Writer/director Federico Fellini
I fear I am about to undermine my status as a lover of film because I have to admit that 8½ did not blow my mind. It irritated me. What the world of film scholarship calls artistic brilliance, I call self-indulgence. It’s beautifully shot, yes. Well acted, yes. Clever, definitely. But is it truly great art? Does it accomplish what great art ought to?
Defining art and its purpose is an argument much too large to address thoroughly here, but I’ll outline a couple essential points that I think pertinent to a discussion of 8½.
The Auteur
I don’t have anything against auteur theory – the idea that the director is the author of a film, that his personality shines through the film, and all that jazz. I think that’s absolutely true – just as we were made in the image and likeness of the Divine Artist, so our human art reflects something of the human artist. But this reflection of the artist is an accident of art (not an oops kind of accident, but a philosophical accident, as in substance and accidents). It is not – or at least it shouldn’t be – the end of art.
But we’ve slowly come to believe that art is merely a self-expression of the artist. Marc Barnes says it better than I can: “Similarly, we’ve made beauty no more than the expression of self — art as a mode of spewing the inner politics of the artist onto a canvas, music score, or theatre stage. But, again, the problem with this modern approach to Beauty is not that it is too loose and free — no, it is too claustrophobic. For if Beauty is defined by the self, it ends with the self. Beauty is limited, under the guise of being freed.”
8½, like so much art of the last century, has lost sight of the infinite. It is Fellini’s movie about Fellini. Instead of directing our gaze to something beyond, it directs our gaze to the auteur. It has mixed up the accidents and the end of art.
Communicating a Transcendent Message in Meaningful Terms
This, I discovered in a previous post reflecting on JPII’s Letter to Artists, is the aim and purpose of art. All three parts – communicating, the message, and the terms – are essential to accomplishing art’s end. 8½ doesn’t do any of those things, though. It doesn’t offer a transcendent message – it’s a message, literally, about Fellini’s own creative constipation. It’s purposely disjointed and episodic – it doesn’t care about communicating in meaningful terms, in terms that the audience will understand. It doesn’t inspire contemplation – it causes confusion.
Or at least it wants to. Perhaps it’s my own pride, but I guess what irritates me about 8½ is that it’s supposed to blow my mind. It’s supposed to leave the audience scratching their heads. That just seems insulting to me.
I know that a lot of filmmakers consider 8½ a gift – it has inspired them and influenced their own films in countless ways. And I can appreciate that. I appreciate the place and importance 8½ holds in film history, and I don’t mean to discount that in any way.
I suppose the greater concern I have is that 8½ is an example of what drives me crazy about our culture’s notion of art – that it’s too good for the common man, that it belongs only to the intellectual elite. It’s exclusive. It’s prestigious. I started this post by saying that my opinion of 8½ will undermine my status as a lover of movies, and that is exactly the point – in order to be considered someone who is serious about film, I am expected to worship these works that, apparently, can only be appreciated by people who are serious about film. So be it.
My overall rating: well crafted but overrated.
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