8 1/2 (Otto e mezzo), Fellini, Mastroianni, 1963
no copyright infringement intended
I found this photo by chance, and it wasn't carrying any indication about the personages. It was clearly related to an Italian movie, I didn't know which one. Both guys seemed very well-known to me, only I wasn't able to guess the names. One of them seemed to be Mastroianni, I wasn't hundred percent positive. Frankly not even forty percent positive; but this was the first name that crossed my mind. Anyway, if it were Mastroianni, this was a very atypical image of him. I looked at other images of him, I remained unsure. As for the second guy, that was much harder. I tried to think at other actors, also at some movies, only to realize that I hadn't watched too many Italian movies, that I hadn't watched many of the most celebrated Italian movies, and anyway all Italian movies watched by me had been very long time ago.
My wife came to help: she was sure about Mastroianni and I started again a search through his images. Eventually I found again the photo, in a blog dedicated to movies (Le Mot du Cinéphiliaque): Federico Fellini and Marcelo Mastroianni in a moment of respite during the shooting of Otto e mezzo. Wow!
8 1/2 (Otto e mezzo) - one of the many great Italian movies I missed. I had read one or two things about it and it had been on my bucket list. Well, not that dramatic, rather kind of: a movie that I wanted to watch sometime. During the years my interest had shifted toward the Asian cinematic universe, toward the great Japanese, Indian, Iranian, Chinese / Taiwanese / Hong Kong film directors - maybe it was now time to visit again Fellini and the other Italians.
I looked for a copy of Otto e mezzo on youTube, and the first video I found was dedicated to its score, created by Nino Rota. I loved Nino Rota's music, since the day I heard on my old record player one of his concertos. A concerto for bassoon that sounded a bit classic and a bit modern. I looked then for other works by him, to realize that the Italian cinematic universe could not have been what it was without Nino Rota's scores.
The video included movie posters, images of Fellini and Rota, also of some famous actors playing in it (among them Cardinale, Aimée, of course Mastroianni), and stills from the movie. Some of these stills were extraordinary: it seemed to be the Felliniesque universe pushed to the absolute, a movie to challenge all movies.
The next video I found was the opening scene of the movie: a nightmare having the main hero caught in a traffic jam inside a tunnel. The jam is absolute, no car can move at all. The hero is inside his car seemingly chocking, trying unsuccessfully to open one of the windows, writhing spasmodically, while the people in the other cars either don't care, or chase him, sometimes vaguely malicious, sometimes like watching a film. Eventually he succeeds to get out of his car and starts flying slowly in the air, the nightmare getting into an enchanting dream - till he is pulled down to earth by a person who awakes him.
As I was watching this scene I began to remember that I had seen it several times during the years, included in some extras documenting important moments in cinema history. My need to watch the whole movie was getting more and more acute.
As I was looking further for the movie, I found some short references. According to Lechuguilla, Otto e mezzo was not for everyone; like a Zen koan, inviting frustration; above all else a celebration of ambiguity and abstraction. For Alexandar, 8 1/2 was an inner-space Odyssey. As for Asa_Nisi_Masa2, this movie taught him a new language. I was looking further for a copy of the film.
I found instead a review made by Roger Ebert, very polemic: what we think of as Felliniesque comes to full flower in La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2; the earlier films, wonderful as they often are, have their Felliniesque charm weighted down by leftover obligations to Neorealism. And later in the review: (the critic Alan Stone) deplores Fellini's stylistic tendency to emphasize images over ideas; I celebrate it; a filmmaker who prefers ideas to images will never advance above the second rank because he is fighting the nature of his art; the printed word is ideal for ideas; film is made for images, and images are best when they are free to evoke many associations and are not linked to narrowly defined purposes.
Now, if I think about the net difference Roger Ebert makes between film and printed word (language of images, language of ideas), maybe he is not totally right, as he does a bit of injustice to the printed word. I would say there is a nuance blurring the difference: the printed word is not just ideas, rather ideas supported by implicit images. T.S.Elliot emphasized this nuance in his essay about the objective correlative. And, after all, any language sends ultimately to images. More than that: it is born from images, it is supported all along by images, it sends to images.
Well, as I was advancing that day in reading more and more about Otto e mezzo, I realized that it was becoming one of the many movies I knew a lot about without actually having the chance to watch. Finding it was now critical. And finally I succeeded. I found the movie on youTube. Its embedding being disabled by the video author, I can give you here only the link:
A film director nel mezzo del cammin. Behind there are eight movies and a half, now he is about to start a new one, and everything's getting derailed. It's the midlife crisis, the age when any of your certitudes are vanishing. The escape is a universe of dreams built by your illusions, competing with a parallel universe of nightmares built by your demons. Both challenged by reality,
Actually Fellini had in that moment eight movies and a half behind (kind of: there were seven films plus two segments in collective productions) and Otto e mezzo was his new movie. Mastroianni was playing the alter-ego of Fellini, and Otto e mezzo was a meditation about the making of that very movie! Putting forth all avatars torturing the artist throughout the process of creation.
As I was watching, I wondered whether Fellini tried here to mock some of the New Wave trends, inflating everything up to derisory. Well, maybe, but this movie is far from being just an uncontrollable play with images and phantasies. It has a subtle consistency. Think at a musical piece: the composer can make any crazy transpositions throughout it, while keeping the control, and at the end the return to the initial tonality is mandatory. The same with this movie. As unexpected a phantasy could appear throughout the film, Fellini keeps firmly the controls in hand and does not loose consistency. And as it was approaching to the end I started to feel that watching of this movie like a blessing.
Here is the original Italian trailer, based on the movie ending.
(Italian Movies)
posted by Pierre Radulescu at
11:24 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home