Author: Roger Ebert
Translator: Zhu Puyi
Proofreader: issac
Source: Roger Ebert official website
One conventional wisdom holds that Federico Fellini is on the wrong path by abandoning realism for his own fantasies. Beginning with La Dolce Vita (1959), his work is a clutter of Images of Freud, Christianity, sexuality, and autobiography. The precise observation in The Great Road (1954) was the highest point of his career, and according to the above point of view, he abandoned neorealism from then on.
La Dolce Vita (1959)
"La Dolce Vita" was bad enough, even worse in Eight and a Half (1963), and by Juliet and the Devil (1965), he was completely off track. After that, he was on a downward spiral until 1987. In addition to Amarcord (1974), which tells the story of your childhood memories, this fascinating film will make you surrender your weapons to it despite any theory and enjoy it wholeheartedly.
Armacord (1974)
This view is profoundly wrong. We think that the characteristics of Fellini's films are at their best in "La Dolce Vita" and "Eight and a Half Parts". With the exception of Armacord, his later works are not very good, some of them are indeed worse, but they clearly have the imprint of a producer. Early works were often brilliant, but the charm of Fellini's films was weighed on the burden of inheriting neorealism.
Eight and a Half (1963)
Critic Alan Stone lamented in the Boston Review that Fellini's stylistic tendency to emphasize images over ideas was expressed. And I applaud it. A director whose ideas take precedence over images will never be able to enter the first echelon because he is struggling with his artistic essence.
Printed words are the ideal form of ideas; films are made for images, and they are free to evoke many connections, not necessarily connected to a particular purpose. Stone commented on the complexity of Eight and a Half: "No one is sure what they just watched." That's true, but it applies to all great movies. Only after watching a shallow movie can you tell exactly what you just watched.
Eight and a Half is the best film ever made about filmmaking. It is told from the director's point of view, and the protagonist of the film, Guido (Marcelo Mastruani), undoubtedly represents Fellini. The film begins with a suffocating nightmare, in which the impressive one is Guido, floating in the air, who wants to get back to the ground and has to have his companions pull the rope tied to his feet, while the companions threaten him to hurry up and make plans for the next film.
The film takes place almost entirely in a health resort around Rome, and Guido sets up a huge set for his next sci-fi epic, but he also loses all interest.
Reality and fantasy are intertwined in the film. Some critics have criticized that it is not at all clear what reality is and what is a fantasy in Guido's mind, but I have no difficulty at all, because there is always a clear turning point when Guido escapes from uncomfortable reality to the comfortable world of dreams.
Sometimes this alternate world is pure fiction, and in the famous scene of herds of wives and concubines, all the women in Guido's life appear in the house he dominates—his wives, lovers, and even the women he once wanted to have a relationship with.
In other scenes, we see real memories that have been distorted by imagination. When Little Guido and her classmates stare at the prostitute Sarah Gina on the beach, she is the towering, irresistible, carnal image that teenagers will remember.
When he was punished by the sacrifice of the Catholic school, we saw a whole wall of a huge icon of Dominic Savio, a local symbol of purity at the time; an icon that looked too big but was not real, reflecting Guido's guilt because he lacked the determination to become a young saint.
All the images (real, memorable, fictional) come together to become the most tightly structured of all Fellini's films. The script was very detailed in its conception, because the story was about a chaotic director who didn't know what to do next. "Eight and a half" itself is used to describe a director who has no plans.
One online reviewer asked, "What happens when the world's most respected director has no idea?" It's not ordinary no idea but a complete lack of ability to shoot. In fact, he made a film about his inability to make a movie?" But "Eight and a Half" isn't about a director without ideas, it's a film full of bursts of inspiration. Guido couldn't make a film, but Fellini was clearly not.
Guido, played by Mastruani, is exhausted by excuses, lies, and sensory stimulation. His wife was fashionable and intelligent, and he loved her but could not communicate with her; his lover was crude and shallow, and his taste was out of his taste but could arouse her Libido. He mishandled things, his wife and lover appeared at the same time in the nursing home, and there were impatient producers, picky writers, restless actors who hoped or believed they could play in the film.
He was not at peace at all times. "Happiness is," Guido muses at the end of the film, "to be able to tell the truth without hurting anyone." Guido's writer did not give him this talent, telling Guido that his film was "a bunch of things that are completely meaningless, without the advantages of avant-garde films but with all their shortcomings."
Guido sought advice from all sides. The old cleric shook his head sadly, then flashed back to the guilt of his childhood; the writer was a Marxist, openly disdainful of his work. The doctor advised him to drink mineral water and rest well. The producer begged him to rewrite it quickly, and he had already spent money to build a huge set for Guido's persistence.
From time to time, Guido fantasizes about the perfect woman represented by Claudia Katina: dashing, beautiful, serene, not sharp, and she has the answers to all her questions. When she appears, the fantasy becomes disappointing (she is as helpless as the other actors,) but in his heart she is the muse, and he imagines getting support from her to talk for comfort.
Fellini's photography has always been a delight. His actors seem to dance often instead of simply walking. I've been to the set of Myth of Love, where Fellini played music in every scene, which piqued my interest (he, like his Italian contemporaries, didn't broadcast live and dubbed in post-production). The music drives the actors' movements and brings a subtle sense of rhythm.
Of course, fellini's films often show music: in "Eight and a Half" we see orchestras, dance bands, and touring musicians, actors moving along the designed routes, as if they were all in sync with the music. Fellini's score was Nino Rota, who combined pop and dance music to advance the storyline.
Few directors use space more than Fellini. One of his favorite techniques is to focus on the moving crowd in the background, follow them to the foreground to face the camera, and follow them into and out of the frame. He also likes to build scenes with the main lens, and then use close-ups when the characters enter the frame and appear in front of us.
Another trick is to shoot people who are walking, and when they turn their backs on the camera, they only shoot three-quarters of the whole person. He also likes to start dancing when one of his dance partners is smiling and walking toward the camera, not waiting for the other partner to join.
All of this is combined in his unique form of parade. Because of his childhood love of the circus, each fellini film featured a parade—the kind of casual rather than organized parade in which people gathered for a common goal or liked the same music, some in the foreground, some farther away.
The parade at the end of "Eight and a Half" has a distinctly circus feel, with musicians, the film's main characters, and fellini's typical, eccentric, strangely dressed people who like to use in his films.
I watched "Eight and a Half" over and over again, and my appreciation for it only deepened. It accomplishes the nearly impossible: Fellini the magician discusses, reveals, explains, deconstructs his own little tricks, but still makes us dizzy. He claimed he didn't know what he wanted and didn't know how to achieve it. But the film proves that he knows and is in high spirits.