“8 ½” Review

Herein lies an in-depth analysis of Frederico Fellini’s “8 ½”. When I wrote my opinion on the greatest films of all time I had not seen this film. After viewing, I find that it is, in my opinion, perhaps the greatest film ever made aside from “2001: A Space Odyssey” and perhaps “The Seventh Seal”. Also, an essential part of my opinion on this film refers to several essays by the great Christian Metz. Anyone who is interested in understanding film should read his book “Film Language”.

Fellini’s “8 ½” is a unique film in how it is interested in reality. This seems odd, considering that Fellini was a director with roots in neorealism who made a clear break with the movement. Yet it can be argued that “8 ½” conveys reality much more accurately, and inseparably, than neorealism ever did. The difference between the two lies in subjectivity versus objectivity. Neorealism seeks to imitate reality and remove all artifice to create an objective portrait of events as they happened. It is seeking truth. “8 ½” doesn’t care about events as much as it cares about internal reality, replicating the subjective experience that is life. It is well known as an auto-biographical film, but unlike most auto-biographical films it contextualizes itself. One does not need to know who Frederico Fellini is in order to know that “8 ½” is about itself and its maker. This self-reflexivity is never explicitly spelled out for the audience either. There is no moment where our protagonist, Guido turns to the camera and says “By the way, I’m supposed to represent Frederico Fellini, and this movie is actually about itself”. The only line of dialogue that mentions the concept of mirroring reality is when a crew member notes the similarity of characters in Guido’s film to the characters in Fellini’s film. But even here, he is talking about Guido’s “8 ½” not Fellini’s, and without the information that Fellini’s film is itself a mirror unto his own life, this line doesn’t necessarily explain things. Like in montage, without the context preceding this line, it could mean anything. The nature of “8 ½” is never clearly, verbally stated. The film uses its structure and the language of film itself to communicate the film’s self-reflexivity, and that the film itself is reality.

One way in which the movie achieves this is through its blurry line between reality and dreams. At the very beginning the division between the two is quite clear. We see an unreal sequence, Guido is first trapped in a car, then floating, and finally tethered to the ground. He then wakes up in bed. It’s obvious that what preceded was not actually happening, and the language of the cinema tells us this. A man floating is not a realistic action, and, unless the film explains that floating is somehow a plausible part of its internal universe, we must assume that it is not possible. A quick cut to a character waking up solidifies the unreality of the sequence, as all dreams in our own lives must inevitably end with the opening of our eyes. This is a standard dream sequence, even the relatively inexperienced filmgoer has enough predicated understanding to clearly intuit that waking up after an impossible scene means the aforementioned scene was a dream.

From here on out the film begins to play with viewer expectations. Guido, on his way to get some mineral water, sees a gorgeous woman, played by Claudia Cardinale (the film will later reveal her character to be a movie star named Claudia, adding to the self-reflexivity). The film does an incredible job here of putting the viewer in the shoes of Guido. We want to meet Claudia, she is beautiful and desirable. But why? We’ve only seen a short glimpse of her, and she doesn’t say a word. In this scene, Guido is fairly distracted, not focusing on any particular thing or person until he notices Claudia. He immediately walks towards her, and is denied the opportunity to interact with her because, alas, she is not real. We feel the same disappointment and desire that Guido does, and thus begins the descent of the viewer into Guido’s mind, and in turn Fellini’s.

This is just the first of many dream sequences that are not separated plainly from reality. But this isn’t “a series of completely senseless episodes”, as Guido’s writer would say. That this intermixing is Fellini’s intent is made apparent by the use of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” in the mineral water scene, and then Guido’s humming of the very same music in the next. This is an especially important detail because, before this occurs, the viewer has no explanation for Claudia’s sudden appearance and disappearance. Is Guido going insane? The humming of “Ride of the Valkyries” indicates that the song is stuck in Guido’s head. Now the viewer can by extension assume that what we saw was also in Guido’s mind, nothing more than a daydream, not the mad visions of a schizophrenic.

But, like the schizophrenic Chief’s narration in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, the camera is an unreliable one. We can’t quite trust anything that is happening in the seemingly real world of “8 ½”, because it is prone to bound off into bizarre fantasy at any moment. The line is further blurred when what seem to be memories descend into symbolism and unreality. In one scene, Guido recalls a meeting with his parents at what seems to be their house, but the landscape is abnormal and his parents behave bizarrely and speak cryptically. The line slowly blurs between memory or fantasy as the scene progresses. In another flashback, after paying the prostitute Sargharina to dance, Guido is punished by Priests at his school. In the background is an unrealistically enormous portrait of Dominic Savio (who was an emblem of purity at that time in Italy). The discerning viewer at the time of the film’s release would likely recognize this in context of the scene, and would take it as a symbol, not fact. Since memory is faulty, it would make sense that Fellini would include these exaggerated, odd details. We see what Guido cares about, not what actually happened, and even flashbacks don’t adhere to reality. But reality is different than truth, and, in film, truth is only derived from the image. What is real doesn’t matter; Guido’s mind is what matters. It is a transference of perspective. “8 ½” uses its breaks with reality to essentially imbue itself with a first person view-point, the viewer is inside Guido’s head. Yet this is done without the use of a voice-over narration, the images and their assembly act as such already.

The fantasies and memories provide the viewer with motifs that will come to play later in the film. The harem fantasy is one of the few scenes in the film where what is happening is made quite explicit. Guido leans back in his chair and gazes off into the distance. The next instant, characters begin acting contrary to their established personalities. Guido’s mistress Carla and wife Luisa get along splendidly, every woman that he’s ever met is suddenly present in a house, and lives only to serve and sexually satisfy Guido, who bathes as he did in an earlier flashback to his childhood. Calling back to that same scene, Guido is dried off and carried away in a towel as he was by his caretakers. This is obvious symbolism, implying Guido’s immaturity by harkening back to his childhood behavior in his own ideal fantasy. Reinforcing that this sequence is a fantasy, we hear “Ride of the Valkyries” once again, as the scene gets more and more absurd.

Motifs, as with any form of narrative, are one of the most obvious devices that can be used in the language of film. By reminding the viewer of a previous event in the film, the viewer has no choice but to contextualize the scene and draw meaning from it. When Guido and his team view the auditions for each part, the film finally, by calling back to the many characters we’ve met over the course of the movie, tells us that Guido’s film is self-reflexive. This creates a “triple mirror” of reality, the third layer of which is addressed in the ending.

After this scene the reality of “8 ½” completely breaks, and every single scene can essentially be interpreted as fantasy. At this point, if we discard analysis of the film’s structure and language and look upon it as an average moviegoer would, “8 ½” works psychologically, in that the viewer projects some of their own preconceptions onto the un-explained, open ending. “8 ½” behaves as a psychic, who doesn’t actually read minds but rather uses general statements to manipulate their subject into feeding them information for them to interpret. Fellini essentially acknowledges this fact by including a scene involving a psychic performer. Fellini manipulates the viewers mind like a psychic does on the person he’s reading.

Take for instance the many possible interpretations of the ending. As an American viewer, one will likely want to believe that Guido finally repairs his relationship with his wife, and his joining the cast of the film is his acceptance of happiness and inspiration. In this mindset, things have worked out for the best. But, this cannot be proven. Nothing is definite in a film like this, so one has to look at the viewer’s sensibility and find what would lead them to this conclusion.

American film endorses the idea of a happy ending. Traditional Hollywood structure involves things going very wrong for the main character in the beginning, but by the end of the film things tend to resolve themselves for the protagonist. This has become an ingrained expectation in American film goers, so it makes sense for them to perceive the ending of “8 ½” as a happy one. In fact this view is supported by the Hollywood musical remake of the film, “Nine”. At the end of “Nine” the Guido character’s wife returns and forgives him, Guido regains his inspiration and makes his movie.

But the happy ending surmised by the first sensibility is never detailed on screen, and neither would a contrastingly negative view of what “actually” happens. In fact, “8 ½” doesn’t seem to care about explaining itself. The film refuses to show what happens to Guido and his life on-screen, and if no explanation is given then it must be assumed that the explanation is not what matters. The film has just spent 138 minutes exploiting the language of film to non-verbally tell us all we need to know.

So what is the ending supposed to mean, if simple emotional cues and wrapping up of plot points are abandoned as they are in “8 ½”? In his original review of the film, critic Christian Metz has a quite astute analysis of the ending. Guido “once more takes up his director’s megaphone to direct the audience of his memories. Therefore the film will be made; it will have no central message, and it will not alter life, since it will be made out of the very confusion of life; but out of that very confusion it will be made … The second phase of the films resolution heralds not only the existence of ‘8 ½’ itself, but also the principle of its creation: It will be a film woven from the life of its author and possessing the disorder of his life.”

“Having entered the circle, Guido has also come to order; this author who dreamed of making “8 ½” is now one of the characters of “8 ½”; he no longer needs his megaphone, for it is now Fellini’s film that will commence.” Essentially, Fellini is discarding any presumption of a grand meaning or finality to the film. The film is about itself, and thus the beginning is the end, like two mirrors positioned directly across from each other, this is an unbreakable loop.

Guido joining the cast is not a profound philosophical statement, rather it is a confirmation of what the film has been implying throughout, that yes, indeed this film is about its creator. When he enters the dance, the empty place of director “can only be occupied by a character external to the action of the film: by Fellini himself”. The ending can serve no other purpose, despite our best efforts to decipher a larger meaning, than to tell us that it has no central message, since life has no central purpose (at least not discernibly). If life is confusion, a film about life must be filled with that same confusion. Deciphering it in any greater context is thus, in many ways, a futile exercise.

Then what is “8 ½” about, aside from itself? Here is a film centered around Guido’s imagination. But are imagination and film one and the same? Let us return for a moment to the work of Christian Metz, who in an essay on the language of film, details and defines the components of a narrative: closed and temporal sequences, discourse, un-realization and events. Afterwards he writes “It is that great form of the human imagination which … I should like to define in the following manner: A closed discourse that proceeds by un-realizing a temporal sequence of events”.

If this defines imagination, it defines the structure of “8 ½” as well. We have a closed sequence, in fact if one takes Metz’s analysis of the final scene as correct, the ending of “8 ½” is also the beginning of “8 ½”, furthering this idea of enclosure. While Metz uses unreality as a universal aspect of narration itself (since a story is being told it cannot be reality), he uses the term differently in another of his essays where he explains film’s ability to make unreality seem possible. “8 ½” takes this concept one step further, by merging fantasy with reality to the point that they are indistinguishable. Taking this into account, the temporal sequence of events is put very much into question, as most of the film did not happen and the point in time varies. Perhaps the most important part of this, however, is discourse. As Metz writes, “discourse must be made by someone”. “8 ½” is a film in which authorship is a highly important factor, and it uses this separation of reality to create an impression of reality that no film has ever achieved in the same way.

Fellini inherently understands how to use the syntax of film to communicate this mirrored reality. As addressed earlier, the entire structure of the film is designed to slowly reinforce its own autobiographical, self-reflexive nature upon the audience. It’s a film where not much tangibly happens, Guido tries to make a movie and doesn’t. In the end Guido as a character has not changed. This contradicts the traditional concept of a story. There is almost no arc to “8 ½”, only insight into Guido’s, and by extension Fellini’s own mind. Reality as we think of it in the film is subjective, all that matters is Guido’s perspective, his personal reality. According to Metz, “a narrative has a beginning and ending, a fact that … distinguishes it from the real world”. By discarding the traditional narrative structure, Fellini makes “8 ½” essentially indistinguishable from his reality.