8½: The Beautiful Confusion

In 8½, some might argue, Fellini’s obsession with the entrenched systems that had always served him, as man and artist, suggests he doesn’t want them to change: his alter ego is, after all, a character who invites both his mistress and his wife to join him at the treatment spa where he’s trying to get his mojo back, somehow believing, innocently, that their dual presence couldn’t possibly create problems. He imagines them becoming friends—but then they join forces and turn on him, as they have every right to do. In this sense, all the ideas in 8½ move toward change, not away from it.

Suddenly the things Guido has always been able to rely on—a simpatico producer, an adoring mistress, a smart, loyal wife—have lost their magic, their ability to make him feel good. Guido may want to believe none of this is his fault, but Fellini is obsessed with lifting that veil of self-delusion. We can imagine that one day the maestro himself looked in the mirror and saw the root of the problem right there, in his own middle-aged mug. So what does he do? He defies the system that had created him—that had already allowed him to create so much—by making a movie with a potentially confounding snakes-and-ladders structure, a semi-comedy about a man who has lost his way, hardly a cheery subject. No one could accuse him of taking the easy way out with 8½.

When 8½ played at the Cannes Film Festival, in May 1963, most of the international critics loved it. The workaday Italian public? Not so much. In one Calabrian town, it so baffled and angered the audience that they tried to attack the projectionist. The two full-length Fellini films that preceded it, Nights of Cabiria (1957) and La dolce vita, had been hits. You can see why the casual moviegoer might find 8½ a lot less fun than watching Mastroianni, in La dolce vita, swanning through Rome in pursuit of various beauties, among them Anita Ekberg’s kitten-cuddling movie starlet.

But if many moviegoers in the Italian provinces hated the new picture, audiences worldwide were a different story. Its ostensible weirdness notwithstanding, 8½ became a hit in the United States. Film financier and producer Joseph E. Levine had bought, at Cannes, the rights to distribute the film, later bragging to Fellini biographer John Baxter that he’d made a profit off it, unusual for an art film. It had become what he called “a cocktail picture,” the kind of movie everyone loved talking about.

From a strictly commercial standpoint, 8½ was arriving at exactly the right time, in an era when many Americans were not only receptive to imported films but hungry for them. The creativity and productivity of filmmakers overseas ensured a steady supply. The year that 8½ arrived, The Exterminating Angel, L’eclisse, High and Low, and The Leopard were also released in the U.S. and found popularity among erudite audiences—or, at least, Americans who wanted to be seen as erudite.

In the years since, 8½ has become so revered that it regularly floats to the upper reaches of best-of-all-time lists. In the 2012 edition of Sight and Sound’s once-per-decade critics’ poll of the greatest films ever made, 8½ clocked in at number ten. Though it dropped to number thirty-one in the 2022 edition, it still made a robust showing on that year’s corresponding poll of directors, at number six. It’s not surprising that 8½ would be a favorite among filmmakers: Roger Ebert called it “the definitive film about director’s block.” But really, 8½ is for any creative person who has ever looked up from the sketch pad, the laptop, the blank sheet of staff paper, and wailed to the heavens, “I got nothin’!” Guido Anselmi, even with all his flaws, is still the patron saint of the stuck.

The subject of 8½ is anguish, yet its form is nothing but playful. One of the miracles of the film is how makeshift it feels as you’re watching it—it reads as an adventure with no plan, no clear sense of the way from point A to point B, like a dream—only to come together in a way that suggests Fellini knew what he was doing all along. As we watch Guido’s trials unfold, we feel as fractured as he does. The real-life action of the film—following the surreal nightmare sequence that kicks it off—takes place at a spa, where Guido is hoping to cure whatever it is that’s ailing him. (A few doses of holy water are supposed to do the trick.) At one point, Guido shuffles to the bathroom in his robe and slippers and stares into the mirror; his face is muddy and diffuse, a blur of exhaustion, and his hair is frosted with silver. He looks ancient for his age, which is forty-three.

Guido has invited his mistress, a cupcake of a woman named Carla (Sandra Milo), to visit him, installing her in a separate hotel; she’s a chatterbox capable of distracting him but not of inspiring him. He has also invited his wife, the sensible, regal Luisa (Anouk Aimée), perhaps thinking she won’t show up. But she does, and she knows from the minute she arrives that Guido has drifted away from her. He tries to appease her, but she’s simply just another woman he can’t control. Guido finds peace only in a fantasy: he sees a vision of the perfect woman—he describes her as “both young and ancient, a child but also a woman”—dressed in white, offering him a glass of that holy water with a smile. This is Claudia Cardinale—later she will appear in the film as an actress named Claudia—and to Guido, the exquisite simplicity of her beauty is the antidote to all his real-life problems.

But any relief Guido feels is fleeting. He meets with a cardinal on the spa’s grounds, and the two engage in a polite, mildly theological discussion. Guido has disengaged from the church, but he still feels its pull. Fellini takes us back to Guido’s boyhood, when he runs off to the seaside with a bunch of his pals to gawp at a strange woman who lives there, a hefty goddess with two slashes for eyebrows and a tousle of sea-witch black hair. This is La Saraghina (Eddra Gale), mesmerizing and terrifying at once. She dances salaciously for the coins the boys give her; they love it, and she clearly gets off on it too. But priests from the boys’ school catch them in the act, and little Guido alone is singled out for punishment, made to feel shame for whatever confusing sexual impulse La Saraghina may have stirred up.

Back in Guido’s troubled present, he continues to seek inspiration for his movie, and to wrangle the women in his life. Again, he retreats into a fantasy, one of the movie’s most famous sequences, in which he’s attended to and pampered by every woman he has ever known—he’s their baby, their stud, their king, and he makes all the rules. But Guido doesn’t even have control over his own dreamy fiction. The women in his fantasy sense something amiss with this setup and revolt. He “tames” them by comically and ineffectually flicking a whip, but come now: even he knows that won’t assuage their anger, their instinctual knowledge that they deserve better. (They know why Betty Friedan wrote that book.) The distinguishing feature of the harem sequence isn’t Guido’s pleasure, but his anxiety.

Much of 8½ addresses, through Guido’s eyes, Fellini’s annoyance with anyone who would doubt his genius—the press, the public, and intellectuals eager to overinterpret. The film is, in short, about man stuff, genius stuff. A genius must make art! A man must make love! At the same time, Fellini is further articulating that tadpole of an idea he’d flirted with in I vitelloni: that sharing the world with women is preferable to subjugating them. He’d been inching closer to that truth for years, especially in the multilayered characters he had crafted for his wife, the most definitive actress of all his films, Giulietta Masina. In movies like La strada (1954) and Nights of Cabiria, she plays women who are victims on the surface but whose boldness vibrates around them like a warrior’s energy. He didn’t just sympathize with women; in his lurching-forward way, he identified with them. His own feminine side—his darkest side, as he might put it—was perhaps the greatest source of his creativity.

It was most certainly the source of his greatest movies’ warmth, and that’s blazingly clear in 8½. As the movie rounds toward its close, Guido is led to the set of the movie he has abandoned. (He’d envisioned his film as a sci-fi extravaganza, but thus far only the armature of a spaceship has been built; cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo captures it as a lonely skeleton in the middle of a sad, faux-lunar landscape.) A throng of journalists and onlookers surrounds him, shouting questions and making unsolicited observations. Is he afraid of the atomic bomb? Does he believe in God? Doesn’t he take himself a bit too seriously? One woman implores, “Why don’t you make a film about love?”

This question arises near the end of a film that is, in fact, all about love—and largely about the conflicted tenderness Guido feels for the women in his life, as well as his hard-earned recognition that they’re not the enemy, but rather his truest allies. In the movie’s famous finale, every character in the film reappears, marching in a circus parade, finally giving Guido the truth he’d been looking for. Fellini adored the circus and all sorts of ragtag performers and clowns. The parade of 8½—one Guido himself joins at the end, taking Luisa’s hand before he does so, knowing it’s the one he’s meant to hold—jars something loose in him: he finally realizes he needs the chaos of life, the messiness of other humans, maybe especially the whirlwind energy of women, in order to create. As Fellini himself put it, “at the end of 8½, the protagonist realizes that his fear, complexes, and anxiety are in fact a kind of wealth.”

Yet as jubilant and rambunctiously poignant as that ending is, the real glory of 8½ is everything in the middle—it’s everything that Guido’s women, who are of course also Fellini’s women, struggle to tell him, before he finally opens his ears. It’s Aimée’s Luisa, looking glamorously sensible in narrow, bookish glasses and a white tunic buttoned up to the neck, gazing at her self-absorbed husband with exhausted anguish. She’s not just a wife to the man, but a wife to his ideas—and those may be harder to live with. Why does it take Guido forever to see that her businesslike affection is, for him, the truest kind of love? But then, 8½ is all about moving toward the future with newly opened eyes. There’s Cardinale’s dream woman in white, and later the actress Claudia, decked out in quivering black movie-star feathers. One of these figures is a specter who serves Guido’s fantasies, the other a real-life woman who explodes them—it’s Claudia the actress who finally says plainly, “A guy like your character, who doesn’t love anybody, isn’t very sympathetic, you know.” Gale’s La Saraghina, dancing on the beach, smoothing her torn black dress over her undulating hips, tells him another truth that takes forever to register: both little boys and the men they grow into are right to be in awe of sex and terrified by it, because it’s awesome and, yes, sometimes terrifying.