Federico Fellini’s 8½ wasn’t the first movie about the movies (Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful being an exemplary predecessor). But 8½ (playing March 30 at USI’s Forum I)  was the first auteurist movie about movies. Several films have since been made about auteurism: Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night, Jean-Luc Godard’s Passion, or Orson Welles’ unreleased The Other Side of the Wind for example. But none of those films spoke like Fellini’s, giving light to the yearning, the tragedy, and the failing behind all works of art, and how that failing is amplified for film—the greatest artistic medium because it encompasses music, poetry, prose, plays, and painting, all to adequately (attempt to) evoke life.

8½ is the story of a populist art-house director named Guido (Marcello Mastroianni) suffering from filmmaker’s block—to say that Guido is Fellini would not be a statement of great unveiling. His film is uninspired, unshaped, completely unready to be made, and Guido(/Fellini) knows this more than anyone. His intellectual co-screenplay author (Jean Rougeul) criticizes the amateurishness of his script (which is never read from); his producer (Guido Alberti) patiently wants some sign of progress; his actress (Rossella Falk) wants to know the substantiality of her part; everyone else he sees just wants a morsel; and Guido doesn’t have an inkling. In public, Mastroianni delivers his excuses with apathetic elusiveness—in private to confidants, he punches on Guido’s frustration, longing to grapple onto one epiphanious idea that will encompass his frustration and anxiety into one perfect, pristine expression. Instead, he wanders from encounter to multiple encounter, trying to live with himself despite the knowledge that he cannot stand in his own shadow. 

Guido “escapes” to his dreams (films?), but the fantasies are realistic Freudian indictments ranging from childhood to irrepressible memories. The film begins with Guido trapped in a car amidst a traffic jam in a tunnel. The sequence is one of spacious claustrophobia; after he escapes, Guido flies away from Earth only to be caught on a kite and pulled back to the ground. And in one of the most remembered and telling sequences, the women in Guido’s life—his mistress (Sandra Milo), his wife (Anouk Aimée), and almost all the women he’s ever slept with/wanted to sleep with—live with him in a harem where he is lord. The women are perfectly pleased with Guido, complacent to all his commands, until all the women revolt against him, verbally accusing him of every guilt he’s ever committed—only all the women are acting. And they then go back to worshipping him and loving him.

8½ (the title is an in-joke—Fellini had made eight features and one short film at this point) was perfectly placed in his career, in between the earlier neo-realist films and before his orgiastic imagery fantasies like Satyricon. But 8½’s dream sequences open a can of worms that no director before (or since) has had the openness or bravery to open: If a director creates a scenario based on the people he loves, is incapable of communicating that love with them, and he has them all act as he wants them to…is he not voyeuristically living his own ideal life? It could easily be said that all artists to one degree or another paint a picture of the world as they want it, even when they’re trying to make a picture of the world as they see it. The medium of film allows an author, like Fellini, to puppet around those close to him, and in a way not afforded in plays or prose. “You want me to put on an act like one of those actresses of yours!” says his mistress.

Maybe Fellini loves more than he can bear, and 8½ is a portrait of his selfless solipsism, his empathetic egotism. Directors are given the fantastical ability to impose themselves on those they love, so the loved will understand all their motives, know that they love them dearly, and will never be hurt by them again. Given Fellini’s impetus of working an enormous budget with indulgence, he heads on that unselfish self-oriented view with an effacing theatricality (and yet can simplistically be visually explained by a failed look in Mastroianni’s eye after he gets through talking to his wife, as if his presence is an indulgence he’d rather just avoid for her sake). 8½ is a sprawling and ambitiously personal film that inevitably says that in this life we will come in contact with people; we will have relationships with people; we will love people dearly; we will disappoint and hurt those we love—despite ourselves—for being ourselves. In the final dream sequence, when Fellini seems like he doesn’t know what to do with his loved ones, he puts them in a burlesque of his most refined image: the circus.

If the twenty-first century will artistically be remembered as one of submerging subjectivism, 8½ will stand along with Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman and—to an extent—J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye as individual tragic works of art about humanity’s inability to tangibly share the human condition with one another. Art serves to express the constant malaise every human can feel and will always invariably feel, and the artist will always face the challenge down by trying to run faster, stretch their arms further—to make a conclusively explanatory expression of the self. Fellini desperately wants those he loves to see that statement, to ignore their predisposed perception of his nature, to "accept [him] as who he is," and to know that he loves them emphatically. And Fellini knows that no matter how artistically direct and naked he may be, they won’t fully understand. “Guido’s” dead father tells him in a dream, “It’s sad for a man to realize how miserably he’s failed.”

But the reason 8½ is aching isn’t because Fellini is telling this to his audience. It’s aching because he’s telling it to himself.