2023-08-04 17:00:00
In 1993, for the 30th anniversary of eight and a half, Martin Scorsese – in his role as an ambassador of great world cinema, and in particular Italian – grants an interview on American television. “I wanted to show eight and a half to my 16-year-old daughter because it’s a very important film for me, he says, and then I realized that you absolutely mustn’t start with eight and a half ! We started with La Strada, Les Nuits de Cabiria, La Dolce Vita… and finally eight and a half. So that she sees the work and the journey of this artist who uses cinema as his tool of expression […], like a painter. »
In fact, the film bears the number of its production like a contemporary work of art: it is the eighth film by its author – the “half” is explained by a film that Fellini co-directed with Alberto Lattuada, The lights of the music hall, in 1950. Scorsese is right: it takes an overview of the work to understand eight and a half.
The taste of the dreamlike
First a press cartoonist, Federico Fellini entered cinema through neorealism alongside Roberto Rossellini. His first film is a comedy (The White Sheikh1952) and his first specialty, melodrama (The street1954 ; Cabiria Nights, 1957). With The sweet life (1960), he delivers an existential stroll that borrows from all genres, a film summed up with intense melancholy. The worldwide success, partly based on a misunderstanding – because the sweetness of life of the title is bitter and cruel –, tilts Fellini into another dimension, that of the star authors whose new film we are watching and discussing the facts and gestures.
READ ALSORoberto Rossellini: the four lives of the pope of Italian neorealismAfter 1963, the dreamlike taste that Fellini cultivated – he drew his dreams every morning – and his prodigious imagination were expressed in fantasy films in which he reinvented Italy’s literary past (Satyricon1969 ; Roma1972 ; Casanova1976), and in films metaphors of human existence full of symbolic images – Eros of The city of women, 1980; Thanatos of And the ship goes1983.
eight and a half basically mixes the two tendencies – realistic and fantastical –, achieving a form of perfect balance. “The camera moves like in a choreography, he uses deep blacks against bright whites, he mixes memories and dreams, explains Scorsese. But there is no need to disentangle the true from the false. You have to let go. »
spirit of childhood
“With Fellini, we don’t ask for the script, says Marcello Mastroianni to an audience of students in 1988. Besides, there is no script. You have to present yourself as a child, ready for anything. With him, it’s really a game.” The special grace of eight and a half is to breathe this spirit of childhood into a story that could be marked with the seal of vanity.
READ ALSORome – Come on Fellini! After all, the drama of Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni), double of Fellini whose hat and graying hair he wears, is to have had so much success with his previous films that he is expected at the turn, crushed by the media attention and the love of fans, overwhelmed by the French intellectual who deconstructs his work to the point of disgust and by the journalists who harass him with questions about Marxism.
The film opens with a nightmare scene – Guido locked in a car – which the character escapes by soaring into the air. He becomes a sort of giant kite that floats in the sky of dreams and beyond… But soon the heaviness of real life comes to catch up with him. Guido stays in a spa town, hopes for a visit from his muse (Claudia Cardinale), meets a cardinal who reminds him of the absurdity of his aspirations: “Who told you that we come into the world to be happy? »
Amorous fantasies
The images of childhood collide, with the duo of loving parents but disappointed by their son’s failings, amorous fantasies, an evocation of professional life – embodied in particular by the characters of the producer and the production manager -, friends, the duo formed by the official wife, played by Anouk Aimée, and the perfectly rounded mistress, Sandra Milo, and dreams, of course, lots of dreams.
Unforgettable images abound: the parade of characters from Guido’s life on the beach – reminiscent of Rimini, Fellini’s home town –, the harem that brings together the women in his life, the nightmarish traffic jam in the sequence of opening.
“This film made me understand, says cartoonist Milo Manara, who collaborated with Fellini on an album (The Voyage of G. Mastorna, Casterman, 1996), the importance of figurative art, how cinema is its heir. Fellini then appeared to me as the equal of Raphael, of Michelangelo. Elsewhere, Alberto Moravia evokes James Joyce, comparing Guido to Leopold Bloom. Way to say that with eight and a half Fellini achieved mythological greatness.
#Federico #Fellini