Today, I would like to discuss a film that I find incredibly intriguing, Federico Fellini's 8 1/2. Fellini’s achievement with 8 1/2 isn’t strictly cinematic, artistic, or philosophical - it is profoundly human. His contemplation of the vagaries of existence, the transient relationships that dominate one’s attention, is sincere to a degree that is almost discomfortingly personal. By the film’s culmination, Fellini’s judgment of the world and our lives as a circus, as a frivolous procession, seems not only without rebuke, and perhaps inevitable. He asks questions concerning the nature of art: What is it if not some fabrication of the Truth? And can it exist in terms of commerce? The pangs of self-doubt are tangible as Marcello Mastroianni’s Guido Anselmi, a famous Italian director, worries that he will finally be exposed as a fake, a fraud. His virility and his charm keep his personal affairs interesting enough to distract from the crippling inauthenticity of his marriage, at least until his wife visits the set and ultimately chooses to leave him. Though the film’s self-reflexivity is almost frighteningly omnipresent, it seems Fellini felt cinema to be an appropriate medium through which to instigate such a discourse; this choice shouldn’t be surprising.
What is a little appalling is the degree to which Bob Fosse appropriated the content and the questions of the film, doing so in his own magnum opus and apologia All That Jazz. The thievery is egregious but well-documented enough to be left unexplored. What Fellini’s accomplished is something which all filmmakers, authors, artists of any sort aspire towards: honesty, or at least the satisfaction of what we come to associate with the truth. A concept with massive thematic implications within the film, the notion of truthfulness is one that Fellini seemingly couldn’t escape, and it appears his resolution was to abandon almost all pretense and lyrically, indelicately, poignantly satirize his own life and the profession he’s devoted himself to. Though clearly influenced by events in his own life, what work of art isn’t? To label the work an autobiography is reductive and misleading--it is art, and art of the highest order.
What is a little appalling is the degree to which Bob Fosse appropriated the content and the questions of the film, doing so in his own magnum opus and apologia All That Jazz. The thievery is egregious but well-documented enough to be left unexplored. What Fellini’s accomplished is something which all filmmakers, authors, artists of any sort aspire towards: honesty, or at least the satisfaction of what we come to associate with the truth. A concept with massive thematic implications within the film, the notion of truthfulness is one that Fellini seemingly couldn’t escape, and it appears his resolution was to abandon almost all pretense and lyrically, indelicately, poignantly satirize his own life and the profession he’s devoted himself to. Though clearly influenced by events in his own life, what work of art isn’t? To label the work an autobiography is reductive and misleading--it is art, and art of the highest order.
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