The opening of Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963) is one of my favorites in all of cinema. No audio--there is a traffic jam in a tunnel, and we see freeze frames of the other passengers. We quickly hear the sounds of labored breathing and a struggle to get out of the car, smoke or fog slowly filling it. Dead bodies or disembodied arms are coming out of the bus windows in front of us. But soon enough we--as in the journey the audience is following Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) through--are flying above the automobiles, into the clouds, until we eventually realize that someone is holding on to a rope attached to our ankle below. Guido’s body plunges downward towards the beach, interrupted by a gasp and his hand reaching up from bed, confirming what we already suspected--that it is a lofty dream.
This opening scene is a reminder of Surrealist imagery from the early films of Buñuel, like Un Chien Andalou (1929), while also having similarities to another ambitious opening a few years later, in Bergman’s Persona (1966). All of these films start off associating cinema and spectatorship with dream states, clearly aligning the two with the inner, unconscious workings of our minds. As a teenager, I would put 8 ½ on as a sleep aid, knowing that it was opening up a world receptive to dreams and visual spectacle. It wouldn’t be until much later that I would read Freud stating, “Visual images constitute the principal component of our dreams.” (64) Even if I was closing my eyes and falling asleep, cinema like this had the ability to shepherd me into the state of mind I desired.
If I began getting drowsy too quickly, the sound of Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries” would wake me up five minutes in. The idea wasn’t to put on a movie that would put me to sleep as soon as possible and keep me there. It was more of a unique way of half-watching films with the guard of my consciousness down. Even if I slept through whole sequences, watching it again in the light of day gave me the uncanny feeling that I had experienced it as a whole. This was only matched later on in life by watching movies while blacked out drunk. I would have no memory of a film, but as soon as I was watching it, each moment was like a revelation of something I already lived through. In terms of sleeping to 8 ½, after about a week, I would have experienced the whole film again, but just out of order, without attention paid to the logical happenings of the story. But that is why 8 ½ is so great--it is more about a creative fantasy state of mind, than a logical, intentional way of being. Carini (Jean Rougeul), the film critic in the movie calls Guido’s script “a series of gratuitous episodes,” which is obviously supposed to be metatextual, although this is not necessarily a bad thing.
For those who haven’t seen 8 ½, it is a self-reflexive movie in which Mastroianni as Guido is basically playing a version of Fellini, the director. Guido is going through a mid-life crisis and partial breakdown while in pre-production for his next film, and is prescribed a treatment of spas, saunas, and mineral water. He is not the only one getting old, as so many of the characters are dealing with the realities of middle-to-late age. In Guido’s eyes youth is exemplified by the beautiful women he desires, many of whom are approximately half his age. His journey through pre-production and domestic turmoil is held together with a series of sublime sequences that are nocturnal dreams, nightmares, and daydreams. Memories of childhood spring to the screen as Guido tries to figure out how to love, truly, effectively, and with consideration.
The progress of the story is completely wrapped up in Guido’s head, but his obsession with women allows for a number of great performances. There is Carla (Sandra Milo), his mistress, who is a bit goofy behind her pronounced fashion sense. We get the idea that she is more interested in her Pippo comic than any of Guido’s grand, cinematic ideas. Luisa (Anouk Aimée), his wife, eventually arrives, showing her disappointment and conflict with him, as well as animosity towards Carla. To off-set this, her close friend Rossella (Rossella Falk) gets a significant role, which is surprising in her intimacy with Guido as a confidant and advisor. Although he is surrounded by all of these women, Guido’s thoughts and dreams continuously return to Claudia (Claudia Cardinale), a youthful actress who initially seems like nothing more than a figment of his imagination. There is an ensemble of other additional female roles, most of whom eventually end up in one of Guido’s most memorable fantasies--a harem scene.
8 ½ is a film that epitomizes a particular kind of Italian masculinity, if not greater patriarchal culture in general. For the most part, the women are objects of Guido’s gaze, and much of his unhappiness comes from his inability to control them. In one of the most heartfelt scenes he confides in Rossella as they stand around his massive spaceship scaffolding set--“I wonder why things turned out this way. When did I go wrong?” His approaches towards women and life have left him profoundly confused and unhappy. One of the most memorable dreams recounted in the film is not expressed visually, and heard only in the words of Carla, mentioning her husband: “I even had a dream about it. I dreamt that you did find him a job, but he lost his mind and killed us both.” She quickly laughs it off, adding that he killed them with a broom, but the looming tension of her husband off screen remains for much of the film. It says just as much about Carla as it does Guido.
A movie that relies on strange dream sequences in order to progress the narrative cannot be considered a surrealist film, because it justifies the surreal imagery in a logical way. Definitive surrealist cinema and art always leaves the spectator confused, or at least unable to fully comprehend the content and meaning. Fellini’s film uses surreal imagery to great effect though, in evoking Guido’s dreams and memories. Aside from the opening already detailed above, we see his parents in a wasteland, with Mastroianni dressed up in a child’s school uniform complete with cape, before his mother suddenly turns into his wife. 8 ½ also does a great job of presenting reality as if it is a haunting, liminal space in between consciousness, for example the scene in which Guido meets the cardinal (Tito Masini) in a bathhouse. It plays out before us in a series of foggy whites and light grays, another scene that would wake me up from dozing just because of the powerful brightness of the screen. As Guido’s glasses fog up, he looks like a phantom talking to this religious figure. Perhaps the strangest set in the film comes by way of cinema as dream machine, with the immense scaffolding put together to shoot a science fiction scene involving a spaceship. By the end, we don’t know if the scene will ever be filmed, but at least viewers of 8 ½ are given a look behind the scenes at the completely illogical and maddening nature of a movie set.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud writes about extra sensory stimuli as a motivator for dream content. He famously wrote, “dreams come from indigestion” (54), which alludes to the greater idea of physiological or external interruption on dreams. It could be something like spicy foods and ensuing thirst that precipitate imagery, or it could be auditory or visual stimuli. This is why I have gone through periods of falling asleep while watching movies, because it creates the possibility that the diegesis of the movie can meld with whatever else I experienced during the day, in order to hopefully influence or change how I felt about recent life events. This headspace also allows us to experience the film differently, experiencing it with the rational, judgemental part of our brains turned off. This may not give us any insights or change our opinions about a movie right away, but it will have an effect on how we perceive the film as a memory much later on. 8 ½ is just as much about how memory works as it is about dreaming, and how dreams have the ability to color our perception of past events.
8 ½ succeeds as one of the greatest movies about making movies because it presents the process as one that relies greatly on unconscious thought. The nonsensical nature of some decisions, like when Luisa is suddenly seen becoming friends with Carla, or during the ending in which the cast comes together to be unified in celebration, shows the utter lack of reality delivered by the film industry. It also shows how many of the people responsible for producing mass market entertainment are borderline delusional. Perhaps more than any other art form, cinema is a dream machine that produces the wild fantasies of a few lucky people, and has the potential to influence the dreams of spectators. Passive viewing is preferred for the most part, by audiences who want to be entertained and executives who want to avoid a fan base that is too demanding. Active spectatorship combined with late night viewing has the potential to bring movies into our dreams as a way to experience them in context to our daily lives. We can see things differently, and possibly extract meaning from movies that were not intended or even imagined by the makers.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Basic Books. Original translation 1955, this edition 2010.