2020 marks the centenary of the death of Italian film master Fellini, and the recently held Shanghai Film Festival has dedicated a retrospective to the master of art cinema. Fellini's artistic achievements, both the Oscar and the Palme d'Or at Cannes, the 1993 Oscar awarded him the Lifetime Achievement Award, and the state funeral held in Italy after his death, which undoubtedly proves that Fellini is a world-class master. However, when these awards are listed in front of everyone, this does not form a specific image of Fellini, and to understand Fellini, it is necessary to experience it from his fascinating world of light and shadow.
Fellini's excellent film works are innumerable, "Eight and a Half" is the most unique one of his film career, because it became a turning point in his film style, if before Fellini was good at excavating social realities as cruel as Italian neorealism, after "Eight and a Half", a magical realism work that mixed reality and illusion, Fellini completely fell into the search for dreams and streams of consciousness.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > Movies and Dreams</h1>
Mytz proposed the concept of "daydreaming" in movies, comparing the experience of movies with the experience of dreams, and modern science has also pointed out that the hallucinatory experience brought by movies is very similar to the stimulation of the cerebral cortex and dreams. Admittedly, "Eight and a Half" is a film about film, and Fellini uses a film made by director Guido as the original story of this film, and its moral is clear - it is like a real film that Guido is shooting, and it is also like a big dream of Guido. As a result, the blurring of the sense of boundary between film and reality is also the blurring of dreams and reality. "Eight and a Half" cleverly connects the similar qualities of the film and the dream, making the film rise from the level of exploring the film itself to the realm of philosophy.
Fellini said in an interview: "In "Eight and a Half Parts", people are like stepping into the labyrinth of memories, dreams, and emotions, in this labyrinth, suddenly they don't know who they are, what kind of people they were in the past, and where will they go in the future? In other words, life is just a long, sleepless sleep without feelings. ”
This "Eight and a Half" is obviously Fellini's exploration of the human subconscious psychology, this subconscious psychology is presented through the form of dreams, and because it is only the connection of countless irrational dreams, it follows only the "rules" of dreams, so most fans think that it is obscure, in fact, the symbol inside we do not want to find a specific direction, it is just a feeling, a Fellini-style thought, its signifier has countless non-specific references, so Fellini will say:" Anyone who tries to understand is pathetic. ”
Because when we try to understand dreams with rational thinking, we will only fall into unsolvable pain, which is also the nature of cinematic art that Fellini wants to express - cinema is the art of illusion, it is intuitive, transcendental, rational thinking is not worth mentioning in front of it, he uses this "eight and a half" to "lure" us: come and join the carnival of movies, leave it alone in this conformist real world.
When we stop dwelling on each of the symbolic symbols of the film, but look at it in terms of dream logic, we can reach an emotional communication with Guido. In psychoanalysis, Freud proposed the concept of the "original self", which held that the original self was the idea under the subliminal ideology, the most primitive desire of man to satisfy instinctive impulses, and Metz believed that another thing that dreams and movies have in common is that they are both the fulfillment of wishes that can release the original self. So Guido's behavior in the story can be reduced to two kinds: filmmaking and dreaming, both of which point to the release of the "original self", that is, the fulfillment of desires.
So, when we can't understand the movie that Guido made, we don't need to feel discouraged, because that is also his "nightmare". In the film, there is always an ancient incantation hovering in Guido's mind, "Asa Nisi Masa", Anima is jungian theory (a branch of psychoanalysis), which is the character and image of the woman perceived by the man's unconscious state. Summoned by this spell, Guido returns to his childhood, surrounded and pampered by women. In this period, lacan's so-called Oedipus stage, he completed the ritual of assimilation with his father by bathing in grapes with the help of male relatives, and it was from this time that he needed to begin to search for the objects of his desires—the various women in the film. These are all projections of his desires, and they are also the primordial forces represented by his "original self."
The cause of Guido's emotional flaws can be captured in later story threads, and the misfortune of marriage caused his inner imbalance. He tried to win back his wife's heart and show her his real world by having the auditioned actor imitate the woman he had appeared in his life, but failed. But when the goddess in his heart told him that he needed to give sincerely and learn to love others, his inner world was gradually balanced.
Filmmaking and dreaming are two of Guido's most basic actions throughout the film, and they are not much different in nature. Through filmmaking, Guido escapes the pressure of reality, through dreaming, Guido escapes the burden of the soul, and the affinity between the film and the dream is cleverly expressed by Fellini, it can be said that our movie-watching experience has gone beyond simple "daydreaming", but watching dreams in dreams, which undoubtedly doubles the ecstasy of the "Dionysian" style.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > blurs the line between dreams and reality? </h1>
The film presents a stylistic feature of "stream of consciousness", the concept of "stream of consciousness" proposed by James, who believes that human conscious activity is like a river, a continuous flow of subjective ideological consciousness. That's why Fellini said, "Dreams are the only reality." "Because dreams are an extension of people's subconscious, dreams are people's current intuition."
Knowing this performance feature, it is not difficult to understand Fellini's creative approach, he blurs the boundary between dreams and reality to follow not the law of reality, but the law of consciousness, which makes the film obscure, but at the same time the clever flow of the sense of dream is like Maslow's "peak experience", giving people a visual and ideological aesthetic pleasure. Guido's thinking runs through history and reality, traveling between the poles of dream and reality, and Fellini deliberately blurs the boundaries between the two with a long lens of nature, in order to prove the authenticity of feelings and emphasize a free, irrational world without worldly constraints.
Fellini in "Eight and a Half" persistently explores the boundary between dream and reality, trying to blur the "credibility" of the irrational world, in order to blur Guido's reality experience and dream experience, Fellini's film scheduling can be described as a world-class director's level, which is embodied in two aspects:
Light and shadow
At the beginning of the twentieth century, German Expressionism, as an avant-garde aesthetic, was in line with the state of the distorted heart of the characters reflected in the stream of consciousness, so the Lighting Method of German Expressionism was well used by Fellini in the film. The strong contrast between chiaroscuro produces a strong dramatic and psychological effect, and the biggest difference between this special visual experience and the ordinary lighting method is that expressionism reflects the spiritual world of the characters more accurately, and more accurately grasps the psychological state of the person in the subjective scene to restore the Bergson-like intuition.
Different from the classical Hollywood style of lighting, the soft light is used for the large close-up of the characters, which sets off the exquisite portrait of the character,
The film mostly uses uneven facial lighting scenes, after Guido and his wife argue fiercely, the light enters the lens to form a halo of vertigo, making Guido's face appear bright and dark, this special mirror language expresses the character's inner uncertainty and schizophrenia, and also interprets the tearing of the character's spiritual world well, providing a symbolic symbol for the indistinguishability between dreams and reality. This technique is also used in Nolan's "Batman: The Dark Knight" to show whether the protagonist chooses to be good or from evil, fully expressing the mental state of the characters.
Lens language
Fellini was undoubtedly a film writer, and he was good at writing with the lens. This focuses on analyzing the film's opening dream to show Fellini's complex film scheduling, after all, such almost perfect film scheduling is too numerous in the film.
In the dream at the beginning of the film, the slow movement of the camera shows the subtle changes in the characters' hearts, which are subtle but complex. In this passage, the "shake" shot becomes the main lens language, from the beginning with Guido's car to Guido slapping the car door, the camera movement here is very objective, bringing the audience into a seemingly real narrative space, making the audience mistakenly think that all this is a real scene.
This is followed by a fixed shot of people in cars around staring at Guido. In the dream, the subject "I" may act as both the viewer and the viewed, after this short fixed shot, into a continuous panning shot, Guido is constantly being watched, if in the first time being watched, Guido can also calmly face this unwarranted gaze (the fixed shot indicates that he is still more calm, but also an objective perspective), and the subsequent panning lens expresses guido's feeling of being "snooped" pressure (the panning lens has a strong sense of uncertainty), This is also the mental depression brought about by his being watched and watched by everyone in real life. At this point, the audience has a certain doubt about this part of the scene, is this a dream or a reality?
This is directly manifested as the fact that in the dream he finally fell into the sea – this is the compensation of the dream. The sea is a symbol of freedom and vastness, but on another level, the mysterious power of the sea can also destroy people, which paves the way for Guido to finally take up a pistol and commit suicide. If you want to be free, you seem to have to do it by falling into an endless abyss of death. Only then did we realize that it was just a dream, but it was so real and believable that it caused us to worry at the moment When Guido fell into the water.
From these two aspects, we can see that Guido suffers from the external troubles of his artistic creation on the one hand, and from the entanglement of emotions on the other hand, which makes him more and more obsessed with a free life, so his dreams are either to break through the shackles into free space, or to be surrounded by the nightmare of being bound, Guido's dilemma is also Fellini's dilemma, on the one hand, real life requires him to remain rational, on the other hand, the spirit involuntarily escapes into irrationality.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > summary </h1>
The film industry says that "Eight and a Half" is dedicated to the director, indeed, the last words that Guido said in the film contain too much affection and helplessness for the film, and the unfreedom of the film creation environment and the unfreedom of self-emotion have made a director fall into a downturn. Guido commits suicide in his film, in the midst of the hustle and bustle, the film ends in a song and dance, where will the film go? Fellini did not give a clear answer, perhaps we commemorate Fellini today, in addition to his almost perfect work of art, another important reason is that he has shown us the real path of cinema, that is, freedom and sincerity.