Authors: Clive James
That much I got, though I couldn’t understand all the dialogue. At the time, I knew barely enough Italian to follow the story. My future wife, who spoke Italian fluently, was sitting
beside me: she disliked having her concentration broken but provided whispered explanations when asked, filling in the details about the lying, cheating husband, who is insufficiently consumed by
guilt for having granted himself romantic privileges on the strength of his creative gift, while his classy wife faces yet another crisis in the endless process of deciding whether to put up with
him or walk away. The film should have functioned as a pre-emptive counselling session – an advertisement for the advisability of filling out the divorce papers before signing the marriage
register. But the aesthetic thrill overwhelmed everything. Long before the lights went up on the stunned audience, everyone in it knew that this was a work to grow old with – one that, as T.
S. Eliot once said about Dante’s poetry, you could hope to appreciate fully only at the end of your life. You couldn’t expect, then, to tease out the meaning of the film’s single
moments. First, you had to absorb the impact of its initial impression, as authoritative and disabling as that created by the two great wide-screen Botticellis in the Uffizi – only a few
hundred yards away from the cinema where
8
½
was playing
in prima visione
– which slowed your step and kept you at a distance while you strove to refocus your
brain along with your eyes.
In the subsequent three decades, growing older if not wiser, I have seen
8
½
every time it was re-released. Now there is a video of it: not a perfect way for a newcomer
to see the film but, for anyone who knows it well, a handy
aide-mémoire
to the order of its events – an order that, though precisely calculated, is inherently bewildering,
because the chronology of the immediate narrative sometimes includes scene-long figments of Guido’s self-serving imagination and is continually intersected by divergent ripples spun out from
his underlying memory. On the whole, ‘personal’ films are to be distrusted, if by personal it is meant that they are personal to their authors. (After the
auteur
theory took
hold, no director could make a film bad enough to be dismissed: a kludge on the scale of John Ford’s
Seven Women
was discovered to be personal instead of lousy.) But
8
½
is the kind of film that becomes personal to its viewer. Whether
8½
is really about Fellini is a question raised by the film itself – a question
answered, in part, by the uncomfortable certitude of any married man who watches it that it is really about
him
. Men, we’re all in this together. Fellini had us figured out.
Until almost the eve of the start of production on
8
½
the Guido Anselmi character wasn’t a film director. We know this because Deena Boyer, a journalist born in
America but raised in France, was trusted enough by Fellini to be given unprecedented access to the preparation of this film about the preparation of a film. Even the best movie books are usually
more entertaining than indispensable; hers breaks the rule. It was first published in French, as
Les 200 Jours de 8
½
, but I have never seen it except in German, as a tatty
secondhand Rowohlt paperback called
Die 200 Tage von 8
½
. There is no point in trying to be omniscient about a work of art whose stature depends upon its knowing more about
life than you do, but Boyer’s supply of firsthand information is handy for dispelling illusions, and the illusion that Fellini set out to make a film about a film director is a crucial one to
have dispelled. Woody Allen’s
Stardust Memories
, in part a copycat of
8
½
, could hardly work if it were not about an artist in a crisis. But Fellini’s
ur-hero was
l’homme moyen sensuel
in a crisis. At first, he was ‘just anyone’, or, as Fellini told Boyer, ‘a man who goes to a watering place and starts thinking
about his life’.
Guido graduated from being just anybody after Fellini decided to give him a career, so that the audience could get a handle on what his immediate crisis was about. Guido graduated from being
just anybody to being a writer, Boyer records. If
8½
had actually been made on that basis, it would have provided an interesting parallel to Antonioni’s masterpiece of two
years earlier,
La Notte:
same leading man, same professional anguish, same lustrous camerawork by Gianni Di Venanzo. But, as the start of production drew near, Fellini, with Mastroianni
already cast, opted for the calling whose nuts and bolts he and his star could most easily show. Thus, very late in the game,
8½
acquired the solid-seeming foreground that snares
your initial attention while the psychological background sends out tendrils through its interstices to gather you in. All the fascination, all the
fun
of the Italian film world, the
mondo del cinema,
is right up front working its charm: the randy production manager getting off with bimbo bit players, the producer carrying on like a prima donna, the prima donna melting
down like a maniac, the deals, the double deals, the chaos, the creativity.
Above all, the creativity. It’s getting hard for younger generations to grasp, as time goes by, but in the nineteen fifties and sixties Italy was the true centre of the
film world. Before the
auteur
theories promoted by
Cahiers du Cinéma
in France, by the magazine
Movie
in Britain, and by critics such as Andrew Sarris in America
forced the movie-mad intelligentsia all over the globe to reassess the Hollywood heritage instead of just enjoying it – a vital preparatory step in the development of the Planet Hollywood we
all so uneasily inhabit now – the lesser nations produced the films that seemed to matter most, and of the lesser nations Italy led the pack, ahead of France, Sweden, Poland, India and Japan.
It was as if Italy had risen reinvigorated out of the ashes of the war, a phoenix with a body by Farina and the Klaxon voice of Giuseppe Di Stefano: sexy, strident, attention-getting, bung-full of
tradition yet terrifically up-to-date. Italian movies were a worldwide art-house attraction even before
La Dolce Vita
came out, in 1960. After that, they were a sensation. Fellini, with
his big hat and loosely slung coat, was in all the photo magazines. Apparently, he lived at a table in the Via Veneto, looking tolerant but reserved while being mobbed by students and paparazzi.
(Actually, he never went there or anywhere else in public except to be photographed, and he put up with it only so that his face could pull in money with which to make movies – but we
couldn’t tell that from looking.) He wasn’t alone. Film artists of impeccable intellectual credentials lived in coronas of personal publicity. Everybody had just worked with everybody
else or was about to. The general effect was to make Italy look like an updated opera, with props and costumes shipped in from the future:
Cavalleria Rusticana
with a Ferrari onstage
instead of a horse,
Tosca
on a Vespa. The effect, in short, was magnetic.
Australians of my generation on their way to Britain stopped off in Italy to absorb an atmosphere they had correctly divined to be a magic compound of culture and hedonism. Those of us who stuck
around long enough to pick up the language found that the film world was even more effervescent than we had guessed. In Florence there was an unending supply of American Fulbright scholars who were
supposed to be studying Mannerist painting but still found time to keep up with all the gossip of the Rome-based industry, as if Pasolini were as important as Pontormo, Bolognini as Bronzino. They
didn’t have to haunt the library to get the facts. It was all in the papers. Producers, directors, cameramen and actors were getting married, divorced, sued, betrayed, killed, buried and born
again in a pattern constant only in its unrelenting turbulence. Everyone was a star.
Essentially, each Italian film was a collaboration, usually involving three or more writers, two or more of whom would be directors next week and one or more of whom was a producer last week,
but the money ran out. All those egos, however, were born to clash: hence the fizz, and hence the air of dedication, detectable in comedies and serious films alike. It is unfair to Antonioni to
read his career backward – from the disaster of
Zabriskie Point
, through the awful, wilful obfuscations of
Blow-Up
to the brain-curdling deterministic lethargy of
Red
Desert
and
The Eclipse
– and to decide that the spaced-out pacing of his high-impact central movies
La Notte
and
L’Avventura
was a bogus claim to
seriousness. You didn’t have to be mad about Monica Vitti (and we all were, even the women) to decide that those films were definitive treatises on the loss of love, all the more convincing
for moving no faster than a snail’s funeral. They retain their integrity when seen now, if we can suppress our awareness of how the director himself fell to pieces. Seen at the time, they
looked monumental, but they didn’t stand alone: bustling at their feet was a metropolis of the imagination.
On the subject of the mature Italian male’s sexual dilemma, the comedies of Pietro Germi looked at least as thoughtful as any dirge by Antonioni, and packed in a lot more incident. (In
Germi’s
L’Immorale
, Ugo Tognazzi runs around frantically to keep three fully fleshed female characters happily out of touch with one another until he finally conks out –
not from guilt but from an overtaxed heart.) Watching the comedies of Germi, Salce, Comencini, Monicelli and a half-dozen others as they appeared, we got an education in just how comprehensive and
satisfying a popular art form could be without ceasing to be either popular or artistic. The entire national life was up there on the screen, with an interval for drinks.
Over and above the comedies, there was the straight stuff. Postwar neo-realism had evolved into something even better: realism, with a fact-based imaginative scope that could take in anything,
even the deep-seated, dangerously retaliatory corruption of the country that had given rise to it. In 1963, Francesco Rosi’s
Le Mani Sulla Città
(
Hands Over the City
)
helped to light a fuse under the Italian political system which finally burned its way to the dynamite more than two decades later. In 1966, Gillo Pontecorvo made
The Battle of Algiers.
A
radical film of such power that it remains compulsory viewing even for conservatives, it put the dazzling first features of Bertolucci and Bellocchio into sober perspective, making them look
childishly hipped on their own anger. In short, the Italian cinema of those years was a lush field for someone to stand out from. Fellini did, head and shoulders.
Even more than
La Dolce Vita,
8½
is a clear demonstration of how Fellini became Italy’s national director and its ambassador to the world –
the ambassador who never left home. The totality of his films is more than the sum of its parts, but all his films are contained, at some degree of compression, in
8½:
they all lead
up to it or lead on from it. Rich even by his standards, his supreme masterpiece first conveys its wealth through its sumptuous visual texture. Since
Nights of Cabiria,
for which the
designer Piero Gherardi joined his entourage, Fellini had already put more of his country’s visual excitement into his movies than any other director except perhaps Kurosawa. In
8½,
with Di Venanzo lighting Gherardi’s sets, Fellini excelled even his own previous efforts at pulling his tumultuous homeland into shape.
The lustre isn’t just the look of Italy; it’s the look of Fellini. Compared with him, the world’s other great national directors hardly cared about what the camera could do.
Buñuel never moved the camera unless he had to. Renoir called for a bravura setup only if there was no other way to make a narrative point: that much-studied, Ophuls-like long exterior
tracking shot in
Le Crime de Monsieur Lange
is there just so you can see exactly how far the hero has to run along corridors and down flights of stairs. And you can’t imagine Bergman
actually enjoying what in his case you feel inclined to call the physical side of it. But Fellini, even in his maturity, is like Orson Welles playing with the toy train set for the first time. In
8½,
through sets built by Gherardi to look real and real locations lit by Di Venanzo to look like sets, the camera sails and swoops weightlessly yet without a flutter, as if
following grooves in space. As Boyer’s book reveals, there was no question of Fellini’s standing aside and letting Di Venanzo make all this happen. Fellini was with him behind the
camera: the instructions given to the operator, Pasquale de Santis, were their joint work, with Fellini always in the ascendant, specifying every aspect of a black-and-white
mise en
scène
gorgeous enough to make colour look famished. Fellini was so sure of getting what he wanted that it didn’t bother him if he was unable to check his work. He almost never
looked at rushes, although for much of the shooting of
8½
he couldn’t have even if he had wanted to: the laboratories were on strike.
Not only were there hardly any dailies, there were practically no scripts. Only two complete copies of the script existed anywhere near the production. Fellini had the picture in his head. To a
large extent, it happened the way you feel it happened: like a marvellous, fluent improvisation, with a freedom of expression which extended to the actors – even to those who were amateurs
and needed dozens of takes to get a tricky scene right. According to Fellini’s usual practice, the players, whether professional or amateur, were cast for their faces. For Fellini,
la
faccia
was everything. In a little book of 1980,
Fare un Film,
Fellini said that he would have preferred not to decide on his cast until he had seen every face in the world. Fellini
had always taken delight in casting untrained faces and getting precise performances out of them, but until
La Dolce Vita
he mainly confined them to the lower ranks of the cast. In
8½
they are up among the leading figures. The role of Guido’s increasingly apoplectic producer (clearly modelled on Fellini’s real-life bagman, Angelo Rizzoli) is played
by an industrialist, Guido Alberti. Physically ideal in his pampered rotundity, he uncorks a performance that a trained actor would be proud of. (Alberti went semi-pro afterwards: he’d got
the bug.) Similarly, the screenwriter is played by a real screenwriter, Jean Rougeul. Possessing a face that begs to be slapped, he, too, is physically ideal, but it is remarkable how good he is at
the lines, or how good Fellini makes him. Contrary to legend, in Italy it does matter if an actor can’t say the lines properly: though Italian films are post-synched, the lips have to match
the words in anything except a long shot. Rougeul, a Frenchman, had to work hard. He does an amazing job of being repellent. When he gets strung up, the audience laughs.