8½

There are artists and works of art that don’t have a big impact on the general public but have a huge impact on the people who make the art that is loved by the general public. In the music world that might be the child-like raw authenticity of Daniel Johnston influencing Kurt Cobain, Tom Waits, Death Cab for Cutie, Bright Eyes, etc; or the Mael brothers of Sparks influencing Joy Division, Depeche Mode, The Smiths, Sonic Youth, etc.. 8 ½ fits into this same mold. It is a filmmaker’s film. It is perhaps too strange and esoteric for the general audience while being absolutely fascinating to, and influential on, the devoted film nerd.

Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about the film is that it is an incredibly early example of postmodern metafiction in film, as well as a complete break from the Italian neorealism of the preceding decade. There are degrees of depth to metafictional narratives in movies. The most simple and obvious level is a movie about making a movie, like The Player or State & Main. One level deeper is a movie that comments on the very structure and form of movie making or storytelling, like the works of Charlie Kaufman. In Adaptation, for example, at one point the struggling screenwriter protagonist attends a writing workshop and is given a set of unbreakable rules for writing a good script (such as: no voiceover allowed) while the script of the very film the audience is watching routinely and pointedly breaks all of these rules (such as: the primary mode of imparting exposition is voiceover). Yet another level deeper is where we might find 8 ½. Here, not only is the movie about a movie being made, that self awarely comments on the structure of a movie, but the movie is also a cinematic Ouroboros: the movie we are watching is about the making of the very movie we are watching.

This post-modernist meta-weirdness is, in some very real sense, the point of the movie. The story is not necessarily written in a way that confuses the viewer with its confounding pretensions, but it also doesn’t make it in any way easy to feel connected to the characters in the story as people, and therefore invest yourself emotionally in the film. Rather, the film makes most of its resonance with the audience out of affecting and memorable cinematography and the entrancing nature of its self-referential construction. As one of my friends would say about a movie like this: it’s just vibes.

In this regard, the movie does excel. The visual essence of the film, and the cleverness of the script, sparse as it sometimes is, display an immense level of unbridled creativity. Due to the film’s fame, some of the ideas and concepts that Fellini utilizes in 8 ½ have been copied by others and so may not feel as unique or as groundbreaking, yet despite that I feel the surrealist, illusory nature of the storytelling via an unreliable protagonist holds up none-the-less. For example, the way a strange childhood memory is displayed not as it was but as it would be remembered, distorted and exaggerated by the passage of time and the perspective of youth, like how the hills you climbed as a kid always seemed taller back then, has stuck with me well after finishing the movie.

For the ultra film nerd who is in love with the weird, the experimental, the different, this film is quite a treat. For the average viewer, the material will likely not create a great impression. Film critics and working directors, most being film nerds themselves, will of course rate the film quite highly, leaving many in the mainstream audience who watch it for its universal acclaim wondering what they are all smoking. I tend to sit somewhere in the uncomfortable middle ground between obsessed cinephile and populist filmgoer and so I found the movie a bizarre and pretentious watch… but not without merit.

Would Recommend: If you want to see a groundbreaking movie in the world of metafiction.

Would Not Recommend: If you have no interest in the strange or pretentious.