Context
Although 8 1/2 (1963)
is director Federico Fellini's most widely recognized achievement,
he was already internationally renowned when he began working on
it in late 1960. He had directed La Strada (1954), which
won a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar when it was released in the
United States three years later, and La Dolce Vita (1960), which
had just been released, had won the Palme d'Or (“the Golden Palm,”
the award for best film) at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960,
and would go on to earn four Oscar nominations. Not surprisingly,
as soon as Fellini began jotting his first notes for his “eighth-and-a-half”
film (8 1/2 follows
six feature-length films and three short films and collaborations),
production companies, costume designers, photography directors,
and flocks of actresses were hanging around him, eager to stake
a claim in the next hit. Cineriz, the production company that had
worked with Fellini twice before, expected him to create another
cinematic masterpiece. Before Fellini had even outlined the plot
of the film, the machinery of its production was already in motion.
Fellini was in his early forties, already anxious about
typical midlife concerns regarding family, aging, and professional
virility, and he felt enormous pressure. This stress was so pervasive
that the making of the film became its own principal influence.
Fellini had intended the film to describe the crisis of an artist,
a journalist, or even a lawyer who is tormented by matrimonial,
spiritual, and creative challenges, but he didn't know how to design
the story. La Strada and La Dolce Vita had
given Fellini a reputation for ingenuity, and he once again wanted
to create something wholly new, as if to prove that he was still
in his prime. But as he witnessed the steady physical construction
of the film—the sets, the cast, the lighting—he felt increasingly
unsure about how he would tell its story. At one point, Fellini
decided to quit. When he was in the middle of writing a letter of
resignation, however, members of the crew happened to congratulate
him on his imminent accomplishment, and the gesture convinced him
that he could not abandon the project. Instead, he was inspired
by the drama of the moment and decided that the film would be about
a director who wants to escape the making of his own movie.
Although 81/2 draws
on Fellini's directorial experience, it is also clear that Fellini
modeled the personal life of the film's protagonist, Guido Anselmi,
on his own. Guido's experience in the film is accented with memories
of his childhood, and these sequences are consistent with Fellini's
biography. Fellini was born on January 20, 1920,
and grew up in Rimini, a city in northern Italy on the coast of the
Adriatic Sea. His parents, his father a traveling salesman and his mother
a housewife, sent him to parochial school, whose influence appears
in two of 8 1/2's
memory sequences. When Fellini was twelve, a circus visited Rimini,
and when it left, Fellini went with it. He found work performing
as a clown but soon returned to his parents, only to suffer a restless
adolescence in the quiet city and leave home again when he was seventeen.
This second time, Fellini followed a vaudeville troupe and earned
his keep by writing comedy sketches for it. After the troupe performed
in Florence, he stayed to write for humor magazines, then went to
Milan, where he worked as a cartoonist. The dictator Benito Mussolini
had banned American cartoons, so Fellini drew bootleg versions of
them.
Fellini spent the years of World War II in Rome, where
he avoided the military draft and continued to write pieces for
humor magazines, as well as for Cico and Pallina, a
radio drama. The woman who played Pallina was Giulietta Masina,
a fledgling screen actress who would become Fellini's wife and the
star of many of his films, including La Strada and Nights
of Cabiria (1956). They
married in October 1943 and settled in Rome.
Masina continued to look for small movie roles, while Fellini spent
his days on the Via Veneto, a luxurious and lively Roman street,
peddling caricatures to passersby. Through Vittorio Mussolini, son
of the dictator and a close friend of Fellini's, Fellini met director
Roberto Rossellini. Fellini agreed to help Rossellini write his
film Open City, which Rossellini completed in 1945.
Open City is a major film of the so-called
neorealist era, which capped a celebrated tradition of Italian filmmaking
that had developed since the turn of the twentieth century. The
history of Italian film begins with the Kinetografo Alberini,
a motion-picture camera patented by Filoteo Alberini in 1895—an
invention overshadowed by that of the Lumière Brothers' revolutionary
Cinématographe (the first widely used camera, printer, and projector)
around the same time. Alberini contributed to the Italian trend
toward melodramatic costume films, which soon gave way to commedia
brillante—light comedy that drew from Italy's lavish opera
tradition. Italian realism followed, inspired by the stories and
plays of Giovanni Verga, who wrote pastoral stories about common
folk such as hunters and fishermen. As World War II began, the Italian
market was inundated with Fascist-sponsored propaganda films. These were
accompanied by “white telephone” films, whose superficial plots,
mostly confined to glamorous apartment interiors, ignored the disastrous
political climate. These films were the impetus to Italian neorealism,
which was as much of a sociopolitical movement as a film genre.
Neorealist directors like Luchino Visconti (whose 1943 Ossessione inspired
the “neorealist” label), Roberto Rossellini, and Vittorio De Sica,
disgusted by the irresponsibility of making lighthearted films during
the humanitarian crises of Mussolini's reign and the Holocaust,
began to make films with socially relevant messages. In addition
to having a moral philosophy, the neorealist films often used ordinary-looking
or amateur actors, were shot on location with natural light, and
underwent constant revisions during production that reflected the
director's experience as he worked with the film. These qualities
were directly opposed to the reigning philosophy of Hollywood at
the time, which bubbled with superstars like Elizabeth Taylor and
Cary Grant and was still carefully timing the dramatic moments of
its artificial (but often thrilling) plots.
After Open City, Rossellini asked Fellini
to collaborate with him on his 1946 film Paisan,, the
weighty theme of which—the social plight of Italy—strayed even further
from Hollywood drama and secured Fellini's reputation as an excellent
screenwriter and director. During the 1950s,
however, Fellini strayed from Rossellini's neorealism, trading sociopolitical
virtue for artistic exploration. He did, however, continue to include
ordinary actors and situations in his films and kept his scripts
dynamic throughout production (which was certainly the case for 8 1/2).
Before 8 1/2, Fellini's
most critically appreciated achievements were La Strada, Nights
of Cabiria, and La Dolce Vita. What
critics applauded in these films, as well as in 8 1/2, was
Fellini's talent for ironic social commentary, the elegance with
which he merged fantasy and reality, and his sense of humor, evoked
most memorably by his exaggerated characters. As in Fellini's previous
films, titillating comedy pervades 8 1/2, though
its prevailing themes involve crisis and frustration. These themes,
which include marital and spiritual infidelity, aging, and creative
stagnancy, mirrored Fellini's own life at the time. Fellini's special
intimacy with the protagonist and the plot contributes to 8 1/2's
organically subjective style of filming, which is perhaps what critics
appreciated most. Just as three major novels—Gustave Flaubert's Madame
Bovary, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and
James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—transformed
the novel by focusing on the psychology of the individual, so was 8 1/2 revolutionary
in the film world for its unwavering preoccupation with Guido's
thoughts. 8 1/2's
influence has been seen in countless European and American films
directed from a subjective viewpoint, such as Woody Allen's Annie
Hall (1977). In 8 1/2, the
hero Guido's consciousness is remarkably present in every passage,
not only in the fantasy or dream sequences. All sounds, sights,
and actions are immediately subject to Guido's interpretation, as
if his reactions are a filter between his world and Fellini's lens.
No one had filmed in such a way before. For that reason, perhaps
above all others, 8 1/2 became
a favorite of film critics, winning the 1964 Oscar
for Best Foreign Film and the first prize in the 1963 Moscow
Film Festival.
