shallow one.

The film weaves in and out of reality and fantasy. Some critics complained that it was impossible to tell what was real and what was taking place only in Guido's head, but I have never had the slightest difficulty, and there is usually a clear turning point as Guido escapes from the uncomfortable present into the accommodating world of his dreams.

Sometimes the alternate worlds are pure invention, as in the famous harem scene where Guido rules a farm house occupied by all of the women in his life--his wife, his mistress, aspiring actresses and even those he has only been remotely attracted to. In a perfect male fantasy of regression, the women baby him, wash and cloth him, “worship” him, and, in a scenario set to the tune of Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries”, stage a rebellion that Guido must cavalierly fight back with a whip, only for the audience to learn that he enjoys suppressing his women’s rebellion each night.

In other cases, we see real memories that are skewed by imagination. When little Guido joins his schoolmates at the beach to ogle the prostitute Saraghina, she is seen as the bulbous, towering, overpowering, carnal figure a young adolescent would remember. When he is punished by his priests of his Catholic school, one entire wall is occupied by a giant portrait of Dominic Savio, a symbol of purity in that time and place; the portrait, too large to be real, reflects Guido's guilt that he lacks the young saint's resolve.

Mastroianni plays Guido as a man confused and exhausted by his evasions, lies and sensual appetites. He has a wife (Anouk Aimee), chic and intellectual, who he loves but cannot communicate with, and a mistress (Sandra Milo), cheap and tawdry, who offends his taste but inflames his libido. He manages his affairs so badly that both women are in the spa town at the same time, along with his impatient producer, his critical writer, and uneasy and impatient actors who hope or believe they will be in the film. He finds not a moment's peace. "Happiness," Guido muses late in the film, "consists of being able to tell the truth without hurting anyone." That gift has not been mastered by Guido's writer, who tells the director his film is "a series of complete senseless episodes," and "doesn't have the advantage of the avant-garde films, although it has all of the drawbacks."

Guido is the victim but, at the same time, the person who creates this confusion. He is the one with the mistress that threatens his marriage. He is the one who has called together the actors who wait impatiently for roles he has not yet written. He is the one who requested the construction of the towering set he must use but which only stands as the most visible monument to his frustrated creativity. He is the one who can’t find his way through the confusion of his own life to start his next film. He is the author of his confusion. An earlier working title for the film was La Bella Confusione (The Beautiful Confusion). Guido is the author of his confusion, the confusion is mirrored in Guido’s film; the film 8 ½ in confusing because it reflects Guido’s confusion; 8 ½ mirrors Fellini’s life; Fellini is the author of his confusion. What is that confusion he has authored? La Bella Confusione; 8 ½. Again, we are not only watching a film, we are watching a film about this film.

Guido seeks advice for his confusion. Aged clerics shake their heads sadly and inspire flashbacks to childhood guilt. In one scene, the characters of the film make a Dantean descent into a steamed sauna, a hell whose inhabitants recognize their guilt and punishment but whose souls still reflect only worldly affairs and their immediate concerns. The center of the inferno reveals an enthroned cardinal, sitting naked in the steam, solemnly repeating that there is no salvation outside the church.

The writer, a Marxist, is openly contemptuous of Guido’s work. He reflects on the self-indulgence of the film bathed in nostalgia and the general faults of cinema as a serious art form. With this character, Fellini is essentially delivering his film pre-critiqued. He is anticipating many of the charges 8 ½ will face, but disarming them even before they are leveled. It maybe that Fellini sees the sarcasm of having the film’s critic also be its writer. At one point, after enough criticism, Guido even imagines his writer/critic being hanged.

The producer begs for quick rewrites and a more accessible film; having paid for the enormous set, he insists that it be used. “I know your film’s about inner confusion; but could you make it clearer?” And from time to time Guido visualizes his ideal woman, who is embodied by Claudia Cardinale: cool, comforting, beautiful, serene, uncritical, with all the answers and no questions. This vision, when she appears, rather than being a figure of clarity, turns out to be a disappointment (she is as hopeless as all of the other actors), but in his mind he transforms her into a Muse, and takes solace in her imaginary support. (I have never read any critic that made something of the coincidence between Claudia “Cardinale” and the Catholic “Cardinal” of the film. Both play important roles in Fellini’s film and were to play important roles in the film Guido was to make.)

When Guido auditions actors for the role of the father, he is casting a character seen by the audience just previously in Guido’s dream. We are reminded that this is not only a film about making a film it is a film about making this film. Even minor characters have multiple mirror images both within the film and in the world of the filmmakers. This element of 8 ½ is brought to consummation in one rather wonderfully inspired scene where Guido and many of the film’s characters watch screen tests of characters in the film, including the Cardinal, Guido’s mistress and the Saraghina. The viewer can watch Guido’s “real wife”, Luisa, watching screen tests of women who are supposed to play the wife in the movie.

But the mirroring does not only stop within the film. Many of the film characters reflect the real people that populated the world of Fellini. The actors in the Guido’s film felt the same sense of impatience as their characters waiting for Fellini to tell them their parts and lines. The producer mirrors Fellini’s real life producer who had built the enormous set seen in the film and was pressing its use in 8 ½. The problems Guido faces with his wife played by Anouk Aimee mirrors the problems Fellini was facing with real life wife and occasional Fellini actress, Giuliette Masina. The Saraghina mirrors a real person from a similar episode in Fellini’s childhood. The actress who plays Guido’s mistress in the film (Sandra Milo) was Fellini’s mistress in real life. For both Guido and Fellini the fantasies mirror their real life, the fantasies become fodder for their film; real life becomes fodder for their film, the fantasies are mirrored in their real life.

All of these elements are brought together in his characteristic parades. Inspired by a childhood love of the circus, Fellini used parades in all his films--not structured parades but informal ones, people moving together toward a common goal or to the same music, some in the foreground, some farther away. 8 ½ ends with a parade that has deliberate circus overtones, a parade of musicians and all the characters of Guido’s life, and Guido as ringmaster.

Guido realizes that he will never be able to resolve his problems, only to live with them. The very act of giving up his film by allowing him to accept his life and the people in it has returned him to the place at the center of the ring. When he realizes that life is a continuous refutation of resolution he experiences an exhilarating resurgence of energy, a return of profound religious sentiment. He is at peace with himself. Secure in what he is, not with what he was or might have been. That is the optimistic finale of 8 ½.