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The film "Eight and a Half" tells the story of a director who encounters creative bottlenecks while conceiving his ninth film. He had a strong desire to succeed, but was unable to get rid of the siege from his wife, lover, producer, journalist, actor, church and other aspects, and finally his mind fell into extreme confusion and failed to complete the film.
He has gradually lost self-control of his work and life, during which he is sometimes in reality, sometimes in fantasy and dreams, and the film successfully reflects his mental journey of rebellion and escape in consciousness.
Fellini and Neorealism
Fellini insisted that he belonged to neorealism, except that he included human psychology, consciousness, and even dreams in the realm of reality.
In my opinion, this inner realism is not only a departure from Italian neorealism, but a different kind of sublimation and expansion.
For Fellini, the film not only pays attention to the external encounters of the characters, but more importantly, by expressing the inner movement of the characters, humanistic care for the rise and fall of their fate.
His fantastical introspective filming style is perfectly reflected in the film "Eight and a Half", which will be detailed later in this article.
The external reality expressed in "Eight and a Half"
The most striking thing about "Eight and a Half" is its dreamlike film style, where a large number of reality, dreams, fantasy and stream-of-consciousness scenes blend together, making the whole film present a strong surreal style.
The form is not original – the flashbacks, streams of consciousness and even the current popular methods of crossing are actually reflected in the masterpieces of many European masters;
However, this film can also be called a work that pushes Freudian psychoanalysis and stream-of-consciousness expression to the extreme - the eleven flashbacks and fantasy fragments in the film have become a model for studying the combination of psychoanalytic theory and film language in Fellini and even European art films.
"Eight and a Half Parts" reflects the director's extremely honest and accurate view of the real contradictions and spiritual crises faced by the high-level intellectual class in Italy and even the entire European society in the mid-twentieth century, both in terms of character setting and dialogue.
If almost all of Fellini's films are filled with recurring imagery, such as noisy or absurd circus performances, deserted and dark roads, coasts full of hidden fears, clowns of all stripes with little to do with the plot, etc.
As if people were watching the same film, "Eight and a Half" can be called his most straightforward and simple masterpiece of self-expression - the image setting of the hero Quito in the film alludes to the broad European middle class and intellectual community at that time.
However, its prototype is more based on director Fellini himself. In terms of the title, "Eight and a Half" alludes to the seven feature films Fellini has directed before this and two episodes that are slightly equal to half of the film.
And the actor of the film, director Quito's setting, his living and working environment, the surrounding characters, etc. also allude to Fellini himself. This film adopts a cyclic set-in-set polyphonic narrative structure, and develops two relatively parallel psychological trajectories from Quito's subjective perspective:
First, Quito encountered a depletion of inspiration in the creation of films, and the anxiety was full of hardship and despair; The second is that when he gets along with his wife, lover, and muse (one of the actors), he gradually loses self-control and is very unsatisfactory in his emotional situation.
Here, we can think of the circumferential polyphonic structure shown in the film as follows: Fellini tells the story of director Quito - Quito tells the film he conceived - and this film tells Fellini himself.
At the end of the film, the director puts down the megaphone in his hand and walks into the imaged characters, dancing in a circle with them, which also indicates that from Fellini himself to the origin of the circumference.
The characteristics of narrative structure and narrative mode indicate the focus of exploration in the content of the film. "Eight and a Half Parts" is like a social kaleidoscope, allowing all kinds of people to flash in front of the camera one by one in a very expressive way.
For example, the film shows the nursing home scenery and the long shot of the characters from 6 and a half minutes, and with a passionate symphony, it shows the audience an Italian ukiyo-e painting from the mid-twentieth century.
Fellini's habit of using dramatic shots to reveal playful and slightly absurd irony is vividly displayed in this film.
Facing his surroundings, Quito faced with the contradiction between ideals and reality, was confused and desperate, and could only escape tiredly; He wants to live carefree like a child, eager to solve all the problems around him irresponsibly.
It is Fellini's direct feeling of the kind of people that Quito represents: the group of modern European intellectuals. This collective struggle and anxiety of the soul, the powerless rush of seeking a way out but without direction, is Fellini's continuation of the realism of Italian neorealism.
Without hiding or pretentiously, facing people's spiritual crises and difficulties. Peel back the surface of the exaggerated and gorgeous audiovisual language of "Eight and a Half".
Hidden is Fellini's insight into the reality of Italy and Europe as a whole. It's just that he takes a more personal microscopic approach than describing the grand social landscape.
The psychological reality explored in "Eight and a Half"
Cinema is a natural need for Fellini, and when the pursuit of visual imagination prompts, through the analysis of "Eight and a Half Parts", the author believes that Fellini was influenced by French surrealism, but it is different from it.
Surrealism only expresses intentions and fantasy spaces in the subconscious realm that do not have any color of reality, and strives to create something more real than reality, without the help of stories or any other rational methods, which often confuses the viewer.
The reality embodied in surrealist films is more ambiguous and obscure, and even above the surface characteristics of reality, but Fellini's surrealist approach.
It is simply the service of the truth that one's own heart follows, which is the reinforcement and interpretation of the representation of external reality, even if it is contrary to external reality, it is still a psychological reality that extends more breadth and depth on the basis of external reality.
For example, in the film, Quito fantasizes about his wife and lover living in harmony, and then he sits in a harem like a sultan, enjoying absolute authority over women.
This inner desire is a kind of empty wind - it is precisely because real life, whether it is a wife, a lover, or an actress with whom he has an affair, has escaped his control, which makes Quito anxious, but unable to resolve the contradiction, so that almost absurd fantasies appear.
It can be seen that surreality for Fellini is not an end and destination, but a means and a way, and in this way it expresses reality more profoundly.
So, what kind of inner reality is Fellini following? From the clown plot that he quotes in almost every film, we can glimpse one or two.
His documentary "Joker" is a complete explanation of why he is so fascinated by clowns, and what he thinks is the world of clowns is actually the perspective of the real world.
For Fellini, clowns are divided into two categories - "white-faced clowns" and "Augustus": "The former represents elegance, cuteness, harmony, intelligence, sobriety, perfection in morality, the only, unquestionable divine... And Augustus confronted it..."
"Augustus, the child who pulls poop on his trousers, is disgusted by that perfection; He was drunk, rolling on the ground and jumping around, so it was an eternal confrontation. ”
"It's a battle between haughty idols of reason (combined with aestheticism) and instinctive, unfettered intuition." "In short, these are two mentalities of man: upward thrust and downward thrust, very different and separated from each other."
In terms of both, Fellini favored "Augustus", because of his spontaneous and unbridled behavior, manifesting a philosophy of freedom and freedom from ideological rules.
However, only by wearing a personality mask can people play the roles required by society, and the "white-faced clowns" are precisely such a type: on the one hand, they are constrained by ideology and almost invariably resort to self-castration under the mask of personality;
On the other hand, when they fail to meet social expectations, their inner evaluation will be hit hard, or they will feel inferior or blamed, and they will adopt different methods, either to seek a breakthrough with all their strength, or to escape the world.
No matter what measures are taken, it will always lead to feelings of loneliness and inability to communicate. Fellini keenly captures the drama between the loading and unloading of personality masks, and it can be said that the world as he understands it is exactly like a circus.
When performing, like everyone in society, they wear masks, and a small number of "Augustus" serve as harlequins, forming a sharp opposition to the "white-faced clowns", and the emptiness, chaos, helplessness, and loneliness after removing the mask is life itself. No wonder many people comment that Fellini's works are always filled with a certain sadness and unwillingness.
Fellini's images basically continue his discussion of the ambiguous relationship between the clown world and the real world, if his "The Road" and "Kabylian Night" describe the pain and relief of "Augustus" in the order of the "white-faced clown".
Then "Eight and a Half" focuses the camera on the mental problem of the "white-faced clown" - Quito, is such an unpleasant "white-faced clown", his self-worth has not been satisfactory in his career and life.
He was unable to meet society's expectations of himself and produce satisfactory works; and unable to get recognition in life (whether it is a wife or a lover, even an ambiguous actress does not actually need to be herself as an individual) ——— lover exchanges the flesh for benefits.
The wife's despair of marriage, the actress only cares about the role in the film, etc. As an unsatisfactory "white-faced clown", Quito has no one to understand, and lacks or is tired of communication, and his relationship with the outside world is only lonely and strange under the noisy surface.
Faced with reality, his strategy is to fantasize about the women, friends and family in his life; to colleagues at work; Even wanton mockery and satirization of religious groups that represent the sacred, cowering in their own imaginary space to lick their wounds.
It seems helpless and pathetic, but also hateful and shameless. And all this seems absurd, but in fact it is in line with the way intellectuals like Quito face embarrassment.
Fellini follows the inner reality, tears the fig leaf that has long been torn, and shows people's inner evasion and misanthropy, stubbornness and anxiety, coarseness and cowardice on the screen.
What is fascinating about "Eight and a Half" is that it expresses Fellini's reality through its discussion of the medium of cinema.
As we all know, film in traditional Hollywood, is a dream making tool, satisfying the audience's sensory desires is to meet the commercial value of the film;
For European artists, it seems that they are more accustomed to seeing film as a way to express their own whimsy and artistic ideas, and the audience's understanding and the commercial value of the film itself are not the most important.
However, the meaning of "dream" or "fantasy" or "consciousness" itself is to artists what "a thousand readers have a thousand Hamlets." Who is closest to reality compared with the reality of consciousness is a topic worth exploring.
Obviously, for Fellini, even if the film is a dream, it comes from the self-knowledge of the individual, and it creates the most close to the human heart, the most primitive and open dream - the dream is the most real existence for him.
epilogue
"Dreams are a language made up of images, and there is nothing more real than dreams, because dreams refuse to be clearly asserted, dreams are expressed symbolically, without clear statements of thought, everything that appears in dreams, every color, every detail... are all referential".
bibliography
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