140 8½

[swingo]

I don't know if this has any relevance to 8½ but I had just finished reading Proust's In Search of Lost Time. It took me two years to finish it. The book reminded me strongly of 8½.

The problem with that book is that it is too dense, I took some considerable time as well to finish it (although I read it while ago) I liked the book much but yes, I found it dense...

[Mr Sausage]

That's a connection I never thought of, and at this moment I see both similarities and differences. Proust's work is in many ways showing sexual love and sexual jealousy as existing in tandem, and mutually inclusive. The narrator (Marcel) is trying to regain the time lost on love's torments. Plus In Search of lost time is a portrait of a budding artist trying to uncover the meaning of the time lost in order to become artistically conscious. Guido, by 8½, is already an accomplished artist who is trying to live up to his past success; he isn't jealous or searching for his past--although he does seem to inspire it in others.

Guido seems both Proustian and un-Proustian; and while I doubt one could find a paradigm for 8½ in Proust, it's certainly an amusing intertextuality--knowing the books stature it's likely Fellini was familiar with it.

[Michael]

Does Fellini have a cameo in 8½?

[swingo]

Does Fellini have a cameo in 8½?

I didn't see him...

[Michael]

Well I've seen this film countless times. During the circus finale, there is a man in a white shirt with a dark tie in the middle of the rink as the folks dance on the ring...you have to look for him. Easy to miss. Could that be Fellini? I have many pictures and books related to 8½ and almost all pictures have Fellini in the same fashion (white shirt, dark tie).

[swingo]

OH!!!! I just checked, are we thinking the same?, white suit, dark tie, black hat and a black cloak, it looked like him to me...

[Michael]

No no. That's Guido Alberto - the producer played in 8½. When folks dance on the ring, look further in the background. There is a man (white shirt and black tie.. no cloak, no suit). Like I said, it's easy to miss. Look closer.

[swingo]

Yes, that was Guido, sorry it was the rush, well I looked again but I missed it, have to go to work, I'll watch closely at night and I'll get back to you...

[Michael]

Ok, more specifically. Right after Guido and Luisa join the folks dancing on the ring.. the camera steps outside the ring , you will see a man (white shirt, dark tie) right inside the ring with an arm waving in a certain direction. probably directing the folks to keep on dancing.

If that man is really Fellini, then that would make sense to see him inside the ring directing like that - like Guido in the previous scenes.

[Crocky]

According to this conversation with Fellini, he did not read any Proust's novel.

[Michael]

I have never seen Peter Greenaway's 8 ½ Women ... is it worth checking out? A homage to Fellini?

[Lino]

From what I've read, the title is the only thing that bears any resemblance to Fellini's opus...

Haven't seen it though...

[swingo]

I have never seen Peter Greenaway's 8 ½ Women ... is it worth checking out? A homage to Fellini?

It is one of the worst films I've seen in my life. there was a connection, yes... but dull nonetheless... Although I recommend you to watch it, to each his own, I just didn't liked it that's all.

[Dylan]

I agree with Axel. "8 ½ Women" was on IFC about two years ago, and I got through about thirty minutes before bailing out. It was terrible. Basically, a father and son (who have a sort of incestuous relationship) decide to open up a brothel after seeing the harem scene in "8½." Maybe it sounds like it might be fun from that description, but I thought it was just plain old dreadful. With that said, I'm sure there are those who like it, but I couldn't sit through it.

And Michael, did you check out that documentary on the 8½ alternate ending yet?

Dylan

[Michael]

Need to watch it again to refresh my memory. I can recommend L' Ultima sequenza only to the die-hard 8½ fans, to those who think 8½ is the greatest film ever made... Dylan, you and I are in that camp. Others will fall asleep. The documentary is basically a series of black & white behind-the-scene stills.. some funny ones. Who knew that Edra Gale (Saraghina) was actually a blond?! And it also contains some nice in-person interviews in colors with Anouk Aimee, Claudia Cardinale, Sandra Milos, Caterina Boratto's daughter and a bunch of tech folks. The women now in their golden age are still as beautiful.. Here Sandra Milos looks a lot older than her interview on the Criterion disc of 8½. A number of interviews state that the original ending is utterly depressing...like death and funeral.. totally contrary to the circus finale that we all came to know and love for more than forty years.

[Mr Sausage]

here Fellini appears to pioneer the use of classical music which fits so perfectly with the movements in the frame that they appear to be choreographed to the music (Wagner, The Barber of Seville, etc.).

Fellini had also the distinct advantage of being able to play these on set and choreograph accordingly. And while I somehow doubt he actually pioneered this rather operatic musical approach to film, I can't actually think of a single example before him. But if he had it surely would have been mentioned somewhere.

[Michael]

I've also always been at a complete lack of words to express what this film means to me and why I adore it so much.

You have no idea how many times I've tried doing this - sitting at my computer attempting to describe my love for 8½ in words. I still couldn't. One of the paintings at the Salvador Dali Museum (about an hour away from my home) called The Hallucinogenic Toreador put the similar effect on me. If you want to see me cry, then just place me in front of this painting. The painting is so intensely personal, enormous, overwhelming, and passionate, like 8½. At the bottom right corner of the painting, a boy dressed in a sailor outfit holds a hoop and a fossil and the boy looks up like if he's looking at the painting itself. This is Dali as a boy. The painting is a celebration of life. As Dali said, the painting is "all Dali in one painting". This could be said the same thing about 8½ - "all Fellini in one film".

I've always loved that one scene when everyone goes to see the spaceship and climb it. Everyone goes up but Rosella and Guido and he voices his major life concerns. He asks: "What do your spirits say?" She says: "They always say the same thing. They say you are free and your time is running out." Then the next thing we see is an upward shot of the spaceship with voices saying - "Guido are you coming up or staying down?". The voices represent the message of the spirits. Also that he is free to grow up.

Also in that same sequence, Guido says to Rosella "Stop acting like a big sister." Then in the harem fantasy she is in the same position above the bathtub as Guido's actual sister in the the childhood flashback.

At the outdoor dinner party, the French actress asks Guido how many scenes she will have in his working film and Guido replies: "Five scenes". That is exactly how many scenes the French actress has in the entire 8½.

I don't know if anyone notices Mario Mezzabotta's hair turning mysteriously dark in the circus finale as opposed to his blindingly white hair in the previous scenes. Fellini/Guido gives Mario a chance to be young again after putting up with his grief for being old (as shown in the outdoor dinner party and the steam room scene).

[BWilson]

Those are great observations. I never would have noticed the "5 scenes" thing in a million years. I watch closely, but not that closely.

[Ovader]

I looked at the DVD again concerning the possible cameo of Fellini in the ring directing people. I zoomed in on the image at 2:15:09 but I cannot be certain that the man was Fellini. On the DVD at 18:13 you can see a man with a white shirt and black tie in the reflection of the mirror. This man quickly kneels down to get out of the frame. At first I thought it was Marcello but the camera pans right in real time and we see Marcello lying on the bed with an opened white shirt with his undershirt exposed.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

Peter Becker talks about the movie on WYNC.

[Gregory]

At the end of the interview, Becker confused Barbara Stanwyck with Rosalind Russell who wasn't in The Lady Eve (nor in my opinion was she in Stanwyck's league). Blecch, how could he?

[shirobamba]

He was already thinking about the contents of the Naruse Box for 2007, so he was a bit confused. (lol) He should have asked Michael what to include in the box, and he'd received a comprehensive list, complete with a catalogue of extras.

[HerrSchreck]

I was watching this again recently and something struck me in this film which had never crossed my mind before: the resemblance between the dialog in 8½ and Renoirs RULES OF THE GAME. At least in 'present-day' moments, where Guido is simply stalling and the people around him are gabbing away.

The dialog of the bourgeoisie-upper class is presented by Fellini in a way that has a lot in common with the style and content used by Renoir to to parody the flighty strangeness of the same class in his own masterpiece. That sense of eavesdropping on a plotless, disjointed garble of self-important poop.

The self-obsessions resulting in hilarious obliviousness to one another and the rest of the world (and their own obliviousness), the clownlike grotesquerie of the character renderings, the shallowness of the characters who are drawn with exaggeration by the punctuation of casting extreme physical types & faces, (of course the photographic hyper-stylishness & hallucination of Fellini, almost Sternbergian in this film, is not existent in Renoir's film)... so much of the chit chat which buzzes and titters around and beneath 8½ has the very specific form of almost cartoon-like exaggeration of REGLE. The spot on rendering of that very specific form of self-conscious deliberacy which is so flightily self-obsessed, that it has no idea how ridiculous it looks beyond (and in the case of tuned-in souls like Renoir & Fellini, within) the bounds of it's own milieu.

[viciousliar]

I love the actress who plays the hilariously self-obsessed actress - she so utterly believable. Talking about actor-movies, I just saw Next Stop, Greenwich Village, and it bored me to tears. It was only worth watching for Shelley Winters' initial scene + that marvelous piece of business when she loses her hat in a fit of hysteria.

Btw, you seem to have been in a jolly good mood of late, Count Orlok. Personally I've been feeling a bit "off." I'm going to catch "The Letter" on the big screen next Sunday, in London. Something to look forward to, I guess.

[HerrSchreck]

Fellini-- who could cast a picture better than he in 8½? She is totally believable... fact I knew quite a few like her during my acting faze (where I studied with the aforementioned Shelley, R.I.P). I always summed up The Problem With Actors (like the one in 8½, character's [American] name escapes me) as follows: musicians have their prized instrument, artists have their hand-stretched canvass & hand-mixed pigments & sable brushes, writers have their beloved antique typewriters or keyboard they'll never part with, and actors have Themselves, which they treat as a fine rare precious instrument, which must be rubbed and lotioned like a prized Stradivarius, treated with essential oils and carefully handled lest it *crack*, and by this self-fetishizing they sweep grandly into parties with high chins presuming wild admiration & granting limited and carefully administered access.

Sorry to hear you're "off"-- grab the Marlena Collection; three Sternbergs plus 2 more Dietrich's, all under 22 bucks will carve a grin in any Orlok. It sure did me. Now we just need SHANGHAI EXP [-o<