The greatest scenes in Fellini's films are often the most surreal. In 8 ½, Fellini depicts the creative process (and, therefore, creative block), a surreal subject in itself. Perhaps one of the most iconic scenes in cinema history is the opening dream sequence, in which a director, Guido (played by Marcello Mastroianni), is inexplicably stuck in his car in the middle of a traffic jam , struggling to escape like a bilious cloud. a smoke slowly asphyxiates him. This introductory scene perfectly captures the stifling inner anxiety that Guido will experience throughout the film, a suppressed panic that manifests itself in ways seemingly unnoticed or trivialized by those around him. As he pants and slams futilely against the car's windows and doors, the camera pans to the surrounding cars, in which his stranded neighbors stare with the detachment of spectators. Some continue their own activities, sleeping at the wheel or clinging lewdly to their voluptuous young female passengers, as demonstrated by an older man, all unresponsive or oblivious to Guido's suppressed and growing desperation. Then, for a moment, all human noise disappears to leave the gentle sound of the wind in the foreground, and Guido is shown escaping through the sunroof and floating away from the ghostly cul-de-sac and toward the heavens. The clouds swirl around him in the same way they briefly swirl around a monstrous launch pad structure, and we then see that he is suspended above a beach. Two film industry professionals from downstairs look at him and notice him; he is shouted at as if to call him back to earth and reality, before laughing and pulling on the kite string attached to Guido's leg. He shoots Guido, who is unceremoniously thrown into the ocean in an effectively nightmarish sequence. Then the sound returns, and Guido wakes up panting, his hand outstretched, in a new kind of congestion. He's currently in a creative impasse, this time surrounded by detached industry professionals who are bustling around, tending to his health with incessant questions, and pestering him with concerns about his next film project. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay This strongly self-referential Fellini film is loaded with symbolism. On one level, this initial sequence lends itself to the continuation of the endless reflexivity that defines 8 ½: it is a dream that parallels the real conflicts of Guido's waking life, in which his attempts to realize a film (especially the 8 ½ film) ultimately serves. just like the 8 ½ court itself. Guido dreams of being reborn and his exit from the car represents a birth experience. The film essentially documents his spiritual death and resurrection, and in one of the final fantasies he commits suicide before undoing the film in real life and subsequently achieving some sort of enlightenment. In the introductory dream, Fellini frees Guido from the car and sends him flying into the sky, much like the statue of Christ at the beginning of La Dolce Vita, reinforcing the theme of death and resurrection. The dream's traffic jam is analogous to its creative impasse; he is trapped by his mind (one could see the imagination as a mental vehicle) just as he is trapped by the self-destructing car. His state of confusion is caused by his inner conflict, his suffering and his emptiness, which stagnate and lock him in his creative blockage. Noxious gas in the car, traffic jams, Claudia's manager and publicistCardinale (which drags Guido into the ocean), the monstrous and imposing structure of the launch pad, everything on earth is representative of the stifling presence of the film industry in Guido's universe. life. The cinematic machinery brings Guido back to earth with a rope revealing the near-total control and ownership that the industry exercises over his life (later, during screen tests, Guido fantasizes that this very rope that constrains him is rather reaching out to her disapproving co-writer, Daumier, for a delicious lynching). In all respects, Guido's close brush with death in his dream is intertwined with the overwhelming sense of stagnation and death in his waking life, in which he is trapped in the infinite regress of truth and lies that comprises 8 ½ . He is a man acutely aware of his age and mortality, incapacitated by creative exhaustion and completely confused by his apparent inability to love. Guido is surrounded by a crowd of yes-men eager to capitalize on his next surefire success. His name allowed him an excess of artistic license that set the production machinery in motion without even a prior script to demonstrate. The titanic shuttle that was erected in faith of his abilities appears both in his dream and in reality, highlighting an artistic insincerity and pretension that has come to torment his conscience. Fellini writes of his own guilt-ridden director's block: “…I was stuttering and saying absurd things when Mastroianni asked me about his role. He was so confident. They all trusted me. Guido becomes more and more obsessed with the idea of ​​purity and cleansing that only Claudia can bring to the contaminated setting. In his mind, his arrival is the only justification for his film, and the only salvation for himself. In the traffic jam dream, he is shown cleaning nothing in particular in his car – a wiping motion that will be mirrored by his mother in his father's grave scene, and an obsession with rebirth embodied by his heavy question to Claudia: “Are you leaving everything behind and starting from scratch? Guido is so far into this production process that the launching pad is essentially his Rubicon and his Tower of Babel – a point of no return and a symbol of his arrogance – and the desperation of his predicament leads him to construct an image Claudia's implausible panacea. The phallic nature of the structure further suggests his sexual arrogance and infidelity. It's easy to imagine Guido's concern when the producer jokes in a rather threatening manner about the millions the set cost him. Fellini expresses Guido's economic concerns through his own turbulent experience: “I was about to cost all these people their jobs. They called me the Magician. Where was my magic? Now what should I do? Guido continues to drive with increasing heaviness, aware that his film Potemkin is on the verge of collapse. The fear that weighs on Guido manifests itself in his constant references to the truth in his film: “And above all… I don't want to tell another bunch of lies. » He wishes to "bury everything that is dishonest in us", and yet before him stands this massive scaffolding of indecision and dishonesty, a structure that cannot be buried. The dream sequence seems to satirize his reality with increasing accuracy, as the industry professionals blocking him literally watch his public display of a breakdown, even though no one seems to recognize him, and no one will criticize him rightly for his lack of progress (in order to make Guido feel guilty about cooperating at one point, the producer even claims that hepaid for Guido's breakdown). Unbeknownst to everyone, Guido has no script, no film, and doubts his artistic integrity. He feels a deep desire to say something new, original and profound in his new film, but wonders if he's lost his artistic drive – or if he ever had one. Toward the end, he said out loud, “I thought I had something so simple to say.” Something useful for everyone… When did I go wrong? I don't really have anything to say, but I still want to say it. » In addition to enormous professional pressure, Guido is plagued by chaos in his personal life. He struggles to reconcile his sincere love for his wife with his sincere attraction to all the women in his life. He is visibly unhappy when remarks are made about his inability to love (i.e. the two nieces tease him that he cannot love). He wants to make a film about love, and Claudia refuses kindly any other excuse for his inability to create a film). Guido's creative life force seems indeed linked to his love life, and his fear of losing professional relevance due to aging contributes to generating his creative impotence. The lascivious old man groping his female passenger in Guido's dream is equivalent to Guido's friend Mezzabotta, who embodies Guido's fear of growing old as he pathetically attempts to recapture youth through an engagement with the much younger Gloria. Mezzabotta's actions bring Guido's masculine neuroses into overdrive, while his dreams focus almost entirely on creative and sexual virility, suggesting that they are one and the same. This emphasis on women is also seen in Fellini's films La Strada and La Dolce Vita, particularly in symbolizing a dichotomy of purity and sexuality. Giulietta Masina's character, Gelsomina, is the embodiment of innocence in La Strada, in direct opposition to Zampano's brutal, worldly amorality. It is his mental destruction and loss of spirit that leads directly to the once steadfast Zampano's emotional breakdown. In La Dolce Vita, Fellini creates a personification of innocence through the young blonde Paola, who eventually beckons the Marcello across a creek, as if to offer the lost wastrel an image of purity he might once have achieved. This vision of female innocence offering salvation is a significant archetype in Fellini's films, as Guido also constructs an image of Claudia Cardinale as a kind of deus ex machina, although ultimately he does not find either his salvation through her. The women that Marcello covets in La Dolce Vita fall into the classic categories of eroticism. One example is Anita Ekberg's Sylvia Ranken, an icon of voluptuous femininity who radiates a joyous sexuality similar to that of Carla in 8 ½, Guido's adult version of his childhood fascination, Saraghina. When Carla is shown feverishly sweating at the hotel (reflecting her intemperate nature), it's hard not to visually link her to the Saraghina through her running makeup, blinking eyes, open, animalistic mouth, and wild hair. Fellini reinforces this Madonna-whore complex through his desexualization of Luisa, which included cutting Anouk Aimee's long eyelashes and directly associating her typically mature and soulful character with Guido's mother in a dream sequence. Luisa's childish haircut, practical outfit, and intellectual glasses also visually juxtapose her with the oversexualized, garishly dressed, childish, and gluttonous Carla. Guido's inability to reconcile his desires for different women is seen in a hotel fantasy, in which Claudia Cardinale is stripped of her. feeding a white nurse uniform and shown to theplace in a suddenly sexualized context, lying in Guido's bed caressing herself in a flimsy negligee with her hair down. Another fantasy reconciles his desire for the desexualized mother and the oversexualized lover in a humorous sequence between Luisa and Carla on the café terrace, where the two women complement each other with delight while Guido approvingly applauds from the side. These hallucinatory visions culminate in the harem scene, in which Guido reigns supreme over a farm of all the women in his life (except Claudia), relegating to pasture those who are over the age limit he imposed on him. confined upstairs, and beaming under the loving attention of all his mistresses. Interestingly, the harem sequence is filmed in the same farm setting as Asa-nisi-masa's memory (which fetishizes the innocence of youth), further emphasizing Guido's desire for maternal comfort than the eroticism in the harem. Indeed, by the standards of male sexual fantasies, the harem scene is decidedly more concerned with capturing the beauty of childhood, a pious desire for masculine regression and "control over an uncontrollable reality", as critic Jacqueline describes it Reich. Guido is bathed in both farm scenes by flocks of feeding women, and among the many images the two sequences share is one of a burning hearth, which captures the feeling of emotional warmth and security idealized by Guido . However, unlike the idyllic childhood memory that unfolds smoothly and ends in affectionate nostalgia, the utopian order and rhythm of the harem sequence quickly disintegrates into a chaotic revolt of women, who criticize the abilities of Guido's lover in the same way that Daumier criticizes his abilities as an artist. Guido is forced to resort to the whip to restore order, but in doing so he calls into question his own masculinity by resorting to an external object, and even more so, to the ultimate phallic symbol. The scene ends on a note of visibly anxious melancholy, returning the viewer to Guido's current state of sexual doubt. It's also worth noting that while the childhood memory doesn't leave the viewer with as much uneasiness, it also references Guido's actual helpless state – artistically. In a magical and haunting scene, the girl in his memory tells Guido that the magic words “Asa Nisi Masa” have the power to make portraits move. In Guido's adult reality, it is precisely this ability to create moving images that he is desperately trying to regain. While Fellini is self-deprecating in his image of Guido as a dried-up creative artist, his brilliant depiction of this artistic crisis shows that Fellini himself is certainly not dried up. 8½ clearly demonstrates this difference between a film that has nothing to say and a film about having nothing to say. Although Guido ultimately did not complete his project in film, Fellini managed to create a film with brilliantly depicted messages about midlife crises, childhood, memories, desires, reconciling reality with fantasy, relationships, etc. As film critic Dan Schneider said: “[Fellini] delivers his exercise in introspection with such mastery of images that one must be impressed by the vehicle as well as the passengers. It is not style that takes precedence over substance. This is deep substance delivered with consummate style. Whether the substance concerns the inner psychic void is irrelevant. This distinction is important because 8 ½ is often criticized for its disjointed narrative, its lack of a unifying and coherent philosophy, and its excess of nostalgia and self-reference (self-critiques, in fact, which Fellini anticipates through Daumier's attacks on the moviebirth of Guido). . Towards the end, Daumier denigrates: “Why piece together the shreds of your life – the vague memories, the faces – the people you never knew how to love? Like La Strada and La Dolce Vita, many of Fellini's films rely nostalgically on autobiographical experiences, sometimes to an extent that has been criticized as masturbatory. Indeed, 8 ½ is an endless hall of mirrors that reaches a new level of autobiographical intensity: his films almost always refer, in one way or another, to his former circus experience, to infidelity towards women, to high society events, to inner anguish, to loneliness, to anomie. , disillusionment with the Catholic Church, etc. However, even if the film does indeed contain autobiographical elements, oversimplifying it by making it an autobiography would mean missing Fellini's very universal messages. He manages to share his life experience and personal insights in a way that deeply impacts others, which is truly courageous and beautifully enlightening. Fellini himself considered Daumier's character to be Guido's greatest adversary, marking the critic as the world's most castrating figure. collection of those who retain an artist. He seems to argue that while a critic's remarks can often be intelligent (as Daumier certainly makes legitimate observations), they are not always shared constructively, instead stifling an artist's freedom to take liberties and make mistakes, without which there can be no great art. . Fellini acknowledges the use of 8 ½ for his own intensive introspection through these self-deprecating critiques he writes into the film, but in doing so diminishes their relevance in the protagonist's greater quest for meaning. Critics become only a secondary obstacle, alongside the economic concerns of the producer and the incessant questioning of actors, agents, journalists and intellectuals, in what is above all a conflict between Guido and himself. Guido is a man who has lost the will to create – a loss of inspiration that calls everything else in his life into question. Without his primary generative force, all secondary conflicts are no longer applicable: the concerns of the film industry rest entirely on the expectation that Guido will produce a new masterpiece; without a film, all the criticism and pressure from the industry is moot. Furthermore, his artistic confusion is closely linked to his sexual chaos, the main source of his relational difficulties. For Guido therefore, creating is a first. For Fellini too, this is precisely the case, and he delivers a remarkable film regardless of its stylistic idiosyncrasies and its breaks with traditional narrative structure. In a sense, the primacy of personal creation is his justification for trying to escape everyone else and ultimately doing things his own way. Fellini finds his personal fulfillment and authenticity, creative or sexual, bogged down primarily by his impossible efforts to respond to the scathing criticism of everyone around him. “Happiness,” he said one day through Guido, “is being able to tell the truth without ever making anyone suffer.” » Thus, the introductory dream sequence reflects the general theme of Fellini's film, which is ultimately more about one man's personal creative block than about the process of filmmaking in general. When Claudia appears, she is the opposite of what Guido had imagined: dressed in black, she emerges from the shadows of the theater rather than the light, accompanied by Saraghina's song rather than by the airy theme of The Barber of Seville, and psychologically proves..”