Having trouble dealing with reality and fantasy? Are the forces of discontent overwhelming? Can daydreams and memories at least give us clues to the elusive breakthrough gestating within the psyche? Can we find a way back to ourselves? As one actor remarks to Guido in 8 1/2: “…You’re free but you must learn to choose. You don’t have much time. And you have to hurry.”
Derek Malcolm:Later, critics referred to Jung, Kierkegaard, Proust, Gide, Pirandello, Bergman and Resnais in burrowing for his influences, and Alberto Moravia insisted Guido was an Italian version of Joyce's Leopold Bloom. Fellini strenuously denied all this, though it is true that many others were making subjective films around the same time, notably Bergman (The Silence) and Kazan (The Anatolian Smile). 'Certain issues are in the air,' was all Fellini would say. Read More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/1999/apr/22/derekmalcolmscenturyoffilm.derekmalcolm image:http://qwikstep.eu/search/fellini-8.html
Frederico Fellini’s 8 1/2 is a film filled with unreality: dreams, daydreams and memories.A director finds his own life transforming into surreal episodes that blur and bridge the world between fantasy and reality. While Fellini was no stranger to employing extravagance to enhance his story, 8 1/2 uses the extravagance as a fulcrum in the battle between reality and fantasy. In 8 1/2, Guido, the director is trapped in his own world as a filmmaker where he is forced to his own compromises and his ensuing doubt is implied to compromise and an indirect link back to the certainties of religion. The escape that Guido has is in his flashbacks and fantasy yet once they collide with reality, it becomes more troubling to him. The brilliance of the script is premised on the simple but effective concept of the collision of fantasy and reality, and Guido’s outward coolness with his inner anguish, his likability and his unsympathetic flaws. Ultimately,its a film about escapism through a man desperate to uncover answers in his own reality.
---He also wants to create something meaningful to people — something truthful. Nothing purely escapist, but still effectively consoling. Holding himself to this standard, he is able to achieve nothing artistically with regard to his “upcoming film,” completely unable to satisfy himself, his producer or anyone else in his life for that matter. The result of “8 1/2″ is a discussion of the purpose and role of art. Is it purposeful or purposeless? Meaningful or ultimately meaningless? The surrealist quality of the film reflects the chaos of addressing that very subject. There is a futility in attempting to create art that fully and completely encompasses and reflects truth and reality and that in itself is the point of art. It’s the beginning of what could be an endless discussion and that’s yet another characteristic of exceptional art.---Read More:http://moviemusereviews.com/8-12-1963-4-55-stars/
Gritty Italian neorealism tempered with a love of the sheerly theatrical, with a little more heft on the theatrical. 8 1/2 is a film that is relevant to almost all of contemporary art.
With la Dolce Vita, Fellini’s first international success, his subject matter stayed with contemporary Italy, but for the first time it was upper-class, well-to-do Italy, and his treatment was much more symbolic in method and elegant in manner. The Fellini who had apparently been bursting previously with things to express about the poor and exploited, and had said them in the most forthright way possible-Il Bidone and The Nights of Cabiria- had been replaced by a Fellini concerned with the problems in lives of luxury and leisure, and was expressing them in a nearly rococo style.
---You can see Fellini pushing the boundaries of filmmaking with every frame. Fellini is going crazy, experimenting with camera angles, switching scenes without any sort of transition, weaving in and out of fantasy and flashback without a moment's notice and filling the screen with random absurdity. And it is an avant garde film is that brave enough (or foolish enough) to actually mock avant garde films! The strange thing is that it all somehow works - probably because it is so funny. I have always been a big fan of random, absurd humor - and it is interesting that this humor which is so commonplace now was once considered the height of art. You watch "Zoolander" with its Breakdance Fighting and Walk-Off, you watch the Centaur dream in "Stepbrothers," you watch the opening dance number in "Kung Fu Hustle," you watch half of Woody Allen's movies...---Read More:http://videopub-film.blogspot.com/2011/01/8-12.html
In 1963, he made 81/2 and the picture that he made after a three year silence was about a director who couldn’t settle on a subject for his next film. The story written by Fellini and Ennio Flaiano , and the film script by the two with the aid of two former collaborators, Tullio Pinelli and Brunello Rondi. The task of the writers was to aid Fellini in putting on paper some material from his innermost self, a script from which he could make a cinematic journey alone. The result was the film world’s best work about an artist’s desperation as artist.
The title itself is a declaration. While the picture was in production, Fellini gave it the working tag 8 1/2 merely as an opus number, since his previous output of features and short films totaled seven and a half and he couldn’t think of a title. The dilemma about the film fits the picture perfectly. Fellini claimed that the film was not autobiographical, at least no more than any of his films; that, although many of the details come from his past, it was only shortly before the start of shooting that he decided to make Guido a director.
---This progression—from Guido in reality to his daydream to the critic’s assessment—is copied later when Guido fantasizes about his own Harem. While sitting with wife Luisa and dealing with her and Rosella’s disparaging comments about Guido’s recently arrived mistress Carla, Guido escapes this domestic nightmare by imagining the two talking honestly and then dancing together. This transitions into the elaborate Harem scene, involving all of the women Guido has ever had sexual thoughts about. Here, Guido is his own sort of Cardinal: he determines whether or not his first sexual fantasy should go “upstairs” or not. Guido does end up mixing the sacred and profane love casually, directly correlating the Catholic Church and who decides goes up to heaven to his erotic dancer who should go upstairs. After telling his table of women that, “happiness is being able to tell the truth without ever making anybody suffer” (yet another layer of self-reflexivity Fellini adds to the process of filmmaking), and watching Luisa accept and cope with his existence, the daydream ends. Immediately after, the hovering critic analyzes the work: “you called to solve a problem for which there is no solution.” Guido promptly imagines bodyguards hanging the critic.---Read More:http://dobbscinemablog.blogspot.com/2010/07/8-12-meaning.html
But, from the title trouble on, it takes a considerable stretch to believe that this film about a director who cannot resol
is ideas about a film was made by a director who was teeming with ideas and just happened to choose this one. In fact, Fellini’s slow progress toward making his hero a director, thus in at least some degree facing his own life as a form of reality project, has, a certain parallel wit the internals of 8 1/2, and makes the film even more autobiographical.
Guido, the protagonist, -Marcello Mastroianni- is a director in his forties who has already done some pre-production work on his next picture but doesn’t have anything like a final script and can’t clarify his ideas. He is at a spa, resting and working. With Guido are some of his production crew, some of his associates,and various actors who are already engaged for the film or want to be, because at least part of the still inchoate picture is to be shot nearby. Not far from the spa, a huge steel tower, a sort of spaceship launching pad, has already been erected for the film, one of the few matters that, presumably, Guido is sure of.
---Christopher Null:Of course, let's call a spade a spade -8 1/2 is indeed a cryptic work full of ridiculous metaphor and overt symbolism (mother/whore imagery and the like). To truly appreciate the film it needs to be viewed on its own terms -- the outrageous work of an immortal director, experimenting with the medium, taking advantage of everyone around him, and sending up his very profession in what is probably the biggest lambasting the film industry has ever received. (The Player is a close second.)---Read More:http://www.filmcritic.com/reviews/1963/8-12/
ADDENDUM:
While 8 1/2 proved to be another successful film for Fellini which won him a few Oscars as well as other international prizes and acclaim. To many, it was the last true masterpiece from Fellini though the director still manage to make some great films until his death in 1993. In the years since the release of 8 1/2, the film did manage to influence many young film directors including two American directors. Woody Allen does a variation of 8 1/2 for 1980′s Stardust Memories where Allen admits to ripping off the film entirely. Terry Gilliam was also influenced by 8 1/2 which he used for his 1985 masterpiece Brazil where he originally called the film 1984 1/2 as an ode to Fellini. Gilliam also appeared in an interview about 8 1/2 for its 2001 Criterion DVD release. Read More:http://www99.epinions.com/review/mvie_mu-1000142/content_216254353028
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Here then—8 ½, JULIET OF THE SPIRITS, and even LA DOLCE VITA tried to propose this backward walk, tried to identify the pathologic conditioning. What are the myths that must be destroyed? Well, the ideals, the ideals in general. I think that “the ideal”, the idealized life, the idealized concepts can be extremely dangerous for our mental health, and it is what I try to express in my films.” In other words, our major obstacle to living in the present is some “ideal” that has been suggested to us as to where we should be as opposed to where we are. It is an insidious enemy—this thought that where we are presently is not good enough.
Robert Johnson and Jerry M. Ruhl write in their book CONTENTMENT: “Our society teaches us that the only reality is the one we can hold onto. It values outer experiences and material possessions. Accordingly, we look for contentment ‘out there’ and live with a ‘just as soon as’ mentality. ‘Just as soon as I get my work done, I can relax.’ ‘Just as soon as I get married, I will be content’ or conversely, ‘Just as soon as my divorce comes through, I will be content.’ (etc.) …And so our contentment slips through our fingers like quicksilver—another time, a different place, a better circumstance.” Read More:http://buckleybulletin.blogspot.com/2011/03/considering-ideal.html
… “Advertising infiltrates nearly every corner of modern life, from television and radio commercials to newspapers, magazines, bumper stickers, billboards, park benches, T-shirts, the Internet—even our telephones. All these messages are designed to manipulate us into craving some product or service. We are pulled by desires and pushed by fears. Madison Avenue and the mass media are powerful purveyors of discontent.” Read More:http://buckleybulletin.blogspot.com/2011/03/considering-ideal.html
Read More:http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/my-voyage-to-italy/153
Read More:http://www.criterionforum.org/DVD-review/8-12-blu-ray/the-criterion-collection/656
Read More:http://www.noripcord.com/reviews/film/8%C2%BD
Read More:http://moviesonly-abby.blogspot.com/2010/05/frederico-fellinis-masterpiece-8-12.html
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