8 1/2

Dir. Federico Fellini
1963
n/a


Every so often a piece of art comes along that unveils a secret or sacred part of our essence. Through trial and error, persistence or sheer will power, this work crumbles away part of the our monotonous understanding of trivial modern life and reveals a blinding light that is at first disorienting and then ecstatically revelatory. It infuses a sense of livelihood and purpose. It elevates and inspires. Over the course of history its importance does not diminish and its meanings become manifold and gain complexity until it is very nearly hidden beneath a shroud of myth. I can only imagine that there is a world of intellectual analysis based around Federico Fellini's 8 ½. To avoid it would be arrogant but to submit to it wholly would be ignorant. 8 ½ beautifully demonstrates the very human alternations between intellectual self-reflexivity and subconscious desire, as well as establishing the benefits and consequences of both. The film wistfully flows in and out of profound dream sequences which show the viewer the internal starvation of Guido Anselmi, the film's artistically and morally nomadic protagonist. He is as human as any character ever portrayed in cinema and Fellini painstakingly constructs his imperfections: his arrogance, his lies, his narcissism. But we do not hate Guido. We love him. He represents the best and worst of us, on a scale so grand it borders on and finally willfully submits to delightful madness. With 8 ½ Fellini constructed a human god; a towering figure so universal it is painful to watch his delusions of self-control, but worse still when he plummets to depths of self-loathing. With Guido Fellini asks one truly important question, the one that will forever keep his film from aging: what makes a man free?

Freedom, at least to Guido, is explained eloquently in the middle of a lavish fantasy sequence in which Guido returns to his home amongst all the women he has ever laid or loved. He says “happiness is being able to tell the truth without hurting anyone.” Happiness and freedom go hand in hand in 8 ½. Of course the two are also implicitly linked to his melancholy. As Guido sheds off his relations with the people in his life (from cheating on his wife to constantly avoiding an overly demanding and entirely disconnected French actress, as well refusing to respond to any questions regarding his upcoming film), he encounters a compounded contradictory feeling: happiness at avoiding all the obstacles presented in his life and sadness at losing his relation to the world. These emotions are of course subtle in the film's "real" world but in the world of Guido's mind, which includes dreams and fantasies, they are illustrated poignantly: escape as Guido flying upwards only to be pulled down by studio executives; guilt as consultations with his dead father; innocence as bizarre ritualistic scenes of sexuality from his youth. Guido desperately wants to create something original and honest. He can no longer force himself into the mold his producers wish for him. His film's unfinished spaceship stands as an aching metaphor for all the vulgar attempts to consciously create a beauty that exists only in the mind's untouchable regions. In 8 ½, beauty is grotesque and cruel, perfection is rejected and what remains is truth.

What is so true about 8 ½ is not cinematic, nor is intellectual. Cinematically Fellini utilizes interpretive surrealism to communicate Guido's devastating emotions. As for the film's scholarly side, the character of Guido's friend the film critic, who functions as our interpreter, synthesizes the film's artistic and intellectual efforts. He demands a high level of academic thought process to be rendered as something honest, original and triumphant. His philosophy is summed up perfectly when he tells Guido “it is better to destroy than to create something useless,” after Guido aborts his sci-fi project, a moving scene rendered as Guido's suicide. The film critic also draws direct attention toward the film's recursive nature and self-reflexivity. Given that 8 ½ is a largely autobiographical, using Fellini's own mounting artistic crisis as a template, it further takes on emotional gravity. All this is to say nothing of its pioneering use of film as a means of documenting the artistic process of film making, or metafilm, which would inspire a league of filmmakers from Francois Truffaut to David Lynch.

The biggest achievement in the film is Fellini's expansion of cinema's ability to communicate. Fellini, more so than any director of his time, engorged the possibilities of cinema, and 8 ½ is the culmination of all that came before and would come after. Everything, from his contemplative and creative camera use, to his mix of surrealist and symbolic elements, to his unflinching condemnation of his actions via the film's painfully honest narrative, Fellini opened the door to film's new consciousness. His freedom which traces, shades and textures his masterpiece, is the ability to step through doors as they appear. It is the desire to see what comes next and the humble awareness of what has come before. Freedom is not a void. It is the process by which we all come to discover the truth about who we really are. It is the beauty and grandeur of everything. It is sublime. It is pure celestial bliss. It is beyond words.

La Strada

Dir. Federico Fellini
1954
n/a

Ever since I saw my first Federico Fellini film I've liked to think of his pictures as circuses. They are huge, absurd and wonderfully entertaining, but beneath their surface exterior of shimmer and paint there is always something a little more sinister; something more melancholy; and something always much harder to grasp. In La Strada Fellini takes this generalized metaphor and transforms it into a highly literal translation. The film is all about the lives of circus performers. Had any other director been behind it the film would have likely been a straightforward, slap-stick field day of a film. With Fellini, however, nothing is ever straightforward. La Strada is a grand tragedy that parades with all the oom-pah-pah of a farce. It is an existential comedy of errors, only these errors lead not to knee-slaps and guffaws but to death and suffering. With his coy understanding of the human spirit Fellini conjures up another roaming masterpiece of cinema that exposes all the sorrow and sacrifice put aside in the name of comedic entertainment.

The film stars Fellini's wife, Giulietta Masina, as the adorable Gelsomina, the sad clown of La Strada. She is a Chaplin-esque performer whose simplistic understanding of the world ends up being decimated by her experiences with cruelty, malice and death. This disenthralled release from the innocuousness of her childhood becomes the focus of the narrative. She is sold to street performer Zampano (Anthony Quinn), who is a barbarous and immoral man. Throughout the film there are numerous references to Gelsomina being more like a faithful dog that Zampano can teach tricks to than the wife he claims her to be. Zampano frequently abandons Gelsomina but it is that same fidelity that keeps her from leaving him. With Gelsomina, Fellini draws a beautiful sketch of a girl not fit for this world: too naïve to understand the instability of the poor people she lives amongst and the painful depths of her own torturous existence, while simultaneously all too good at faking an enthusiastic happiness that is intoxicating to those around her. Her on screen heart break is unbearable. Children are meant to be introduced to life's struggles slowly and under the protective gaze of their parents and loved ones. Gelsomina, who is all but a child in the film, is introduced to tragedy first hand with only a mocking slave driver of a man as company. At times she is paraded about, other times she is hungry but through the unbelievable resilience inherent in all children, she survives until the moment when she is finally piteously abandoned for good by Zampano, who we come to realize cannot cope with his feelings for her any longer. If La Strada is meant to be a film about the deceiving nature of appearances, especially by those who make a living doing so, then Fellini's ultimate revelation of Zampano's own grief at leaving behind a child whose innocence tortured him because of his heavily repressed desire to be good and not evil, is certainly the definitive climax of the film.

Fellini, like the Italian Neo-Realists who came before him, acquaints his viewers with a dramatically different view of Italy than the stereotypical images of graceful dancers and artistic beauty that have infiltrated the non-European mind. His Italy is raw and stark; flashy but altogether artificial; absurd to the point of being melodramatic. It is a world unto itself that real people do not think about, much less exist in. Comparatively his characters are much the same, but what grounds Fellini's films, especially this one, is the theory that if you change both the nature of your characters, say from realistic to being tantamount to a synthetic idea or concept, and their environments then nothing has really changed at all, only moved. Like changing water from a clear glass to a colored one: it may look awfully different but there is still only water in the glass. Fellini's grandeur extends from this understanding and his construction of meaning in and through this model of film making. He has not necessarily created a new message, only an unparalleled and highly particular way of communicating.

Fellini's films do have a habit of being terribly esoteric. They incorporate a great number of significant ideas and issues and present them in ways that are often baffling to those unaccustomed to his style of delivery. Still, from the chaos of his films comes a sublime understanding of the world's madness. While drummed up to prove a point, his films are generally meant to divulge, in their absurdity, how truly absurd the world can be. La Strada is no different in that respect. Fellini uses the medium of circus performance, a tongue-and-cheek 'art form', to put on a vivid display of the sad and crazy lives of ordinary people. Here is a man doing his best to fulfill the macho role his culture demands of him, betraying his inner anxiety about being appreciated and maybe even liked, and a young girl capable of only two emotions, both of which are unquestionably sincere, whose world expands too quickly and to a fatalistic end (the film begins with the news of her sister's death and ends with Zampano receiving the news of her's). They come together for a brief time and then are separated forever. Just shy of two hours La Strada encapsulates a lifetime of confusion, suffering and repentance that is no mock-up of reality: it is reality.