#0000C/#140: FELLINI, Federico: 8½ (1963)
FELLINI, Federico (Italy)
Commentary
8½ [1963]
Spine #0000C/Spine #140
DVD/Blu-ray
2001 synopsis
One of the greatest films about film ever made, Federico Fellini's 8½ (Otto e mezzo) turns one man's artistic crisis into a grand epic of the cinema. Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastoianni) is a director whose film — and life — is collapsing around him. An early working title for the film was La Bella Confusione (The Beautiful Confusion), and Fellini's masterpiece is exactly that: a shimmering dream, a circus, and a magic act. The Criterion Collection is proud to present the 1963 Academy Award winner for Best Foreign-Language Film — one of the most written about, talked about, and imitated movies of all time — in a beautifully restored new digital transfer. Disc Two features Fellini's rarely seen first film for television Fellini: A Director's Notebook (1969). Produced by Peter Goldfarb, this "imagined documentary" of Fellini on Fellini is a kaleidoscope of unfinished projects, all of which provide a fascinating and candid window into the director's unique and creative process.
2020 synopsis
One of the greatest films about film ever made, Federico Fellini’s 8½ marks the moment when the director’s always-personal approach to filmmaking fully embraced self-reflexivity, pioneering a stream-of-consciousness style that darts exuberantly among flashbacks, dream sequences, and carnivalesque reality, and turning one man’s artistic crisis into a grand epic of the cinema. Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido Anselmi, a director whose new project is collapsing around him, along with his life — including Anouk Aimée, Sandra Milo, and Claudia Cardinale. An early working titled for 8½ was The Beautiful Confusion, and Fellini’s masterpiece is exactly that: a shimmering dream, a circus, and a magic act.
138 minutes
Black & White
Black & White
Monaural
in Italian
1:85:1 aspect ratio
Criterion Release 2001/2020
Director/Writers
Story by Federico Fellini and Ennio Flaiano.
Fellini was 43 when he directed 8½.
Other Fellini films in the Collection:
#0000C/#189: The White Sheik (1952)
#0000C/#246: I Viteloni (1953)
#0000C/#219: La Strada (1954)
#0000C: Il Bidone (1955)
#0000C/#49: Nights Of Cabiria (1957)
#0000C/#733: La Dolce Vita (1960)
#0000C/#149: Juliet Of The Spirits (1965)
#0000C/#747: Fellini Satyricon (1969)
#0000C/#848: Roma (1972)
#0000C/#4: Amarcord (1973)
#0000C/#50: And The Ship Sails On (1983)
#0000C: Intervista (1987)
The Film
#0000C/#189: The White Sheik (1952)
#0000C/#246: I Viteloni (1953)
#0000C/#219: La Strada (1954)
#0000C: Il Bidone (1955)
#0000C/#49: Nights Of Cabiria (1957)
#0000C/#733: La Dolce Vita (1960)
#0000C/#149: Juliet Of The Spirits (1965)
#0000C/#747: Fellini Satyricon (1969)
#0000C/#848: Roma (1972)
#0000C/#4: Amarcord (1973)
#0000C/#50: And The Ship Sails On (1983)
#0000C: Intervista (1987)
The Film
There is nothing in the film universe as unique, unqualifyingly honest and truly spectacular as 8½.
From start to finish, the viewer is bombarded with images real and imagined — but they are true, as far the filmmaker is concerned.
Those who say it’s a confused mess (original title: “A Beautiful Confusion”) — the many actors and producers of this “film-within-a-film” — it is productive to take a good hard look at the editing. Dreamlike sequences permeate the film — from the beginning where film director Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni, as Fellini) is stuck in a traffic jam, smoke filling his car; he escapes to the roof where he flies away (in a Christ-like pose) until he is in the clouds. Claudia (Cardinale)’s agents pull him down from the clouds on a rope attached to Guido’s ankle. He falls into the ocean and then wakes up from the dream in a room at the spa, undergoing a health treatment.
There are frequent flashbacks to his childhood. His dismay at the contradictions of his strict Catholic upbringing are shown in multiple scenes — the most intense is when he and his friends are enticed by a rotund woman named Saraghina (Eddra Gale) who — for a coin — dances the rhumba for the schoolboys.
He is subsequently chased down by the priests and severely reprimanded.
As he tries to avoid the crowd of actors, writers and producers, constantly nagging him about the details of the film (to which he, himself, is completely lost in his confusion) — he is further distracted when both his mistress, Carla (a fantastic Sandra Milo) and his wife, Luisa (Anouk Aimée) show up at the spa.
Daumier (Jean Rougeul) — his “intellectual” collaborator on the screenplay, who never has anything positive to say, warns Guido that his Catholic guilt and attitude is not clearly expressed as Suetonius did for the Caesars. A nice, obscure reference.
He finally gets an audience with aging The Cardinal (Tito Masini, sole IMDb credit), who tells him plainly (in a steam bath) that there is “no salvation outside the Church.”
One of the best reality-to-fantasy moments come when Carla and Luisa spot each other — with Guido mildly protesting that he’s innocent — lots of angry talk — when all of a sudden the two rivals are walking arm-in-arm, complimenting each other.
The scene that follows has Guido surrounded by his harem — dozens of women — with one, Jacqueline Bonbon (Yvonne Casadei) — a burlesque dancer he met in Bologna — being ordered to the upstairs where the women who’ve passed Guido’s acceptable age limit are forced to live out their lives with only their memories.
Guido cracks a whip to keep everyone in line. His wife is super-compliant — saying she understands it all and gets busy washing the floor, doing the laundry, etc. Guido is wrapped up in a blanket, a parallel to one of the earlier childhood scenes.
Here Fellini is at his most honest reckoning about his philandering. He holds nothing back.
**
Perhaps the shining beacon of the film is Cardinale, a virginal dressed in all white in the scenes where he is fetishizing her. They are brief appearances, until she shows up to actually play herself in the film — Guido leaves an important screening of all the screen tests, where he is expected to make casting decisions, and drives off with Claudia where they have a truth session.
**
The finale is the joy, the climax to the all the confusion, when the entire cast gathers at a monumental, costly set of a huge, tall spaceship set. All the world press is there to question Anselmi, who ducks under a table to avoid the questions.
(This reminds me of the great Robert Bresson trying to make it through a presser at Cannes where his final film, L’argent (1983) [Spine #886] was being shown. The press poses either inane or unanswerable questions to him, and his bewilderment is evident.)
As the decision is made to cancel the film — the set starts to get torn down — Maurice (Ian Dallas), the clownish ringleader, organizes the band, the extras, the entire cast — as a little boy playing the piccolo leads other clown musicians.
Suddenly, Guido regains his confidence. He picks up the director’s bullhorn and shouts orders to everyone. He is ready to make his film.
FINE.
Film Rating (0-60):
The Booklets
58
The ExtrasThe Booklets
#140 only:
Twenty-two page booklet featuring essays by Fellini, longtime Fellini collaborator and critic Tullio Kezich, and film professor and author Alexander Sesonske.
Fellini:
“I never answer questions about my films because I think talking about the film before you do it weakens it, destroys it. The energy goes into the talking. Also, I have to be free to change. Sometimes with the press, as with strangers, I would simply tell them the same lie as to what the film was about — just to stop the questions and to protect my film.”
Kezich:
“Fellini’s fantasies were often prophetic, considering he ended up really living his story of a director unable to finish the film he had been hired to shoot. In 1967, during the pre-production of Il viaggio di G. Mastorna (“G. Mastorna’s Journey) and after an expensive replica of the Cologne Cathedral and other huge sets had been built in Cinecitta, he wrote a letter to producer Dino de Laurentis telling him he was quitting the project. The producer, wild with anger, demanded the judiciary repossession of the Fellinis’ villa in Fregene.”
Sesonske:
“One puzzle which remains unresolved for most viewers of 8½ is the meaning of ‘asa nisi masa.’ ‘Say the magic words then when the picture moves its eyes, we’ll all be rich.’ The words derive from a children’s game, like pig latin, in which one takes a word, doubles each of its vowels and then puts the letter ‘s’ between the two. So, run backwards, the root word is ‘anima,’ the Italian word for soul or spirit. Daumier dismisses all this as another idle childhood memory, devoid of all poetic inspiration. Yet in the film the utterance of ‘ana nisi masa’ works like magic, releasing the film of the joyful life of the farmhouse scene. And the childish promise is hardly idle; for it was when the picture moved its eye — when Fellini found his true métier in motion picture — that we all became enriched.”
Fellini (reprise):
“It’s always satisfying when you can turn something that goes wrong into something that is even better. If I saw that an actor like Broderick Crawford was a little drunk on the set, I tried to make it part of the story. If someone had just had an argument with his wife, I tried to use his upset state as part of his character. When I cannot correct the problem, I incorporate it.”
#0000C only: Essay by David Forgacs.
“The central character is a director in midcareer who is blocked creatively. The result is the most famous metafilm in the history of cinema, its title taken from Fellini’s calculation of the number of films he had made up till then — six full-length features and three ‘half’ films: Variety Lights, which he had codirected, and his episodes in the compilation films Love in the City (1953) and Boccaccio ‘70 (1962) — plus 8½ itself.”
154-page booklet featuring an introduction by Bilge Ebiri and essays by Michael Almereyda (Primary Sources); Colm Tóibin (Imagined Homes); Carol Morley (Life on Earth); Stephanie Zacharek (Tough Love); and Kogonada (There is No End).
Kogonada:
“You will spend the entire film interrogating your life, remembering, recalling, reconstructing, trying to find meaning in your existence. The lack and disappointment will be too much. Alone and confused, you will pull a gun from your pocket … There is no answer to this life … A shot fired … A new question to be asked … What is death? … Your head falls slowly to the ground. The wind blows, and we hear your voice in the air … ‘What is this sudden happiness that makes me tremble, that gives me strength and life? Forgive me, sweet creatures. I didn’t understand. I didn’t know … I feel like I’ve been set free. Everything seems so good, so meaningful. Everything is true. I wish I could explain, but I don’t know how … But this confusion is me, as I am, not as I’d like to be. I’m no longer afraid of telling the truth about what I don’t know, what I’m looking for, what I haven’t found. Only this way do I feel alive.’”
Commentary
#0000C/#140:
“The grand evening at the spa opens with the song “Gigolette” from The Dance of the Dragonflies by Franz Lehár. First performed in Milan in 1922, it’s a light musical comedy set in a chateau … again, Fellini seems to have taken us back in time … the music switches to the song “Cadillac,” and suddenly Barbara Steele (Gloria) vaults into the frame.”
The mélange of the commentators is perfect, coming from unique viewpoints. For example, Bachmann really was close to Fellini and was the still photographer on the set (you can see him in the final sequence) …
Introduction
From 2001 by filmmaker Terry Gilliam.
The Last Sequence
A 2003 documentary on Fellini’s lost alternate ending for 8½.
Not much remains of the original ending — just a few stills — which would have taken place on a train. Like the actual ending, everyone was dressed in white. It was an elegant dining car.
But the documentary goes further and digs into Fellini’s modus operandi.
Nino Rota: Between Cinema and Concert
A 1993 documentary about Fellini’s longtime composer.
Rota’s music is hugely important to the tone of the film.
Fellini also used pre-composed music, like Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” and Rossini’s overture to “Barber of Seville,” and Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Flowers,” from “The Nutcracker.” Rota even takes Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance” and refashions it.
In a chuckle to the art of filmmaking, Mastroianni finds himself whistling the Rossini, which we just heard on the soundtrack.
The documentary seems to be “searching” for Rota, implying that it is only the music itself which Rota wishes to present as his public face. We see clips of him working at the piano — but there aren’t many.
We see him as a child prodigy, writing an oratorio at 11; his travels to America, and his beginnings in the film industry, with a sweeping filmography of some very obscure films:
- MATARAZZO: Treno popolare (1933)
- CASTELANNI: Sotto il sole di Roma (1948)
- CASS: Glass Mountain (1949)
- MONICELLI: È arrivato il cavaliere! (1950)
- COLETTI: I sette dell’orsa maggiore (Hell Raiders of the Deep) (1953)
- VIDOR: War and Peace (1956)
- SCOTESE (Ulmer): I pirati di Capri (The Pirates of Capri) (1949)
- GENTILOMO: Appassionatamente (1954)
- DE FILIPPO: Napoli milionaria (Side Street Story) (1950)
- LATTUADA: Anna (1951)
- GUILLERMIN: Death on the Nile (1978)
His 13+ films for Fellini clearly indicates the depth of their collaboration. Rota was there from the beginning.
Interviews
From 2001 with actor Sandra Milo, filmmaker Lina Wertmüller, and DP Vittorio Storaro.
Milo: She had actually quit the business after starring in Rossellini’s Vanina Vanini (The Betrayer) (1961). Fellini called her in for a screen test for the role of Carla after having great difficulty casting the part. (We can see all this in the “screen test” scene.)
Wertmüller (who served as one of Fellini’s assistants): She talks about how Piero Gherardi (costume designer), Gianni di Venanzo (cinematographer) and Rota had many decades of work before Fellini — yet he brought out the best in all of them.
She discusses Fellini’s notorious disregard of the script:
“I remember Rougeul (the “critic”) — he was so happy and excited to be an actor in one of Fellini’s movies, that he was always pestering us for a script. And I’d ask, ‘which script do we give this guy?’ because Federico had a production script, but he kept changing it all the time, and he wasn’t telling anybody, least of all, the actors. So we ended up giving a bunch of lines to learn. He’d learn them and show up in the morning absolutely prepared. And I had to ask him, ‘did you learn your lines? Good. Now forget them, because they’re useless. These are your new lines.’ And I’d give him lines he had no time to learn, and so he had to improvise. And this is exactly what Federico wanted.’”
Storaro: How di Venanzo revolutionized lighting in cinema.
He also has a beautiful description of how 8½ works:
“The Indian guru Yogananda, in his journey within the different levels of consciousness, made a connection that the more … if we live in the life of consciousness, the more we can do down in our unconscious, the more we can go up in our over-conscious — that’s 8½! The deeper we go into his memory, the higher we go into his imagination.”
Rare photographs
From Bachmann’s collection.
Gallery
Of behind-the-scenes and production photos.
U.S. Theatrical trailer
#140 only:
Fellini: A Director’s Notebook
A 52-minute film by Fellini.
Gilliam, who — like Fellini — got his start as a cartoonist, is so delighted with this film, because it reaffirmed his notion that no film director really knows what he’s doing from start to finish.
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