In 1963 autobiographical expressionism wasn’t new in literature or the plastic arts but in feature films it was unheard of, thought impossible because a) film is a collaborative art and b) film costs so much money. But due to the international success of La Dolce Vita, Federico Fellini was able to gain the necessary carte blanche to make a picture on the highly personal theme of an artist who makes films and is confronted by writer’s block. Fellini was able to extend his symbolisms into a narrative that alternates between the exterior and interior worlds of the protagonist Guido (Marcello Mastroianni) without warning, presenting an integrated reality of past and present – even the future perhaps – but within the usual beginning, middle, and end narrative structure.
“It was self-centered of me, I suppose, not only that my own ideas seemed more attractive to me, as our own ideas seem attractive to all of us, but I believed I could carry them out with greater feeling, I could stay with them and give them a unity because they were born of me, and I could achieve the greatest understanding and intimacy with my characters.” Federico Fellini in I, Fellini
Drama requires crisis and 8 1/2 starts with one: Guido suffers a claustrophobia attack when he finds himself trapped in his car in a tunnel during rush hour. As he claws at the windows, watched by the impassive passengers in the other stalled vehicles, he astralizes and floats clear of his car and the tunnel until he is over a beach, anchored by a rope as if he is a kite. Then, in the classic anxiety dream-fall, he crashes towards the beach...
Cut To: A doctor’s office where Guido is being tested.
Doctor: Well, what are you working on now? Another film without hope?
Now you recognize that Fellini is slyly creating an autobiographical commentary on his previous work as well as presenting the universal artist confronting a guilty past within a confusing present. Soon Guido is consulting with his writing collaborator, his producer, his cast, his mistress and various incidental characters at a health spa which also shares time and space with the film studio... and incidents from his past as well as his dreams and fantasies. The doctor recommends 300 milligrams of mineral water every day before breakfast and every second day a mudbath. The Spa is sited at a spring which is to be the opening sequence in his film. Meanwhile, the elderly and the infirmed line up for this elixir in a continual confluence of theatrical possibilities with his cast and family. Guido’s older friend Mario is there with his young mistress, his folly a more advanced case than Guido’s, a biological anomaly between the sexes, institutionalized in Italy but here presented as part of the multiple personae of the artist rather than a chauvinist double-standard. Guido meets his own mistress at the railway station, although her materialization is as much an erotic dream as it is a literal event. At the Spa, his collaborator harangues him about the script:
Collaborator: This film is merely a series of senseless episodes... oh, their ambiguous realism is perhaps quite amusing... but what is the writer’s real intention? To make us think? To frighten us?
Again, this elliptical commentary fits perfectly with Fellini’s own experience and the actual film you are watching. This sort of personalism, where the play within becomes the real structure, and the play without a dismantling of the old determinist model, is both existential and revolutionary. It abandons the fixed certainties of a religious universe in favour of the uncertain topographies of a psychological one where dreams and trauma shape the soul of the individual. Guido is often in narrow spaces, hotel corridors, tunnels, between buildings – even a cemetery where the ancient walls enclose a pasture that seems more like a forgotten roadway between past and present. Here he meets his mother at his dead father’s tomb and his father, in the bizarre logic of dream, is inspecting his own tomb. As they part, his father shakes his hand, sinks into the ground and disappears in a surreal event as natural as the propitious arrival of the Producer and Mario. Ergo: Guido might be dreaming or postulating a scene in the film he assembled this cast to make.
And so it goes. There are a number of amusing scenes which make no political distinction between dream and actuality, memory and the status quo. The Catholic Church is satirized, criticized, even chastised. Guido submits his script for approval, but the Cardinal says, “I don’t believe film is the proper medium for some subjects.” In the long sequence in the steam baths, Guido’s friends and associates exhort him to prostrate himself before the Cardinal, and he does, but the Cardinal simply says: “There is no salvation outside the Church.” The window closes on the Cardinal’s private steam room, effectively shutting Guido out.
“I was a little shocked when I saw on a church door a poster that had my name on it that had a black border... The poster said, ‘Let us pray for the salvation of the soul of Federico Fellini, public sinner.’” Federico Fellini in I, Fellini
