68. Solipsisms: “8½” restoration at Film Forum, reviewed by Cheryl S.
When I think back on the origin of my Nekomata pas de deux, I have to admit that, like other things in life, its sources were many. (One day the world may yet see its oft-postponed premiere downstairs in the Ballet 33 space in our Tower.) First of all, there was dear Louise Ebersdorf’s suggestion that something Oriental (Japanese, Chinese) might prove topical, especially since she had entrepreneurial ambitions in the Far East. Then there was my own early interest in Japanese films and culture. The ancient Nipponese emphasis on ghosts and demons (especially demon-felines) has always appealed to my youthful imagination. Knowing that Louise had a collection of prize-winning cats may have been another pressure. I asked Sandy (who helped me set the pas de deux at its earliest stage) what had drawn him to the subject, and he remembered his initial reaction to seeing the famed Maurice Tourneur film Cat People and the Kaneto Shindo movie Black Cat. After teaching the pas de deux to Albertine and Paco and enduring their subsequent strike, I believe the thing that really interested both Sandy and me was the eventual participation of Master Raro. Once A&P took themselves out of the picture, Master agreed to partner me as Husband to my Cat-woman. Somehow, the return of Master to performing dance after many years of serving as Louise’s assistant was a kind of rebirth equivalent to the reanimation of the dead spouse in Nekomata. (My ballet could be seen as a kind of miniature version of Balanchine’s La Chatte, where the female cat flourishes but her male lover dies. There is even talk of The Ballet reviving Balanchine’s work for an early season – a full feline evening could result.) Both Sandy and I are fascinated by Master’s artful charisma, off-stage and on. And then, too, there was the love between Pippa and Louise’s prize tomcat, Murr. All of the above undoubtedly went into the mix. And may we soon find ourselves – Master and I – performing the ballet in front of a post-pandemic audience!
I was moved to these thoughts by seeing a new 4K restoration of Federico Fellini’s movie 8½ at Film Forum last week. Sandy and I sat in the fourth row from the big screen and reveled in the visual detail that the new digital transfer makes available. It was like seeing the movie for the first time, and that is no exaggeration. First of all, the subtitles have been improved and made visible against the black-and-white cinematography. You can read them with ease. I believe the translations from the Italian are now more idiomatic and accurate. You also become aware of how visually “composed” the film is throughout, with many planes of action from foreground to deep background. So dense is the visual imagery with specific details, you are bound to miss something on a first viewing.
If you are unfamiliar with the film, I can reveal that it covers several days and nights in the career of Guido Anselmi, a Fellini-like movie director who has entered an Italian health spa near the location of his next picture, a sci-fi film for which he does not have a final script or even a clarified concept of its themes. Ultimately, Guido comes to accept his mid-life confusions, especially in his relations with the women in his life, and from them he will make something like the film we have been watching, thus solving his private and professional dilemmas through a single act of creation. We are regularly introduced to the personnel who make up his professional milieu (an impatient producer, a pretentious script consultant, his long-suffering production manager, various performers hoping for parts in the new film, etc.) and the women of Guido’s life (his wife, current mistress, his departed mother, and many past amours and objects of erotic fantasy) who have helped establish his off-screen reputation as a virile Italian ladies-man. As you can see, the movie has a strong autobiographical component, and this relation to the well-known Fellini legend caused the film to be accused of artistic solipsism when it was first released.
An absent artistic component of practical filmmaking in 8½’s fictional world would be Guido’s missing cinematographer, and this is a striking omission because Fellini’s movie was photographed by Gianni di Venanzo, one of the great visual artists in motion pictures of the twentieth century. What he does with sfumato blacks and overexposed whites has to be seen to be believed. (These nuanced photographic values have been faithfully preserved in the new digital restoration.) Fellini asks miracles of focus-pulling in the pin-point pans of the mobile camerawork. The collaboration between director and cinematographer involves pushing cinematic technique right to the edge. For example, do I not see an influence from American experimental films of the mid-century, especially the work of Jack Smith here in New York? Fellini made numerous trips to our city to understand American technical skills and local visual taste, so this guess may have some foundation.
The spa where Guido hopes for restored health and inspiration includes nighttime entertainments, and one evening Guido’s mind is “read” at the insistence of a stage magician who is an old friend. What is Guido thinking? It comes out as a nonsense phrase – “Ana Nisi Masa” – which translates into the Jungian term “anima”, the feminine component of a male psyche. As 8½ develops its description of Guido’s psychology, it becomes apparent that his relations to the women in his life all point to his insufficiently developed or integrated anima. Fellini exposes this weakness in the brilliant Harem sequence of the movie, a fantasy vision in which Guido’s narcissistic desires and self-serving fears are turned into a satiric portrait of the rampaging Italian (perhaps any) male’s self-protective ego.
All of the women we have met earlier in the film – Guido’s wife Luisa, his mistress Carla, his wife’s friend Rossella, his remembered mother, various attendant film actresses, his first prostitute, and many more – assemble in what appears to be a replica of his childhood country home, complete with wine-press vat and communal dining table. Here, a home-coming Guido rewards his seraglio with presents delivered out of a raging snowstorm (the delicious Carla breathes upon Guido’s hands to warm them). Guido is fussed-over, praised, undressed, bathed, talcum-powdered, and carried about in a sheet-sling, like a beloved infant readied for high-jinks in bed. It so happens that one of his former loves -- Jacqueline, an aging showgirl – is about to be relegated to an upper story, the fate of all those beloveds past their sell-by date or those who have outlasted Guido’s first infatuation. When Jacqueline protests at being so discarded, she generates sympathy from the other women. A revolt breaks out among Guido’s captive slaves. (So topical, this.)
The comic-opera theme (perhaps a concept Fellini had encountered in flea-bitten Italian variety shows and tatty music hall sketches) was a fixture of spectacles throughout the nineteenth century. (For example, Filippo Taglioni created a ballet – The Revolt of the Harem – for Paris in 1833.) Fellini exploits the motif for its automatic scenario of power-revolt-suppression-reaction. No matter how baroque the development of the Fellini mise-en-scène, we know it is headed for a restoration of patriarchal order. Or is it? The first thing we see in the sequence is a pot of country soup warming over the fireplace, and we come to its end with Luisa, the faithful wife, scrubbing the kitchen floor on her hands and knees. Marcello Mastroanni is very witty wielding a whip in order to tame his wilding women or sulkily Laying Down the Law in consigning Jacqueline to realms upstairs. The hapless revolt is his amusement and ultimate justification. “He does this every night,” confides an adoring Luisa to the camera.
What interested me and Sandy is the accumulated detail of action and word in the sequence and the way filmmaking technique is immediately joined to the themes raised by Fellini’s choreography. For example, there is the sensuous tactility of the opening situation. We are in the warm ambiance of the creatures of Guido’s private fantasy. The remembered country farmhouse setting has become his usual escape from reality. When Guido enters from that snowstorm, we see the cold flakes swirling through the doorway. His snow-dusted distribution of presents to his favorites garners automatic praise. Immediate, too, is the way his women swarm over him protectively, removing his cloak, thanking him, surrounding him with affection. Fellini films these tributes to Guido with either the faces of the actresses or brief shots of female upper bodies in competition with one another. The quicksilver camera not only pans laterally but tracks and revolves in order to embrace the many shifting figures as they fight for an opportunity to pamper the alpha male. Fellini’s choice of lens and the proximity of camera to the various women allow their physical presence to immerse the hero – and the viewer – in female charm and luxe. The imagery strokes the ocular nerve. There is even an Oriental flickering effect as semi-transparent swaths of cloth – veils – interpose themselves between the camera and its objects. The dream-vision is taking its time to steady itself. We are titillated by the comforts and thrills it offers.
In contrast, when something like ordinary reality asserts itself in the sequence, Fellini allows the action to play at a distance and with less mobility. For example, when Luisa’s companion Rossella comments from on high on Guido’s stereotypical male mastery, we see her figure from below, from Guido’s rapt point of view. She towers over him. Guido is then bathed, and Rossella helps another woman to open a trapdoor above his floating figure. We look down on him in his bubble-bath: it’s a return to the womb. Guido submits not only to infantilization but to the questioning of his authority by Jacqueline. When the revolt proper breaks out, women scurry about the room, swing from the ceiling, and evade the camera’s attempts to follow them in their actions. Feminine perfume turns acrid, and the setting’s light sources swing wildly, so that the flickering of veils is replaced by unpredictably varied light levels. (The cinematography here must adjust rhythmically to the shifting illumination.) At the end of the sequence, when Jacqueline’s retirement to the upper regions has been achieved, the camera follows the dream Luisa as she walks into the depths of the room and contentedly resumes her fated role as dedicated scrubwoman.
Fellini often liked to exploit theatrical second-raters for the poignant comedy of their pretensions. (The climax of this tendency was the charmless Ginger and Fred of 1986 in which Fellini mocked Italian television variety shows by featuring two amateurish imitators of Astaire and Rogers, played by Mastroanni and Giuletta Masina.) In 8½ the butt of the joke is Jacqueline, she who must accept her forced retirement. If Fellini makes the “camp” humor work here (the woman’s costume pearls keep falling off as she exits), it is because the shift of tone underlines Guido’s underlying misogyny. Jacqueline is allowed a tribute to her self-sacrifice by her priestly executioner. The showgirl’s dignity reasserts itself in a grand music hall exit. When Guido subsequently makes a little speech at the dinner table to the re-disciplined rank and file, he is soothingly reactionary, all the more the heartless tyrant. Male authority has been questioned only to be reaffirmed. Rossella sits to his left and looks skeptical. The Harem fantasy is followed by a torturous screening room sequence, and that is topped by the director’s encounter with his muse, Claudia, who rejects him as her collaborator. Guido’s relation to his anima has been tested and found wanting.
The fugitive “camp” touches in Fellini’s films are always a self-conscious ingredient within the director’s lyric range. He goes to some lengths to suggest that the crisis of Guido’s marriage has thrown Luisa into the arms of Rossella, who is styled so as to evoke a possible lesbic relation. And what about Guido himself? Conocchia is the aging director of production on the new film. He has a scene in the film company’s hotel hallway in which he breaks down before Guido’s various indecisions. Those very unprofessional tears suggest an underlying personal complaint. I suspect that we are to see in Conocchia a love-slave from Guido’s past, a man who mentored an upcoming talent and whose affection went unrequited. As Guido hides under the long table at the climactic outdoor press conference, he pays special tribute to Conocchia as the one person who was truly dedicated to him and who has been ill-treated over decades. Guido has had his “virility” to advertise, and the one man who loved him is just another sacrifice among many. As far as gender goes, Guido has proved an equal-opportunity tyrant for his admirers. During the screening-room sequence, he even arranges to imagine Conocchia pressing the production’s financial records upon the project’s producer. Revenge has its privileges.
Speaking of revenge. On the marquee of the reopened Film Forum, management has arranged a tiny payback of its own. “Extraordinary. Magical. Pauline Kael” reads the sign. Now, anyone who knows movies is aware that Kael was highly critical of Fellini in his post-Nights of Cabiria period. She found the neo-realist Fellini much more plausible than the poetic satirist of La Dolce Vita and the films that followed, including 8 ½. The Film Forum ascription of those encomiums represents wickedly isolated pull-quotes from an essay by Kael which savaged the pretensions of the director’s tribute to imaginative resources. Kael was always weak trying to describe the work of film directors. Question: why did The New Yorker let her get away with such incompetence for so many seasons? The poor woman regularly had to rely on social commentary to swell the word-count. But, in this case, she knew too little about Italian society. For example, the fact that in 1963 the Italian government had recently ceased its subvention for houses of prostitution, removing the Italian male’s local “harem” from state funding. Italian directors had their ways of commenting on social reality even at their most “solipsistic”. Fellini’s harem fantasy included a ring of social truth.
Sandy and I were amused at the effrontery of both Kael and Film Forum. Perhaps each of us should consider making ballets about the making of ballets. But perhaps we are doing that already.
C.S.
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