Fellini's 8?? Fancy

...Only Guido Anselmi is a coherent type —but a type, precisely, not an individual...

...but it is not so simplistically antithetical...

...It merely palls on us and, finally, appalls us...

...Guido is always characterized in terms of seeking without finding, having nothing to say but wanting to say it anyway, wishing to bury the past but lacking the courage to bury anything...

...unfortunately, it makes for bad, because confused, art: The tone is never sure, but falters between irony and self-pity, between shamefaced poeticism and tonguetied self-mockery...

...Fellini, after all, is typically and gloriously Italian, with all this implies of a kind of sensuous wisdom, of tragicomic profundity...

...Confused, also, because ignorant...

...The devoutest Felliniites donned their most superior faces and informed us that, of course, Steiner was not meant to be the real thing, but an unsuccessful would-be intellectual—look at all those creeps at his party...

...Fellini could not make his motivation very believable, but...

...But what, for instance, are we to make of the Cardinal's disquisition on the bird called Diomede, because when Diomedes died, these birds, ululating profusely, accompanied him to the grave...

...There arc other obvious echoes —of Wild Strawberries, Last Year at Marienbad, Fellini's earlier films (the very score is a reworking of the Dolce Vita score), even a broad allusion to Dante's Inferno in the steam-bath scene—but the borrowings are not integrated and do not crystallize anything in 8...

...The story of Guido Ansclmi, the famous director, successful yet criticized for his recent work, troubled by not knowing what kind of film to make next, torn between Catholicism and Marxism, devoted to his wife and dependent on her yet drawn to all other attractive women and involved with some, attempting to use his film as psychotherapy—all this is humanly understandable and even touching...

...And the intellectual content...

...Life is complex and even contradictory...

...Should Anselmi strive for the truth through autobiography or through a film about atomic destruction...

...That remarkable writer, all too little known here, Vitaliano Brancati, has been aptly called an "umorista serio," and the title sits as well with his kindred spirit, Fellini...

...The episode was meant to be ideological—that censorship is a form of prurience, that puritanism is hypocrisy—but the ideas were either too old and obvious or too feebly expressed, and the only thing that registered fully was a more-than-life-size Anita Ekberg, of whom even life size is too much...

...8½ is about floundering, and it is not the flounderer who can give floundering a concrete form...

...but sheds no light, which is not...

...But Origen mutilated himself for the sake of the heavenly kingdom...

...La Saraghina, the woman-mountain, is a loathsome monolith of flesh, a whore, but also childlike and genuine...

...The past is the proper study of autobiography, for it allows of tranquil recollection, selfdistancing and perspective...

...Yet whereas such a cornmedia dell'arte ending may fit into the style and non-intellectual Problematik of a film like Cabiria, it is foreign to the matter of 8½, and remains an inept deus ex machina...

...Is there a parallel intended between the embalmed saint in a glass case at the seminary and an obviously fake sideshow fakir in a similar case at the thermal resort...

...Why are so many of the priests at the seminary manifestly androgynous...

...And behold, all the principal characters of 8½ are sublimely dichotomous...

...Therefore, everything in the film should be equally relevant...

...What does the satanic young man in the Cardinal's entourage represent...

...There are several reasons for this...

...There is the Cardinal, humane yet dogmatic, gently repeating the horrible slogan: "Extra ecclesiam, nulla sahts...

...To all these questions Fellini manages only the already mentioned corybantic answer: a stagey dance of life, even less convincing than the dance of death at the end of The Seventh Seal, which undoubtedly suggested it...

...Ah, but it is from the mouths of phoneys that the truth comes: It is the absurd American girl, an intellectual flapper, who has written a dissertation on "The Solitude of Modern Man in the Contemporary Theatre" —which Anselmi's life and work demonstrate with a vengeance, if they demonstrate anything at all...

...yes, but this character is a ludicrous phoney...

...An effete American journalist (played all too believably by Eugene Walter) mumbles critically, "Le cinéma n'est pas né comme un jeu intellectuel," which would seem to give films like 8½ short shrift...

...I Vitelloni, the one incident that did not quite ring true was the one involving the stolen statue of the angel, where the film was straining for symbolic value...

...8½ reminds me of those truly dreary orchestral works of a Respighi, a Casella or a Malipiero...

...The present hurts too much...

...A serious humorist, that is what the creator of The White Sheik...

...And so on...

...Art has every right to subtle ambiguity...

...Though his foibles are recognizable enough, and his childhood neuroses exemplarily Freudian, there is little about him that is specific, interesting, compelling enough to make us care...

...The dialogue itself bulges with antinomies...

...but premeditated ambivalence, splitting, hatchet-like, every character, every statement, every hair, is not art...

...There is, indeed, a mock resolution tacked on at the end: a kind of dance of life begun by a group of clowns which includes the hero as a boy, and is eventually picked up by all the motley dramatis personae...

...If he were not, he would be nowise different from Marcello, the hero, on whom he is meant to be a potentially salutary influence...

...Somewhere or other Fellini must have heard that ambiguity is, or is supposed to be, the hallmark of advanced art...

...There is the protagonist's wife, honest, neglected, touching, yet also a shrew...

...What made Fellini's early films great— and they, too, tended to be quasiautobiographical—was their almost total avoidance of intellectualizing, and reliance on character study, accurate local color, honest and controlled emotionalism, bittersweet humor, an occasional bit of satire, and a simple, lyrical view of the world through a camera that had an eye for the poetic but a stomach for the realistic...

...Wherein does the symbolism consist...

...Art is made out of knowledge—intuitive, partial, prejudiced, illusory—any kind, but knowledge...

...Foreignness brings us to the third weakness of the film...

...And what of Fellini's metaphysics...

...gravely metaphysical or esoterically symbolist films—trobar clus—he should leave to more rigorous or recondite minds, to Bergman or Bunuel or Antonioni...

...The Cardinal quotes Origen with unassailable finality...

...Fellini's intellectualizing is not even like dogs dancing: It is not done well, nor does it amaze us that it is done at all...

...Claudia, the beautiful actress (played insipidly by Claudia Cardinale), remains completely bisected by the intellectual chiaroscuro...

...luckily, he did not try very hard...

...In Fellini's hands, this approach is rather like the attempt of a typical Italian composer to forsake bel canto for the symphonic...

...Fellini was trying to show the problem of the modern intellectual, yet Steiner and his psyche were far from convincing...

...First, it is extremely hard, virtually impossible, to make a good autobiography out of one's present...

...That is the second failure of 8½: its ignorance...

...Claudia is repeatedly described as "young yet old," "a child, yet ancient...

...In 8½, Fellini, apparently afraid of becoming a selfrepeater with diminishing returns as so many famous Italian directors have become, tries for something new: symbolism, metaphysics, solid intellectual content...

...True, the creeps were creeps all right...

...The great masters of ambiguity— Pirandello, Brecht, Proust, Valéry, Eliot—however much they may undercut ideologies, do not chop up the ground on which they stand...

...The film moves from reality through daydreams into dreams, and one of its main points is that all three states are of equal importance, indeed not readily distinguishable one from the other...

...I Vitelloni, La Strada and Cabiria is...

...But, here lies the tragedy, the potential savior goes berserk with fear of the future and kills his children and himself...

...Can one say Yea to life without apprehending its quiddity...

...arc we to believe such a celestial castrato...

...There is the sardonic scriptwriter, significantly called Daumier, intellectually and artistically intransigent, critical of Anselmi's weakness and compromises, but for all that a prating, negativistic bore...

...Already in Fellini's masterpiece...

...Carla, Anselmi's mistress, is nice yet imbecile, devoted wife and perfect slut...

...The same goes for the hero's other women...

...Now comes 8½, and, despite two or three good scenes, it is a disheartening fiasco...

...rather, it is stumbling about in various directions all of which seem, successively or simultaneously, positive...

...Floundering, incidentally, should not be confused with doubt, which is the assertion of the self in a negative direction...

...Of his third of Boccaccio 70, Fellini made a much bigger hash, though the other two thirds were scarcely better...

...There is her bosom companion, Rossella, the intelligently muckraking voice of the film, yet she is the very one who goes in for spiritism...

...but Steiner—witness his trusting altruism, delightful musicianship, appreciation of good painting, modesty, borrowing of books on Sanskrit grammar, exquisite and loving wife and children —is clearly meant to be the genuine article...

...Worst of all is the systematic undercutting of every utterance...

...Thus Daumier is continually citing Stendhal, Mallarmé, Suetonius and what have you, appositely yet unenlightcningly...

...8½ piles problem upon problem, which is permissible...

...Is it better to create at all cost, or to admit one's sterility and refrain...

...Now the sad truth is that he and his fellowscenarists could not be more unsuited to this kind of art...

...here the intellectual cleavage is given yet more indecent exposure...