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| Federico Fellini | 1963 |
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 Aging Italy Visual Artists  |
8 1/2 is Fellini's 8 1/2th film. It's autobiographical; a film about making movies and a film about Fellini himself. It's meant to express the way he's feeling about the world at this point in his life and career. Like "La Dolce Vita" it's not an easy film. This time it's because the film is so disjointed and relies so heavily on symbolism and is just so absolutely bizarre at points that it can be pretty hard to follow. You may have problems making sense of things and over the course of the two hours and eighteen minutes of the movie you may be tempted to give up. Fortunately, like "Satyricon", Fellini manages to bombard you with so many strange and beautiful images and so many odd ideas that you may not feel the need to make sense of things and may enjoy just going along for the ride. At any rate, the second time through should prove to be much easier. This is the sort of film that you'll probably want to watch several times anyway. It gets better as you spend more time with it.
8 1/2 features a large number of very lovely ladies in addition to top-notch art direction by Piero Gherardi and cinematography by Gianni Di Venanzo. It's a masterpiece of artistic and surreal filmmaking that features all sorts of very strange characters, bizarre costumes, dream sequences and some simply incredible filmwork. It begins with a silent traffic jam and the camera panning from bored face to bored face. Suddenly, a car begins to fill with smoke and the driver begins to pound frantically on the windows in an attempt to escape. Again the camera pans from bored face to bored face. The man escapes from the car and floats into the air, only to be pulled into the sea by the rope tied around his leg.
Cut to Guido Anselmi {Marcello Mastroianni} waking painfully from his dream and being harassed by several people regarding his filmmaking. Several men enter the room and give Guido some medical advice. Guido needs a break. Cut to Guido's very tired face in the bathroom mirror then to a longer shot in which he stands in the bathroom looking a bit lost. Cut to an odd procession of surreal people at an outdoor spa as the camera follows a long rotating pan from face to face. Guido appears in the frame looking a little tired and a trifle bemused. He spots a lovely young woman {Claudia Cardinale} walking through the woods at the spa's edge. She approaches him and offers him a glass of wine. He slides his sunglasses down his nose and just stares at her, in seeming confusion, over their rims.
A man approaches Guido and gives him a short critique of his movie thus far. Guido escapes this when he spots his friend Mario Mezzabotta {Mario Pisu} standing a short distance away and walks over to give him one of those manly hugs accompanied by a slap on the back. Mario introduces us to Gloria Morin {Barbara Steele}. Gloria's an actress. Cut to Guido sitting in a railway station. When the train pulls into the station, Guido discovers that Carla {Sandra Milo} has only brought five suitcases. He's gotten her a nice room in a nice hotel. At lunch we discover that Carla's husband Luigi is miserable. In Carla's room, Guido scripts the action. He doesn't seem to be able to separate himself from his life as a director even in the bedroom. While he's sleeping after the "action", we watch a very complex transition into a dream starring Guido's mother and father. After the dream Guido dances down the hallway to an elevator filled with a Cardinal and his attendants. In the lobby, Guido is accosted by several eager, would be cast members. While drinking in the club afterwards, we dance a bit, meet even more strange characters and continue our discussion of the movie.
This progresses from confused scene to surreal scene to completely psychotic scene for the next many minutes. All of those scenes bear some sort of relationship to the film's main topic of filmmaking and to Guido's life. This creates a sort of tapestry of stylistically related scenes which actually begin to tell a story over time. It would be really difficult to explain more of that story here without telling you the entire thing. It visits Fellini's childhood and his fantasy as well as his real life. It shows the way he feels about some of the people in his life and many of his attitudes regarding religion, women, relationships, family and art as well as his impressions of the world around him. Basically, you can expect a surreal character study with an amazing amount of depth to it which will give you a lot of insight into the way one of the greatest filmmakers of all time sees himself.
