The following notes on Fellini’s 8 1/2 were written by Dr. John Bennett, PhD, graduate of the Department of Communication Arts at UW – Madison. A newly struck 35mm print of 8 1/2 will screen at the Cinematheque on Friday, October 17 at 7 p.m. The venue is located at 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Admission is free!
By John Bennett
In the decade leading up to the 1963 release of 8 ½, Federico Fellini steadily established his reputation as a major voice in postwar arthouse cinema. With his run of poetic tragedies—I vitelloni (1953), La strada (1954), Nights of Cabiria (1957)—the maestro of the Italian cinema found success at the Venice and Cannes film festivals, just as his work thrived within the blossoming market for international cinema in the United States, with the latter of the three winning an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Fellini then rang in the 1960s with La Dolce Vita, his sprawling exploration of the debauchery and decadence of the glitzy mid-century Roman high life. The film achieved new heights of success and scandal, winning the top prize at Cannes and grossing nearly $20 million at the US box office alone. Variety even hailed it as “the yardstick by which all future subtitled foreign imports would be judged.” By 1962 (after contributing a short comedy to the anthology film Boccaccio 70), Fellini had begun work on a follow-up feature. But the dizzying heights of the expectations placed upon him in the wake of this wild success strained his ordinarily voluminous creative faculties. “Something happened to me which I had feared could happen, but when it did, it was more terrible than I could ever have imagined,” he told interviewer Charlotte Chandler. “I suffered director’s block, like writer’s block. I had a producer, a contract…There were sets already up, but I couldn’t find my sentimental feeling.” He nearly wrote to producer Angelo Rizzoli to bow out of the project when inspiration mercifully struck: he would dramatize a fictional version of his own creative crisis. The intensity of this professional pressure formed the diamond that is 8 ½, the gleaming centerpiece of Fellini’s body of work.
The title 8 ½ represents what is essentially an opus number for Fellini, who at this point had made six features, two shorts and one co-directed effort, making the film, by his math, his eighth-and-a-half work. A working title for the film was La bella confusione (The Beautiful Confusion); it is in this confusion that Fellini’s fictional counterpart, Guido Anselmi (played by Marcello Mastroianni, the major male star of 20th century Italian cinema), finds himself as he desperately casts about for inspiration for his upcoming film (in a metafictional flourish, various clues in 8 ½ indicate that the film Guido wants to make is in fact the very film we are watching). As he attempts to exorcise his neuroses at a swanky spa, any chance for rest is thwarted by a cavalcade of characters who insistently press Guido with questions about his film for which he has no answers. A snobby writer deflates Guido’s ideas with intellectual jargon; a barking, sweaty producer demands to know how his money is being allocated; a French actress (Madeleine Lebeau, who played the young French refugee in 1942’s Casablanca) needles Guido for details about the character she is supposed to play. Compounding this crisis of inspiration are the many women in Guido’s life who tax what little remains of his emotional resources: his mistress Carlotta (the ebulliently feminine Sandra Milo) comes to stay in the spa town, and her presence causes tensions to flare when his long-suffering wife Luisa (a stoic Anouk Aimée) arrives a short time later. All the while, he fantasizes for salvation at the hands of the mysterious actress, Claudia (Claudia Cardinale, whom we lost last month at the age of 87). Interwoven between these moments of professional and personal turmoil are delirious dream sequences and flashbacks to childhood scenes of comfort and shame.
The characters enumerated above represent only a portion of the figures with which 8 ½ brims. First-time viewers may be forgiven for not being able to keep track of the sheer quantity of grinning nightmare faces that comprise the film’s cast. Each major character is flanked by two or three ancillary hangers-on who arrive at the spa to take in the healing spring waters and the high life alike. Fellini’s fascination with the extreme varieties of the human face is immediately apparent in an early sequence establishing the spa as a setting. His camera dreamily slithers among a phalanx of extras selected for the distinctive characteristics of their physiognomy as Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” blares on the soundtrack. Augmenting this beautiful confusion is the film’s soundscape, which is constantly abuzz with the ceaseless cacophonous chatter of figures demanding Guido’s attention. 8 ½ builds its tension by steadily intensifying the pressure that these characters exert on Guido—a tension that culminates in a carnival climax as triumphant as it is mysterious.
8 ½ represents a major shift in the aesthetic directions of Fellini’s work. In his films of the 1950s, Fellini did indulge in his lifelong preoccupations with the oneiric and the carnivalesque, but these works more closely resemble the Italian neorealist movement of the 1940s and early 1950s in the midst of which Fellini established his career as a screenwriter. 8 ½, however, marks the first time Fellini plumbed with abandon the depths of his dreamlife, an abandon that colors all his subsequent films. Fellini followed 8 ½ with Juliet of the Spirits (1965); shot in kaleidoscopic Technicolor, the film revels in the ghostly fantasies of a distraught housewife (played by Fellini’s wife and muse, Giulietta Masina, who bears more than a faint resemblance to Anouk Aimée in 8 ½). For the rest of his career, Fellini’s major works—Fellini Satyricon (1969), Amarcord (1973), Casanova (1976), and City of Women (1980)—are all structured in episodes, each of which bursts with the kind of dreamy surrealism that Fellini explored for the first time in a sustained fashion in 8 ½.
Much of the film’s aesthetic brilliance can be attributed to the work of Fellini’s collaborators, each of whom was working at the heights of his craft. The music of composer Nino Rota (best known for his score for The Godfather) showcases remarkable range. At times, jazzy passages harken back to his music for La Dolce Vita, but Rota’s score then oscillates between tones of low, sullen moodiness and bouncy, frenetic agitation. Piero Gherardi’s costume and set designs are a riot of rococo splendor. Statues, clocks, grand pianos and potted plants populate the stately hell of Guido’s hotel, while impossibly long bolts of fabric billow about the latticework of the gargantuan unfinished set for Guido’s suffocated film. Parading amid these sets are innumerable poised parasols and gauzy gowns. Lined with fur and draped with veils, hats inhabit 8 ½ by the hundred. Even Mastroianni’s costumes—though more muted than the couture of the fantasy creatures that assail him at every turn—drip with a certain mod elegance. Most impressive of all may be the high contrast black-and-white cinematography of Gianni di Venanzo, whose camera gracefully ducks, swoops and floats among the film’s countless characters. Note the frequency with which—as fleet camera movements coincide with precise turns of the body—faces suddenly loom into the foreground of a shot. Indeed, the blocking in 8 ½ is an utter marvel. If you can resist the lure of the lush black-and-white of the film’s elegant close-ups to let your eye stray to the backgrounds, you’ll notice that many shots are secretly aflutter with extras crisscrossing each other in a swift, intricate, well-dressed ballet. But orchestrating all this beauty—with the assurance and control so desperately sought by Guido—was Fellini, who, by expressing his story of the agony and ecstasy of an artist’s life in such ravishing form, cemented himself as one of the 20th century’s major artists.