Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

After eight

2015; Elsevier BV; Volume: 2; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/s2215-0366(15)00246-1

2215-0374

Laura Thomas,

Italian Literature and Culture

Beginnings, for Federico Fellini, were difficult things. “When I decide to make a film, I need to find a reason—any reason—to begin”, he once confessed. “My psychology is that of a child who must be forced to work”. 8 ½, restored and re-released this month, regarded by many as the director's masterpiece, certainly got off to a shaky start. The writer John Baxter recounts how one night in 1962 Fellini prepared a letter of resignation to his producer, confessing that all inspiration had deserted him. That he could, in fact, find no reason whatsoever to begin this latest film. As he sat down to write he was interrupted by his crew, come to toast the project: “Long live Otto e Mezzo!” Fellini couldn't face disappointing them. And so filming began. 8 ½'s central character Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) is a blocked director who—just like Fellini—is looking for a reason to start a film. Physically drained, imaginatively spent, as 8 ½ opens he has retreated to an upmarket spa to take the waters and await the arrival of a worryingly tardy muse. He has little chance to rest however, because the circus that is his working life, comprising grumbling crew, needy actors, a cigar-toting producer and a waspish script-doctor, has followed him to the resort. He is besieged by questions all day long. Even his doctor doesn't spare him. “What are you cooking up for us? Another film on hopelessness?” Always his own worst enemy, Guido installs his mistress Carla (Sandra Milo) in a local hotel, only to have his wife Luisa (Anouk Aimee) insist on joining him for the weekend. Surrounded by people hungry for professional and personal answers that he cannot give, he takes refuge in a world of dreams and memories. It's the dream sequences that make 8 ½ so much more than a film about film making. Fellini had a decisive encounter with the ideas of Carl Jung in 1960 and immediately responded to the fact that, unlike Freud, Jung didn't pathologise dream imagery. For Jung, “the dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul” and dreams are part of our culture, part, even, of our collective unconscious. Dreams and dreaming had always been central to Fellini's work, but Jung's ideas freed him from Freudian shame and allowed him to embrace them as a source of creativity. Many of 8 ½'s dream sequences really do feel like they come from a collective unconscious. They are dreams we all have or might have: the headlong plunge of the falling dream that opens the film, leaving Guido clawing at empty air; the anxiety dream in which Guido's father asks his producer-turned-headmaster “how is the boy doing?” Others are comically particular to the dreamer himself, such as the harem Guido imagines the women in his life sharing (not quite) harmoniously. One dream sequence seems to give a clue to Fellini's attitude to the creative process. At the spa one evening Guido encounters an old friend, a magician doing a mind reading act. As they work the audience, the magician and his partner Maya seem disarmingly convincing. “There are a few tricks”, he tells Guido, “but part of it is real, somehow”. Guido consents to have his mind read and Maya calls out “Asa Nisi Masa”, words that send us back into Guido's childhood, where he and his siblings imagine a portrait in their bedroom will come to life and lead them to untold riches—if only they remember the magic words Asa Nisi Masa. Many interpretations of the phrase are available, but the point of the scene seems to be this idea of real magic, of honest trickery. “I'm a liar”, Fellini once said, “but an honest one”. Bereft of a reason to begin his film, Guido feels himself a fraud, leading his cast and crew on. Maya and the magician hold out to him the possibility of a way past his director's block: the liar might after all be capable of truth, the fraudster of authenticity. Asa Nisi Masa is a rallying cry. It has the power to make pictures come to life, to make tricks real. Even, perhaps, to make films begin. 8 ½ Directed by Federico Fellini, Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimée, Sandra Milo Running time: 138 min 8 ½ Directed by Federico Fellini, Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimée, Sandra Milo Running time: 138 min