Disc Reviews

8½ Blu-ray Review

• 8th Nov 2013

In the intellectual scene emerging from France in the late 1950s came a new word on the cultural landscape: auteur. This was a notion posited from the likes of François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard that the director is the author of their own film. They championed such Hollywood directors as Hitchcock, Douglas Sirk, John Ford, Edgar Ulmer and William Wyler as examples. This is an idea we are familiar with today, especially to cineastes but at the time was a new notion. From this emerged certain directors who were considered artists, including the fore-mentioned French directors, alongside Pasolini, Buñuel, Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini. Few films celebrated this idea stronger than Fellini’s 8½ (or Otto e Mezzo as it was originally titled in Italy). Everything about the film has Fellini’s stamp on it. The main character is a film director facing an artistic block, as well as visioning himself with the mature beauty of Marcello Mastroianni (no one could play these melancholic type of roles better), his pursuit of beautiful women as well as having the stylistic stamp of a Fellini film; even the seemingly abstract title 8½ indicated that this is the 8^th film made by Fellini (the ½ is the film that Mastroianni’s director in the film is making – the film within a film).

Made in 1963 and following on from the success of his previous iconic film, La Dolce Vita in 1959 (that’s the one with sultry Anita Ekberg dancing in the Trevi Fountain) this film eclipses that film as an internal exploration of the human condition. Whereas in La Dolce Vita in which Mastroianni’s character is questioning his moral compass as a journalist in an age of celebrity, in 8½ he is questioning his age and his artistic integrity while suffering from an artistic block. The film opens with the famed dream sequence in which film director Guido Anselmi (Mastroianni) dreams that he is stuck in traffic and his car becomes intoxicated with fumes. He then climbs out and walks across the bonnets of the cars until he is floating on a balloon before suddenly falling into the sea. Sound familiar? Of course film buffs will recognize this from the opening sequence in Falling Down (1993) with Michael Douglas as a man on the edge of mental collapse or from R.E.M.’s ‘Everybody Hurts’ video showing some of the extent of the films influence. Guido awakes and is preparing another day on the lavish launchpad set of a science-fiction film he is making. This is the irony, Guido is not making an art film or even a drama of the human condition, but rather a science fiction film. The rest of the film deals with the director’s love life, his daydreams and fantasies usually revolved around the women in his life from the buxom MILF from his childhood sparking his sexual desires, to his wife, mistress and starlets.

The film may be seen as being self-indulgent from Fellini but he makes some important artistic and stylistic forays in the film that almost gets away with it. There are some great devices and styles including the bright cinematography on the terrace as everyone courts the director, the Launchpad set and the dream sequences themselves. Added to this there is also Nina Rota’s (of Godfather fame) score blending contemporary with classical and the circus music encompassing the final dance of life with the cast of characters. Because it is an intellectual and intellectually challenging film it may alienate some viewers and requires some buy in and thinking from the viewer – so don’t view expecting mass entertainment. Distributed by Argent Films in bothe DVD and Blu-ray formats the film includes a lengthy 50 minute exploration of the notorious missing sequence that largely involves barely audible dialogue to images from the film with interviews and an interview with Fellini collaborator Lino Wertmuller. Also on the discs are a bunch of trailers of other films released by Argent including the brilliant Battle of Algiers to spaghetti westerns and some dreadful B movie war films from the 1970/80s.

Chris Hick