OK, I'll admit right off the bat that I've seen this one before. Normally the "Just Watched" tag denotes a film I've just watched for the first time and consists of my initial reactions to the movie and thoughts after the first viewing. I watched Fellini's beautiful masterpiece 8 1/2 a few years ago, but I don't remember it because I was completely stoned out of my mind, which means I appreciated the visual ingenuity of the film but wasn't paying as much attention to the plot as I probably should have been. Still liked it a lot though, just watched it again and here we are. Anyways, 8 1/2 is brilliant in the fact that it is basically a movie about a movie and the movie the movie is about is 8 1/2. Seriously. Charlie Kaufman must have been channeling Fellini when he created his own meta masterpiece Synecdoche, New York, which is sort of similar in concept, but also incredibly brilliant in its own right and worth watching several times. I'll write about that one later though, this post is about Fellini.
In summary, 8 1/2 follows the struggles of a film director with writer's (or director's) block. He's achieved success in the past and has huge plans for his next film, but has no idea how to proceed. People are watching him and he doesn't want to let them down, but his greatest concern is creating a masterpiece, an emotional, personal, flawless piece of work. The feelings of Guido Anselmi, the protagonist, are established right from the start. The film begins with an ethereal dream sequence. First his car begins to fill with smoke and suffocate him while everyone nearby stares enthused, and then he flies through the sky only to find himself floating above a beautiful beach, and subsequently pulled down as he desperately tries to free himself from the rope that tethers him to the ground and the people below him who want to bring him down for good. These opening scenes symbolize Guido's (and Fellini's) desperation for creative freedom, to be able to create something personal and perfect without outside interference. Guido is constantly inundated by people asking him how his work is going, trying to help him speed things along, or attempting to change things about his film altogether. A writer Guido asks to edit his screenplay eviscerates his work, saying it has no point, no conflict or statement to give it a purpose. No one seems to understand his level of creativity and what he is trying to do. As a result of this, Guido spends more and more time in his own brain, closed off from the noise of the outside world. People talk, but he's lost in thought, barely listening. This, and some very clever framing and cinematography illustrate his separation from others very well.
One of the things that makes 8 1/2 succeed so well at what it does is the intimacy in which it is made. Every thought of Guido's is made clear to the viewer, we get to explore his very dreams. Abrupt dream sequences and unannounced flashbacks may create a feeling of disorientation at first, but they also give us incredible insight into Guido's mind and accurately represent the unpredictable nature of memory and thought. Seeing his relations with his parents and the escapist fantasies of his subconscious mind let us project ourselves onto him extremely easily. Anyone who has struggled with any form of artistic block should be able to relate. And that's really one of the main points of the film, isn't it? That art is more than just production. It's expression of one's inner self created by their experiences and personality. Guido's producers try to stifle this creativity, claiming that his vision is arrogant or flawed, inconsistent with the state of cinema and what is culturally accepted to make a financially successful film. They tell him his film in inaccessible to the audience, his expression is indiscernible to the layman who will watch it. Therein lies a dilemma as well. Should Guido be creating this film for his own sake, or for the sake of the viewer? If the movie is perfectly consistent with his vision for it and turns out to be exactly what he wanted it to be, does that make is a success even if no one else understands it? Who is art for? The creator or the audience? Hollywood would say the audience, but this is a film of passion created by Fellini, born from the depths of his own creative mind. I, for one, think it's pretty cool that he took us along for the ride.
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