From Nine to 8½ – why have a musical comedy when you could have Fellini's surreal story of the psyche?

By Nick Ingram, on Monday, December 28, 2009

What with the film Nine doing the rounds – an adaptation of the award-winning Broadway musical, inspired by Federico Fellini’s film 8½ – Devon’s own Nick Ingram went back to the source

For the Italian Neo-Realism film movement, a written text was never needed – the main text and the manifesto was burnt by light onto celluloid, giving us Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945), The Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948), La Terra Trema (Luchino Visconti, 1948), and La Strada (Federico Fellini, 1954), among others. It was the films they made that became their manifesto.

In La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960), Sylvia (Anita Ekberg), is asked: ‘Do you think Italian Neo-Realism is dead?’ The man behind her replies, ‘No.’ Yet Fellini’s response was to make 8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963) – a film as far away from the aims of Neo-Realism as you could get. Fellini’s films had become more stylised, more objective, less about the people, more about the middle artistic classes. As far as Fellini is concerned, Italian Neo-Realism died somewhere before 1960.

8½ is a fragmented meta-text about the creative relationship with life, autobiography, and history. The film is Fellini’s study of the connections between three elements as they flow around and though the film’s central character, Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni), who could be a cipher for Fellini’s own creative process as Guido tries to bring together and finish the science fiction film he is working on.

Elements of Guido’s life seem to keep surfacing in his mind as he stays at a health spa at the beginning of the film. He seems disconnected with the world as he floats between the people at the spa to the refrain of Wagner’s Ride of The Valkyries. He cannot focus on the writing of the film. He is having trouble casting his picture. His relationships with the women in his life seem to be catching up with him, leading to a point where we wants to cancel the whole production. Guido is a creative man on the edge – his dreams give him no solace. With the producer leaning on him it would seem that Guido is on his own.

At the centre of all of this powerlessness, there always seems to be a woman – Guido’s mother; the woman La Saraghina (Eddra Gale,) who lives on the beach and dances the rumba for Guido and his friends when they are around ten years of age. Then there are the women he may or may not have loved: his wife; his present mistress; and all those who seem to be at a certain age sent upstairs, out of the way, replacing them with those who are younger.

Guido’s mind falls in on itself. He suffocates in the way we find him trapped in his car at the beginning of the film. From this he escapes, only to be pulled back down to earth, crashing from his own subconscious dreams into the reality of his own suffocating malaise.

We never see the film which Guido was working on, instead, along with the march of Fellini’s personal symbol, the clown, the whole of the elements of Guido’s life stream down the stairs of the gantry built for the science fiction film. They lock hands and dance around Guido: his producer, his wife, his mistress, the cast of the film he is making, his critics, and his friends. It is here he will have to stand and actually begin to live through the various fragments that his subconscious has shown him. All of these fragments are the dance of life, as Fellini shows us.