8 1/2

Somewhere in the archives of this blog, perhaps, 800 postings before today, there may well be a note on Fellini's famous 8 1/2.  The 1964 film is an inexhaustible work of art that takes on different dimensions every time you view it and, I suppose, should be watched every couple years.  It is also long, dauntingly complex, and, often, quite tedious.  A film's greatness doesn't insure that it is easy to watch and 8 1/2 is irritating, at least a half-hour too long, and, by current standards, so inextricably bound up in the "male gaze" (usually a fictional construct but not here) that it has dated, in some ways, as much as D. W. Griffith's melodramas.  The only reason that 8 1/2, notwithstanding Fellini's cruel instinct for the ugly and grotesque, remains watchable is the performance by Marcello Mastrioanni.  The Italian actor was a great movie star on par with Cary Grant and Clark Gable and, even, when playing the role of the loathsome and self-centered director, an obvious surrogate for Fellini himself, he retains some measure of dignity and, even, winsome charm. 

8 1/2 is darker than most people remember.  The film begins with the hero being gassed and, therefore, suffocated in his car in an apocalyptic traffic jam.  The picture ends (almost) with a fantasy of his suicide.  Fellini confidently suggests that the crisis experienced by his character, a famous film-maker unable to complete (or even begin) the movie that is supposed to be his magnum opus, is also a crisis in the European imagination.  As in La Dolce Vita, a greater film in my view, Fellini equates the malaise of his characters with a broader societal decadence -- attributable in his eyes, I think, to the decline in the authority of the Catholic church.  (The equation of decadence, sin, and the absence of Christian authority is manifest in Fellini's surreal version of the Satyricon.)  For most of the film, Guido (the director played by Mastrioanni) is taking the waters at a spa somewhere near Rome.  He has installed his voluptuous mistress in another hotel -- she natters on and on about her much-beloved husband whom she is cuckolding.  Acting disastrously, Guido invites his long-suffering wife, Luise, to the spa as well.  And he is tempted by a number of other women queued up to quaff the supposedly healing waters at the spring.  It's fairly clear that the spring surrounded by half-moribund geriatric patients is Pierian -- that is, a symbol, perhaps, for the well of inspiration from which an artist must drink on the upper heights of Mount Parnassus. Viewed in this light, the women who cross paths with Guido are all potential muses, female figures implicated in Guido's beleaguered creativity.  This is pretty explicit, at least, with respect to the role of Claudia Cardinale, radiantly beautiful in this film, and an image of an the Ideal that continually eludes the hero.  (She is like the little girl in white on the other side of the stream on the beach with the derelict monster in La Dolce Vita, an allegorical image of lost purity.

Guido's problem is that he always assigns to women a nurturing role and is, in effect, a kind of pampered baby boy.  At the spa, his muse is tawdry, worn-out, meretricious and unfaithful -- that is, his girlfriend with the doting husband.  Recognizing that his plump mistress is unsuitable to inspire his new film, Guido summons his wife.  But, of course, she's disgusted with her husband's perennial philandering and quarrels bitterly with him.  The other problem afflicting Guido is that the various objects of his desire, women as disparate as Anouk Aimee and the peculiar-looking Barbara Steele (most famous for her role in horror films -- she's a Bob Keene picture come to life something that is not necessarily appealing) are all more than willing to make their own demands on our hero.  In fact, Fellini makes this clear by scoring several sequences to Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries".  The women in contention to serve as Guido's most recent muse are, themselves, potentially dangerous, not just ideal allegorical muses but also woman-warriors with the capacity to humiliate and, even, emasculate the hero.  The leader of his monstrous regiment of women is the frightening whore, Seraghina, a mountain of a woman who haunts Guido's imagination. 

Like Picasso, Fellini is an artist who always equates his object of desire with esthetic truth and beauty.  His art seems based upon a desire to make beauty tangible in the figure of an idealized woman, an object of sexual desire, who also embodies the spiritual transcendence sometimes achieved the art of the highest order.  For Fellini, meaning and knowledge is intrinsically carnal -- at least, this is the proposition advanced by 8 1/2.  Therefore, it is calamitous for Guido to finally find himself alone with his ideal muse, Claudia Cardinale, because she promptly, and candidly, rejects his advances.  She's dominant and he's submissive, literally, in the driver's seat of the sports car that she uses to ferry Guido to a lonely piazza in the middle of the night where she denounces him as unworthy of her.  This leads to the film's protracted ending.  Guido sits in a darkened theater in which he shows screen tests of the various women that he is casting in his film.  What film?  It is obviously 8 1/2 in a sequence that establishes a dizzying mise en abyme.  The next day, he attends a banquet qua cocktail party on the beach in front of the huge scaffolding that has been built for the science fiction film that he is supposed to be directing but which has no script.  The scaffolding is stark and enormous, a kind of rickety tower of Babel, and, Guido is flummoxed.  He creeps away from his humiliation under the table set for his producers and money-men on the seashore.  His screenwriter observes:  "Why add chaos to chaos?", suggesting that the best recourse in the face of the fragmented and depraved modern world is silence.  But Guido rallies somehow and the film ends with him directing the characters as a ringmaster to his private circus, his menagerie of friends and lovers, his dead parents, everyone in the film dancing in a ring while a little, shabby circus band plays Nino Rota's splendid theme -- it's impossible to imagine the ending without the vulgar, jaunty little tune played by the band.  The outcome is similar to many of Max Beckmann's late paintings -- the world is nothing but a stage, a tawdry cabaret or mud-show circus.  The imagination doesn't aspire to the sublime -- the imaginary theater is just a cabaret with some shop-worn performers dimly trying to do their best for an audience that is gradually vanishing away. 

8 1/2 is one of the most influential films ever made.  Again and again, the viewer will see scenes echoed or quoted in the work of later filmmakers.  To cite one improbable example, a scene in which all of the characters in the movie descend toward the camera on a huge staircase is cited directly in the final moments of Sokurov's The Russian Ark.  The film is also not without its precedents -- Bergman's Wild Strawberries with its unstable mixture of fantasy and realism is a noteworthy source for a number of sequences in the movie, particularly, those in which we see two widely separated periods in time in the same shot, a foreground image of an old man and an idyllic background in which see that old man as a young boy.  And the final ring dance in which all characters join hands and trot along the beach seems to cite the eerie closing shot in The Seventh Seal.