8 1/2 (1963)

Directed by: Federico Fellini
Written by: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, Brunello Rondi
Starring: Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimee, Eddra Gale, Barbara Steele 
Rated: NR

When we think of the "greats" of the cinema there are a few who naturally spring to mind: Kubrick, Copolla, Bergman, Ozu, Kurasawa. Renoir, Orwell, Ford. I don't know if any, however, meet the shear might and inventiveness of Federico Fellini who for all his flaws and all his indulgences captures the vitality, the sexual drive, the passion and the flair of the cinema better than all the others. I wonder though, with all of these men who broke the bone and sucked the marrow of film, did any of them doubt themselves and hate their work in the way Fellini did? Did they have that suffocating lack of faith in their artistic worth? Could they create a masterpiece and never see the forest for the trees? If they did, none of them were brave enough to speak their fears aloud in the way Fellini did in his monumental "8 1/2". If there has ever been a better film made about the creative process then I haven't seen it.

It is at this point that Fellini began to dip into his surrealist, emotive phase, choosing to discard his episodic yet contiguous pieces in favor of work which flowed more organically and relied on feeling and instinct as opposed to traditional structure. This is nowhere near as bizarre as his later work, but from an opening sequence in which our protagonist, Guido (Marcello Mastroianni), is found trapped in a car in a traffic jam, only to end up floating above the clouds, a rope tied to his ankle like a kite, there is a definite sense of claustrophobia and restlessness, moods which will come to dominate the rest of the piece

Guido is a filmmaker at the peak of his career, and Guido is in a creative slump. With studio executives and all of the women in his life harping on him to make another film, and with a repugnant, uber expensive space shuttle being constructed for a film which he has yet to even pen, Guido finds himself under stifling pressure for which he is not able to cope with.

One by one, woman and woman and woman is introduced to us, a continuation of themes brought up in previous Fellini movies. The man is both obsessed and dreadfully afraid of the fairer sex, and here Fellini in the form of Guido is pushed and pulled to follow his ambitions--to have sex, to relax, to explore, to work until he dies. The hapless man knows only that the well is dry. There are people who are naturally creative; they aren't tethered by the awful plague called Shame, but occasionally the constant rays of an ever-attentive audience burns up the spring, something which needs the precious raindrops of time to replenish.

Guido's rain should supposedly come from a retreat to the healing waters of some mountain resort, but the unforgiving nature of his business does not allow the mineral springs to take their effect. A roadblock is a roadblock and Fellini's message is that continually driving more cars into the blockade will not clear the wreckage and let the ambulance through. It is as much a sorrowful look at old-age and the dread of worthlessness as it is a manifestation of feelings of incompetency.

Fellini did what nearly all other directors would have been terrified to do: he took his insecurities and he found a way to capture them in scenes. In dreams and fantasies and memories he personified his doubts into the beautiful abstractness of women which have so long puzzled and fascinated him, and in this way he was able to cope with his own sense of inadequacy and present for the masses the black dog of writer's block (or whatever the term may be for a director--I assume it isn't much different).

Tracing Guido/Fellini's life we travel from childhood through marriage and possibly divorce and we observe the women who guided and molded Guido in the macho snob who is his own greatest failure. We cannot hate him, of course. He acts out and pushes others away because he is afraid. The internal conflict in Mastroianni's eyes is understated yet very moving.

Fellini takes emotions and brings them into tangible forms. In a way they seem almost like scenes of my own life. That is Fellini's rare gift, I think, to turn the abstract and the fantastic into something relatable. We might not truly understand the implications of a scene and may surely bring it out of context, but somehow his work--in whatever small form--relates to us and seems to find its way into fitting into the rest of the story. It is his universality that makes Fellini a great and his arguments something worth listening to. I know that as a hopeful writer I find comfort in his feelings of inaptness. I look at the perfection of so many of his movies and it makes me think that perhaps nothing deserves to be made if its maker didn't at some point believe that it was worth nothing. For only then do you know that he found the inspiration and the drive to correct his mistakes and construct something truly wonderful for his audience.

4/4