Guido Anselmi, a film director, finds himself creatively barren at the peak of his career. Urged by his doctors to rest, Anselmi heads for a luxurious resort, but a sorry group gathers—his producer, staff, actors, wife, mistress, and relatives—each one begging him to get on with the show. In retreat from their dependency, he fantasizes about past women and dreams of his childhood.
09 Dec 8½ (1963)
The Petaled Swirl of Influences
I am generally not a fan of Fellini: his early work is too sentimentally trivial for his talent, and his later work is just lazy. But in this film, he reaches more than one height.
In terms of basic worlds, it is radically heterogeneous: we have visions, memories, dreams, desires, films, reveries, imputed futures, fantasies, showbusiness abstractions: but all are treated with such fluidity that it seems whole. It is nominally about itself, but that is only one dimension of the reflexive folding we have. Many of the other dimensions involve us more than they do him: the sex, the fiction, the writing of a life.
But at the same time it pulls off something that I think is unique: we are meant to assume that the assembly of this film was as accidental and chaotic as the one depicted. But it is clearly not so: like the Chopin piece of `Autumn Sonata,’ it is something that comes from a coherent shaping of the ether by a single mind: but it displays all the qualities as if it simply emerged as an artefact of the competing forces shown. The filmmaker is both a result of God’s caprice and is God himself. The sex is only there to engage us: the larger issue is the moist, engaging fecundity of creation.
This is a touchstone for folded cinema. It changed everything that followed on screen and to a large extent in our dreams.
Posted in 2002
Ted’s Evaluation — 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.
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