The most beautiful scenes in Fellini's films are often the most surreal. In 8 ½, Fellini depicts the creative process (and, by extension, creative block), a notoriously surreal subject in and of 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 trapped in his car in the middle of a traffic jam, struggling to escape like a bilious cloud. of smoke slowly asphyxiates him. This introductory scene perfectly captures the suffocating internal anxiety that Guido will experience throughout the film, a contained panic that manifests itself in ways seemingly unnoticed or trivialized by those around him. As he gasps and bangs uselessly against the car's windows and doors, the camera pans to the surrounding cars, where his stranded neighbors stare at him distantly. Some continue with their activities, sleeping at the wheel or obscenely grabbing their young and voluptuous female passengers as demonstrated by an older male, completely insensitive or unaware of Guido's suffocated and growing desperation. Then, for a moment, all human noises fade away to foreground the gentle sound of the wind, and Guido is shown escaping through the sunroof and floating away from the ghostly impasse and into the sky. Clouds swirl around him the same way they briefly swirl around a monstrous launch pad structure, and then we see that he's hovering above a beach. Two film industry professionals from below look up and notice him; one snaps at him as if calling him back to earth and reality, before laughing and tugging on the kite string tied to Guido's leg. He takes down Guido, who is unceremoniously dumped into the ocean in a truly nightmarish sequence. Then the sound returns, and Guido wakes up with a start, with his hand outstretched, in a new sort of congestion. He's currently at a creative standstill, this time surrounded by aloof industry professionals milling around, nursing his health with incessant questions and hounding him with worries about his next film project. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay This highly self-referential Fellini film is loaded with symbolism. On the one hand, this opening sequence lends itself to continuing the infinite reflexivity that defines 8 ½: it is a dream that parallels the real conflicts in Guido's waking life, in which his attempts to direct a film (in particular, the movie 8 ½) ultimately serve as the plot of 8 ½ 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 his final fantasies, he commits suicide before breaking the film into real life and subsequently achieving some sort of enlightenment. In the introductory dream, Fellini frees Guido from the car and sends him flying across the sky, much like the statue of Christ at the beginning of La Dolce Vita, furthering this theme of death and resurrection. The traffic jam in the dream is analogous to his creative stalemate; he is trapped by his mind (one might see the imagination as a mental vehicle) just as he is trapped by the self-destructive car. His state of confusion is caused by internal conflict, suffering and emptiness, which stagnate and confine him to his creative block. The noxious gas in the car, the traffic jam, Claudia Cardinale's manager and publicist (who drags Guido into the ocean), the monstrous and imposing structure on the launch pad: everything on earth is representative of the suffocatingpresence of the film industry in Guido's work. life. The machinery of the cinema brings Guido back down to earth with a rope that indicates the almost total control and ownership that the industry has over his life (later, during auditions, Guido fantasizes that this same rope that binds him instead turns to his co-writer, Daumier, who disapproves of it, for a delightful lynching). However, Guido's close brush with death in his dream is intimately linked to the overwhelming sense of stagnation and death in his waking life, in which he is trapped in the infinite regression 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 prerequisite script to prove it. The titanic shuttle that was erected in faith in his abilities appears both in his dream and in reality, highlighting an artistic insincerity and pretense that has come to haunt his conscience. Fellini writes of his guilt-ridden directorial block: “…I stammered and said nonsense when Mastroianni asked me what his part was. He was so confident. Everyone trusted me." Guido becomes increasingly obsessed with the idea of ​​purity and purification that only Claudia can bring to the contaminated set. In his mind, his arrival is the only justification for his film and the only salvation for himself. In the dream of the traffic jam, he is shown cleaning something in particular in his car – a cleaning motion that will be mirrored by his mother in his father's grave scene, and an obsession with rebirth exemplified by his weighty question to Claudia : "Could you leave everything behind and start from scratch?" Guido has so entered 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 situation leads him to the construction of a Claudia's incredibly panacea-like image. The phallic nature of the structure further suggests her sexual arrogance and infidelity. One can easily imagine Guido's anxiety when the producer jokes in a somewhat threatening way about the millions the set cost him. Fellini expresses Guido's economic worries through his tormented experience: “I was going to cost all these people their jobs. They called me the Wizard. Where had my magic gone? What do I do now?" Guido continues to advance with increasing heaviness, aware that his film Potemkin is soon destined to collapse. The terror that weighs on Guido is manifested in the continuous references to the truth of his film: "And above all... I have no want to tell another mountain of lies." He wants to “bury everything that is dishonest in us,” yet in front of him is this massive scaffolding of indecision and dishonesty, a structure that cannot be buried. The sequence of dream seems to satirize his reality with increasing accuracy, while the industry professionals who block him literally watch his public demonstration of a meltdown, even though no one seems to recognize it, and no one will adequately criticize him for his lack of progress (in order to at one point (hitting Guido by forcing him to collaborate, the producer even claims that he paid for Guido's collapse). Unbeknownst to everyone, Guido has no script, no film and is tormented by doubts about his artistic integrity. He feels a deep desire to say somethingagain, original and profound in his new film, but he wonders if he has lost his artistic impulse or if he ever had one. Towards the end he says out loud, “I thought I had something so simple to say. Something useful for everyone... When did I make a mistake? I don't really have anything to say, but I want to say it anyway. “In addition to the tremendous professional pressure, Guido is plagued by chaos in his personal life. He has difficulty reconciling his sincere love for his wife with his sincere attraction to every woman in his life. He is noticeably displeased when comments are made about his inability to love (i.e., his two nieces tease him that he can't make a movie about love, and Claudia sweetly rejects any other excuses for his inability to make a movie). Guido's creative life force indeed seems to be linked to his romantic life, and his fear of diminishing professional relevance as he ages contributes to generating his creative impotence. The lecherous old man who gropes 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 regain his youth through an engagement with the much younger Gloria. Mezzabotta's actions send Guido's masculine neuroses into a tailspin, as 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 between purity and sexuality. Giulietta Masina's character, Gelsomina, is the embodiment of innocence in La Strada, placed in direct opposition to Zampano's brutal and worldly amorality. It is his mental destruction and loss of spirit that leads directly to the emotional collapse of the once steadfast Zampano. In La Dolce Vita, Fellini creates a personification of innocence through the young blonde girl Paola, who ultimately greets Marcello across a cove, as if offering 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 sort of deus ex machina, although he ultimately does not find his salvation even through her. The women Marcello lusts after in La Dolce Vita fall into the standard 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 in the hotel (reflecting her intemperate nature), it's hard not to visually connect her to Saraghina through her runny makeup, flashing eyes, animalistic open mouth, and wild hair. Fellini furthers this Madonna-whore complex through the desexualization of Luisa, which included cutting off Anouk Aimee's long eyelashes and directly associating her typically mature and soulful character with Guido's mother in a dream sequence. Luisa's boyish haircut, practical clothing, and intellectual glasses also visually juxtapose her with the oversexualized, flamboyantly 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 clothes. wearing a white nurse's uniform and instead shown in a suddenly sexualized context, lying in Guido's bed who caresses herself in a light dressing gown with her hair loose. Another fantasy reconciles his desire for his motherdesexualized and the hypersexualized lover in a humorous sequence between Luisa and Carla at the outdoor bar, as both women happily complement each other while Guido, approvingly, claps from the side. These hallucinatory visions find their culmination in the harem scene, in which Guido reigns supreme over a farm of all the women in his life (with the exception of Claudia), relegating those who have exceeded the prescribed age limit to pasture. confined to the upper floor and resplendent with the affectionate attention of all his mistresses. Interestingly, the harem sequence is filmed in the same agricultural setting as Asa-nisi-masa's memory (which fetishizes the innocence of youth), emphasizing Guido's desire for maternal comfort more 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 longing for male regression and “control over an out-of-control reality,” as critic Jacqueline describes Reich. In both agricultural scenes Guido is bathed in flocks of nurturing women, and among the many images shared by the two sequences is that of a blazing hearth, which captures the sense of emotional warmth and security Guido idealizes. However, unlike the idyllic childhood memory that flows smoothly and ends with fond nostalgia, the utopian order and rhythm of the harem sequence quickly disintegrates into a chaotic revolt of the women, who criticize Guido's skill as lover in much the same way that Daumier criticizes his ability 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, moreover, the phallic symbol par excellence. The scene ends on a palpably anxious note of 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 the same discomfort, it also references, artistically, Guido's actual state of helplessness. In a magically haunting scene, the young 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 trying so desperately to regain. While Fellini is self-deprecating in his image of Guido as a creatively dried-up artist, his brilliant depiction of this artistic crisis shows that Fellini himself is certainly not dried-up. 8½ effectively demonstrates this difference between a film that has nothing to say and a film about having nothing to say. Even though Guido ultimately does not complete his project in the film, Fellini managed to create a film with brilliantly depicted messages about mid-life crises, childhood, memories, desires, reconciling reality with fantasy, relationships and more. As film critic Dan Schneider put it, “[Fellini] delivers his exercise in introspection with such mastery of imagery that one must be as impressed by the vehicle as the passengers. This is not style over substance. This is deep substance delivered with consummate style. The fact that the substance concerns the inner psychic void is irrelevant. This distinction is important because 8 ½ is often criticized for a disjointed narrative, for lacking a unifying and coherent philosophy, and for being overly indulgently nostalgic and self-referential (self-criticisms, in fact, which Fellini anticipates through Daumier's attacks on the nascent film of Guido). . Toward the end, Daumier decries, “Why put together the shreds of your life – the memoriesvague, the faces - the people you never knew how to love?" Like La Strada and La Dolce Vita, many of Fellini's films draw nostalgically on autobiographical experiences, sometimes to a point that has been criticized as masturbatory. Indeed, 8 ½ is an endless game of mirrors that reaches a new level of autobiographical intensity: his films almost always refer, in one way or another, to his previous circus experience, to his infidelity with women, to the events of high society, internal anguish, loneliness, anomie, disillusionment with the Catholic Church and so on. However, although the film indeed contains autobiographical elements, oversimplifying it into an autobiography would mean missing Fellini's universal messages. He manages to share his life experience and personal insights in a way that has a profound impact on others, which is truly courageous and wonderfully enlightening. Fellini himself considered Daumier's character Guido's greatest adversary, defining the critic as the most emasculating figure in the world. collection of those who hold back an artist. He seems to argue that while a critic's observations may often be intelligent (as Daumier certainly makes some legitimate observations), they are not always shared constructively, instead stifling an artist's freedom to take liberties and make mistakes, without the such as there can be no great art. . Fellini acknowledges the use of 8 ½ for his own intense introspection through these self-deprecations that he writes into the film, but in doing so diminishes its relevance in the protagonist's greater search for meaning. The criticism becomes just another secondary obstacle, along with the producer's economic worries and the incessant questions of actors, agents, journalists and intellectuals, in what is mainly a conflict between him and Guido. Guido is a man who has lost the desire to create, a loss of inspiration that calls into question everything else in his life. Without his primary generative force, all secondary conflicts are no longer applicable: the film industry's concerns depend entirely on the expectation that Guido will produce a new masterpiece; without movies, all the criticism and pressure from the industry is moot. Furthermore, his artistic confusion is intimately linked to his sexual chaos, the main source of his relationship problems. For Guido, therefore, creating is the first thing. This is exactly the case for Fellini too, and he manages to make an extraordinary film despite its stylistic idiosyncrasies and breaks with the traditional narrative structure. In a sense, the primacy of personal creation is his justification for trying to escape everyone and ultimately do things his own way. Fellini sees his self-realization and authenticity, creative or sexual, mired primarily in his impossible efforts to resolve the cutting criticisms of everyone around him. "Happiness", he once says through Guido, "is being able to tell the truth without ever making anyone suffer". Thus, the introductory dream sequence mirrors the overall theme of Fellini's film, which is ultimately more about one man's personal creative block than about the filmmaking process in general. When Claudia appears, it is the exact opposite of what Guido had imagined: dressed all in black, she emerges from the shadow of the theater rather than from the light, accompanied by Saraghina's song rather than the airy theme of the Barber of Seville, and she proves psychologically and emotionally diametrically opposed to Guido: she laughs while he is distressed, she doesn't like the "unreal" location of the set while he likes it enormously, she sits while he stands, she makes touchy shots at his.”