by Louis Williams

Created on: April 01, 2010   Last Updated: March 19, 2011

A Lion of Film in Winter: Fellini’s 8 ½ (1980)

This film is like a nightmare in which you find yourself facing a huge audience which expects you to entertain them, teach them, explain to them, and discover that you have nothing to say, are utterly unprepared, have forgotten your subject, have forgotten the occasion, are a total, embarrassing blank waiting for the derisive, hideous laughter to start.

Thus Marcello Mastroianni, as Guido Anselmi, an Italian film director much like the Fellini who directed this film, who has a twenty million dollar project, dozens of actors, technical crews of all sorts, all of them waiting for the magic words from him telling them when, how, and where to start. He stumbles, reassures investors, dodges questions and racks his brain, because he hasn’t an idea in his head.

Not, indeed, that his head is empty. It positively whirls with scenes, memories, impulses, but none of them is a doorway into a narrative that he might film.  He needs something that will give him ninety minutes on the screen, and does not, cannot, find it.

What Fellini give us is one hundred and thirty eight minutes of sheer frustration, in which Guido upends his life only to find nothing he can use. Of course, what he really gives us is an essay on the workings of a creative mind as well as a look at the hodgepodge each of us carries around in his head out of which we fashion what life and life-story we can, out of which, too, has come everything, every craft, every trade, every art form, every technique that makes mankind unique. Man is a maker and in 8 ½ we see his tools.

Such as the gigantic woman who, when Guido was a child, danced for the Brindisi boys on the beach, huge, mysterious, accommodating, someone the youthful Guido, in his church school uniform can’t resist, even though the fathers punish him for his interest in her. Punishment matters not at all to him. As soon as he’s free again, he goes back to the beach to watch her dance again.

Such as the sequence in which Guido is once again a child lovingly bathed by his mother and his aunts and then by all his lovers, a long string of women who have been loving to him, with bath salts when he was a child, with their bodies, later.

Such as the image/reality/fantasy of the side show magician, natty in his cutaway coat and top hat, someone Guido sees as a counterpart.

        

Such as the young girl, played by Claudia

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