Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963) review
Marcello Mastroianni as Guido in Fellini’s 8 ½ - un imbroglione…
The artist is a buffone. That's Marcello Mastroianni’s Guido in 8 ½. A fraud, a trickster. You press him just a bit— and he's got nothing. Not even the slimmest awareness of how he comes up with things. Like the poet in Plato's Ion, the artist cannot give an account of himself and his craft. Things happen in him, through him, if he's lucky. If he's unlucky he becomes the pastiche of a great thinker, like Guido, full of bloated non-sense disguised in pseudo-intellectual fashion, as professorially harangued by his film critic. The depth of Guido’s film is that of a catalogue of modern art.
There's an absolute emptiness to an artist, to whoever sets about to create something. What is creation if not a rendezvous with nothing, that which is not yet? Who’s to guarantee the success of this ex nihilo operation? Guido’s at a loss, running away from everything which might commit him to a positive answer, caught in the toils of angst and novelty. And thus what he proceeds to do is: conceal and delay.
Camouflage, cover up, and shroud in splendid veneers and pretenses the void of his project–– his barrenness turns into an expensive artificiality, a beautiful illusion suggesting a core of substance and meaning. But it's all a fugazi. Thus, the second necessary part of his act: defer, delay, and buy time–– much as a lawyer with a weak case who holds on fastidiously to the procedures, waiting for a miracle to come. “Perhaps something will happen…” –– the artist’s grand motto.
In Fellini’s 8 ½ cinema and its making become the metaphor for art’s ultimate frightening frivolity. Cave paintings, ancient tribal tattooing, richly ornate religious ceremonies, Greek statuettes, the Sistine Chapel, Dante’s Commedia or Homeric epics: what’s the point to all this? Why carve, paint, draw, sing, rhyme or sew? If one goes on a journey to the heart of art, whence it comes and why, one will end up like Guido: a self-conscious childish fraud, dodging his way into indulgences, succumbing to the mild melancholy of failure.
The artist’s not a creator, but a mere vehicle, a passage. A passage for what? The Muse, as the Greeks would have it. But we can’t be Greeks anymore. We’re too… suspicious. In 8 ½ the Muse enters the screen as Claudia Cardinale, Guido’s last hope of achieving an “ancient beauty”. And yet, it is either too late or insufficient. They cannot come to terms. The magnetic chain of attraction, to return to Plato’s Ion, is broken: that eerie invisible connection between the poet’s inspiration, its divine source and the audience is broken. Like Eliot’s Prufrock, Fellini’s Guido has heard the mermaids singing each to each, but no longer thinks they’ll sing to him. His film, his inspiration (and Fellini’s) sinks once he reaches the bottom of art. It’s like a film set: show it from the outside, with a little bit of trickery, and it impresses, rouses, disturbs: it magnetizes... Go in— poof! Nothing. 8 ½ is not only about this process; but it is itself this process. A work of art about art looking into itself–– and not finding anything.
Is this another take on the “end of art” then? Not quite. The end of some art, perhaps, one typical of modernity, turned autonomous, self-conscious, self-reflective. Some sort of meta-art, subjectively centered, departed from God, impossibly innocent like the Greeks, the paradigms of which are Hamlet and Don Quixote. The former cannot help but to think of himself as himself, that is, Hamlet, the troubled prince facing the abyss – thus his tragedy; the latter cannot help but to think of himself as what he is not, a knight errant, thus his comedy.
Fellini, keen on psychoanalysis (which aims to cure that self-centered subject of modernity), also attempts to dive deep into subjecthood, as Guido self-inspects obsessively: at times a man-child still haunted by ghosts, at others a rascal staging the world in accordance with his fancies, a wanna-be tyrant who doesn’t want to govern. Contrary to Hamlet, Guido does not have much to look into: he too thinks of himself as himself, Guido, but that’s just a fraudster pinballed by irrelevant memories and clichés stubbornly floating about his head. He’s done for.
What to do then? Give up on art? Make a U turn after reaching its end and just… go down the same road? Fellini’s answer is the radicalization of his favorite theme, his universal metaphor: the circus as the circle of life, a flamboyant stravaganza and a weird mayhem of a celebration. In his journey into himself, finding nothing of substance, Guido, and Fellini himself, give up on the paradigms of modern art – the self and the theoretically self-conscious work – and seek a return to more ancient, less presumptuous forms, a kind of revisited tribalism to the tunes of Nino Rota. Just an inflated show of dance, music, and glitz. Guido gives up on his intellectual screenwriter and critic, the pedantic, professorial type with a mania for concepts and categories. Modern art (i.e., art since 1500s), especially since Modernism and the sudden burst of interpretative schools, hermeneutical techniques and the vanguards, has become the subject of incessant, increasingly empty theoretical talk.
Freudian and other psychanalytic interpretations, Marxist critical readings, semiotics, structuralism, Russian formalism, postmodernism and deconstructionism, post-colonialism, feminism and gender-oriented readings, historicisms, etc. It’s become impossible, so it seems, to appreciate a work of art “seriously” without considering a previous categorical grid, as if every art should have its own theory in order to have any “significance”. Well, who doesn’t hate theory by now? So, in the end, Guido leaves the tiresome intellectual critic and joins the illusionist and his circus troupe. For an artist, in a cultural landscape already saturated with highbrow pretenses, the clown and the magician are better guides than the theorist with all his references to Mallarmé.
The circus troupe
A ritual dance of the dead in celebration of life ends the film and the film’s journey, opening a new artistic route for Fellini and wasting the land of Modernism: 8 ½ ends up being a comedy of sorts, a parody of Proust’s unbearable seven volume search into himself, the farcical undoing of the Joycean bet on stream of consciousness. Fellini’s film is a riot, and it does not demand, nor does it seek, an intellectual higher order. “È una festa la vita: viviamola insieme!” – again, the clown knows better.
Fellini’s post-8 ½ films, exercises of flamboyance with disputable merits, are but variations on that conclusion. Is it a viable route for cinema? Not likely. But perhaps it was for Fellini, who could be accused of many things, but never of not being consequential to his art.
