Au-Cinema Films

Modernist Aspects Of Fellinis Style

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Federico Fellini's 8 1I2 (1963) is a radical departure in style and content from mainstream cinema. Unlike the typical Hollywood film, which has its roots in the clearly defined characters and unified, coherent plots of nineteenth-century popular fiction, 8 1I2 is a European art film, inspired by the forms and techniques of twentieth-century literary modernism.1 Modernist novelists such as Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, and James Joyce adopted complex and often difficult new forms of representation that foregrounded the subjectivity of the narrator, undercutting the pretensions of nineteenth-century fiction to render characters, actions, and events objectively. Literary modernists questioned the belief that art can ever be an accurate mirror of nature and society, claiming instead that art can only mirror the external world as filtered through the mind.

When I first saw 8 1I2 in 1964 I was totally baffled. This was the result of the film's strange, stylized mise-en-scène and my confusion about just exactly what was happening in the plot. No film up until then had prepared me for Fellini's adaptation of a quintessential modernist technique— stream-of-consciousness narration. The stream-of-consciousness narrator does not convey events in a clear-cut linear order. Rather the story is told as if the narrator were lying on a psychoanalyst's couch and asked to relate an event using free association, including not just the "facts" of the story but all the feelings and mental associations the story triggers in the teller's mind. Thus, in 8 1I2 there is no easy-to-follow, linear, rational causal string of events, as there is in the classical Hollywood film. At any moment in the film, Guido's circumstances might trigger not an action but an interior vision—a dream, a childhood memory, or a scene from the film Guido is in the process of conceiving. The preponderance of interior visions reminds us that we are not seeing a replication of the world as it is, but a world as it is remembered in a free-associative manner, filtered through the mind of the teller.

In modernist literature, the goal is often not to tell an exciting story but to delineate a character suffering an existential crisis. Thus the emphasis is not on external action but on internal insight. As narrative theorist Horst Ruthrof observes, the narrative is "organized towards pointed situations in which a presented persona ... in a flash of insight becomes aware of meaningful as against meaningless existence."2 In the process, the narration becomes an implied pronouncement on the conditions of modern life. These traits all apply to Fellini's 8 1I2. The film is about the existential crisis of a filmmaker who has a breakdown in the midst of a project, losing inspiration for the film he is under contract to make. The film lays bare the cultural and psychological conditions that inhibit the mind of the artist and presents a breakthrough moment when a sense of meaning (and hence a knowledge of what his film is about) returns to the artist. In both modernist literature and the art film, the point of the work is never obvious and easy to grasp. One has to work mentally to put together the pieces in one's mind, to figure out what the author or auteur is trying to say. Just as with any difficult modernist literary work, one needs to experience 8 1I2 more than once in order to "get" it.

8 1I2 also presents itself as a modernist work because of its self-reflex-ivity. Like modernist novels which draw attention to their own conventions and the words out of which they are constructed, 8 1I2 blatantly calls attention to its filmic techniques. The flamboyant camera movements, audacious edits, and self-conscious score make us aware that we are watching not life, but a cinematic rendering of life, a life as it is mirrored on film. Indeed, everything we see in 8 1I2, beginning with the dream that opens the film, is blatantly filtered through the cinematic sensibility of Fellini's fictional protagonist, the film director Guido Anselmi, whose cinematic sensibility mirrors Fellini's. Even the title of Fellini's film is self-reflexive: it is also the title of Anselmi's film. Moreover, it literally enumerates Fellini's past endeavors in cinema. Before 8 1I2, Fellini had directed six films, codirected another, and directed episodes in two films. According to his arithmetic, this added up to seven-and-a-half films. Hence 8 1I2 was Fellini's eighth-and-a-half film.

8 1I2 marked a departure, in style and theme, both from Fellini's earlier films and from the classics of Italian neorealism, such as Rossellini's Open City (1945) and Paisan (1946), both of which Fellini had worked on as a scriptwriter at the beginning of his career. As discussed in chapter 6, the goal of many Italian neorealist directors was the truthful depiction of the impoverished condition of Italy in the aftermath of World War II. Though Fellini's goal was also to tell the truth on film, that truth encompassed not just the director's vision of social reality but also his spiritual, psychological, and metaphysical reality. The least realistic films, he felt, were the ones that pretended to be the most objective. Under the influence of the ideas of the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, Fellini wrote: "Sometimes a film, while avoiding any precise representation of historical or political reality, can incarnate in mythic figures, speaking in a quite elementary language, the opposition between contemporary feelings, and can become very much more realistic than another film in which social and political matters are referred to much more precisely."3 8 1I2 is a radical departure from neorealism because its images do not purport to mirror the world, or present a "true" reflection of society, but they do mirror the mind—the interior, subjective world of a great, successful Italian film director.